2.2 The 'Three Wise Men' Report

Major faced his first general election in April 1992. He was expected to lose: all the polls suggested that Labour, led by Neil Kinnock, would win by a small majority. The Tories decided that a return to streaming and more formal teaching methods in primary schools would be a popular campaign policy, so in February 1992 Kenneth Clarke commissioned Robin Alexander, Jim Rose and Chris Woodhead to produce what became popularly known as the 'Three Wise Men Report'.

Written in just one month, Curriculum Organisation and Classroom Practice in Primary Schools: A discussion paper argued that:

• there was evidence of falling standards in some important aspects of literacy and numeracy;

• Piaget's notion of 'earning readiness', as set out in the Plowden Report, was dubious and the progress of primary pupils had been 'hampered by the influence of highly questionable dogmas';

• the teacher should be an instructor rather than a facilitator;

• teachers should use a range of organisational strategies including individual and group teaching, but there should be more use of whole class teaching;

• while there was a place for well-planned topic work, more emphasis should be put on the subjects of the National Curriculum;

• pupils should be grouped by ability in subjects ('setted') rather than as a whole class ('streamed') but 'teachers must avoid the pitfall of assuming that pupils' ability is fixed' ;

• many primary teachers were not equipped to teach subjects effectively and there was an acute shortage of specialist expertise;

• there should be greater flexibility in the deployment of staff as specialists, generalists, semi-specialists and generalist-consultants;

• there should be more specialist teaching in the upper years of Key Stage 2;

• initial training, induction and in-service training should all take account of these needs;

• heads should set and monitor INSET policies, should lead by example, and should teach;

• the National Curriculum should be regularly reviewed to ensure that it made appropriate demands on pupils of different ages and abilities and that it was manageable in terms of the time, resources and professional expertise available in schools.

The report caused much controversy. Teachers who had been brought up on Plowden regarded it as an attack on their most dearly-cherished values and practices. The two reports shared some things in common, however. Both were products of their age - Plowden, the progressive sixties; Alexander, Rose and Woodhead, the new age of National Curriculum subjects and testing. Both, too, were widely misquoted and misrepresented.

2.3 Specialisation

Following the election, John Patten replaced Clarke as education secretary and the Department of Education and Science (DES) was renamed the Department for Education (DFE).

Patten was as keen as the prime minister to undermine the comprehensive system but he realised that public support for comprehensive schools was a problem - one which even Thatcher had been unable to solve. There had been widespread parental opposition to the reintroduction of selection in the wake of the 1979 Education Act, which allowed LEAs to maintain selective systems. Her response to this opposition had not been hugely successful: few schools had chosen to adopt grant-maintained status and few firms had agreed to sponsor city technology colleges.

So Major and Patten now sought other means to damage the comprehensive system and weaken local authority control of education. Their strategy was to convert 'selection' into 'specialisation'.

In an article in the New Statesman and Society (17 July 1992) Patten argued that:

Selection is not, and should not be, a great issue of the 1990s as it was in the 1960s. The S-word for all Socialists to come to terms with is, rather, 'specialisation'. The fact is that children excel at different things; it is foolish to ignore it, and some schools may wish specifically to cater for these differences. ...

Such schools are already emerging. They will, as much more than mere exotic educational boutiques, increasingly populate the educational landscape of Britain at the end of the century, a century that introduced universal education at its outset; then tried to grade children like vegetables; then tried to treat them ... like identical vegetables; and which never ever gave them the equality of intellectual nourishment that is now being offered by the National Curriculum, encouraged by testing, audited by regular inspection. [5,p.27]

The independent National Commission on Education, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and chaired by Lord Walton of Detchant, was worried. Its final report, Learning to succeed: a radical look at education today and a strategy for the future, published in 1993, condemned the Major government's obsession with creating 'a greater variety of secondary schools' and warned that 'as we see it, there is a serious danger of a hierarchy of good, adequate and "sink" schools emerging within the maintained system' . The aims of giving all children access to 'high-quality' schooling and of creating greater choice and diversity were simply not compatible:

As we see it, the main task for the future will not be to concentrate on producing highly educated elites, but to achieve higher learning outcomes for all, and particularly for those in the middle and lower bands of attainment ... At present, there is a conflict between, on the one hand, moves towards a greater diversity and choice of schools and, on the other hand, an ideal of equal access for all children to 'high-quality' education ... Laudable principles for schools may often work against each other: serving a local community and catering for all abilities as in the comprehensive ideal; or encouraging choice of secondary school. For example, a community school where the neighbourhood is not socially mixed may not have a broad enough social or ability range to operate in a truly comprehensive manner. Choice, when exercised, is often used to escape from the local school, thereby working against the community school ideal. Similarly, those parents who are exercising their choice are tending to use it in favour of schools with other pupils of a similar and 'appropriate' background.

Others warned that giving parents the choice of a diverse range of schools would ultimately result in selection of pupils by the schools themselves. Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, then chair of SEAC, admitted as much. 'If you give parents real choice in the system, it is inevitable that the schools themselves will demand to choose the kind of pupils that come'. [4,p.71]

But Patten wasn't listening. His 1992 white paper Choice and Diversity: A new framework for schools condemned the comprehensive system:

Uniformity in educational provision presupposes that children are all basically the same and that local communities have essentially the same educational needs. The reality is that children have different needs. The provision of education should be geared more to local circumstances and individual needs: hence our commitment to diversity in education.

The white paper aimed to break up the comprehensive system by encouraging specialisation, and to diminish the role of local education authorities by promoting grant-maintained schools.