Clive Dalton
Prof Sir Kenneth Robinson
It was watching a TV interview with Sir Kenneth on Aljazeera that got me going, especially when he related that at his primary school in a working class area of Manchester, it was traditional for everyone to fail their 11+ exam. Nobody was expected to pass - so they didn’t!
But by a bit of good fortune, he got some extra tuition and passed – and the rest is history! His life’s work in education has been to promote the simple concept that given the opportunity, anyone can succeed. We are not all born dummies.
Looking back
The TV interview and his extensive writings brought back frustrating memories of my days at our village school in Bellingham in Northumberland, when every pupil at age 11 was faced with the ‘11+ exam’ which effectively determined their future. This had been standard practice for decades in UK.
We Bellingham kids of Church of England parents went to the Reed’s Charity School, and those from other religions in the village (Presbyterians and Methodists) went to the village Council School. Catholic kids of course went to their own school, and there was strict segregation between each school’s staff and pupils.
The Reed’s school was closely linked to St Cuthbert’s ancient church where all of us had been christened and had to attend, under the close care of the vicar – the Reverend (later Canon) ‘Daddy’ Flower. The school was just over a high stone wall from the church and all its ancient gravestones.
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| St Cuthbert's ancient church in Bellingham |
In these small country schools, there was an infants' teacher (ours was Mrs Mary Forster); then a junior teacher (we had the disciplinarian Jean Milburn), and then pupils went into the seniour class of Head Master (ours was Joe Lumley). The Head Master (always a male) was in charge of pupils from age 10 until they left at age 14 to join the local work force until 18 when they became eligible for military service.
The 11+ exam
All we kids knew was that if you passed the exam, you ‘were brainy’ allowing you to go to the public (no fees) Grammar School at Hexham – and maybe be rewarded with a bike as well. But if you failed you stayed at the village school with all your dummy mates, to leave knowing your tables, basic arithmetic, how to read, know the Ten Commandments off by heart, and traditional songs like Jerusalem. You also knew how to keep a vegetable garden.
On leaving school at 14, there was plenty of work down a local coal mine or quarry, work on the Council to maintain the roads, and work on farms or for the Forestry Commission. So why need a Head Master worry about teaching any more than the bare minimum needed? At the Reed’s school Joe Lumley used the big lads in the class to teach us how to run the garden allotment, and help fill in our time playing football or cricket on a very uneven ‘rig and furrowed’ field owned by Jackie Potts of the Fox and Hounds hotel.
There was no way Joe gave us any extra tuition for the kind of questions that would appear in the 11+ exam. And in fact, when the day of the exam arrived it came as a surprise to many of us, and one of my fellow pupils (David Armstrong) who I sat beside in class, reminded me recently (70 years later!) that he was actually at the school allotment when the exam was taking place.
Joe must have decided that the exam was not important enough to call him back. David was never popular with Joe anyway and he had many strappings to confirm this. David’s father Barty Armstrong owned and managed Hareshaw coal mine so Joe must have assumed David would end up down there hewing coal.
Joe Lumley’s legacy
I remember getting at least two strappings from Joe – one when Jean Milburn sent me to him from the juniors to be dealt with for turning around in my desk and hitting the girl sitting behind (Dorothy Brown). She was sewing and stuck her needle in my backside to see what happened. My evidence in defence carried no weight with either Jean or Joe, but there was plenty weight behind Joe’s strap on both hands! Jean normally doled out discipline with her 12 inch ruler but for major transgressions she sent us to Joe.
There must have been over 12 of us each year who qualified to sit the 11+ after the war, and only one studious pupil in my group (Gilbert Nichol) passed. Before that, I can only think of one girl (Joan Forster) who ever went to Hexham Grammar School from the Reed’s school. Around the time I sat the exam, I can remember the others boys who all failed were David Armstrong, John McPhail, Alan Pick, Kenneth Pick, Willie Reed and Alan Forster. The girls were Sylvia Armstrong, Dorothy Brown and her sister Pat, Meenie Hall, Jeanette Bell, and Isobel Armstrong.
The Bellingham Council School was a bit more successful, as were some other village schools up the valley at Falstone and Kielder. But they didn't lead by a big margin! I can't remember anyone from the Bellingham Catholic School who passed the 11+.
The Bellingham Council School was a bit more successful, as were some other village schools up the valley at Falstone and Kielder. But they didn't lead by a big margin! I can't remember anyone from the Bellingham Catholic School who passed the 11+.
So without doubt, Joe Lumley’s Reed’s school was at the top of the 11+ failure league, and he probably never worried about why, or was even the slightest bit concerned. Rather than question his own performance, it would be easier to conclude that all of us kids from the village working class parents were thick and not worth worrying about, based on the fact that there was plenty of manual work in the area for pupils where academic merit was not important. So any interest or effort to get any of his class to the Grammar School was clearly not a goal of his.
Joe was much respected by Daddy Flower and had the responsible role of reading the lessons at church each Sunday. Daddy would not be concerned about the academic achievements of the school’s pupils as his role was confined to the spiritual care of us attending Sunday school, and then church each Sunday to become good little Christians, making his job easier for when he had to answer for us at the Day of Judgement when his sheep were separated from the goats!
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| Reed's School Sunday School trip c1934. Daddy Flower in right front row. |
Mother’s work paid my fees
Three of us who failed (me, David Armstrong and John McPhail) were fortunate as we had parents who cared about education, even if Joe Lumley didn’t, and they were prepared to make great personal sacrifices to find a secondary school that would take us, and then find the money to pay fees. John McPhail's mother passed away suddenly so John stayed at the Bellingham school.
My parents not having had a secondary education, saw the advantages of having one and were prepared to scrape together enough money to pay the fees for a secondary school. They had lived through the slump, and saw that an education was an advantage in getting employment.
Joe Lumley would certainly not be interested in the hours of domestic service my mother put in on my behalf to pay my fees.He must have cost her hundreds of hours of hard work about which she had plenty of experience as Head Housemaid at Chesters in Humshaugh, before marrying my father who started working on the railway at Humshaugh after surviving the horrors of WWI. But mother could well have done without the sacrifice and long hours thanks to Joe Lumley's interest in his pupils.
Skerry’s College
My brother (seven years my senior) and other pupils of his age from Reed’s school and other schools up the Tyne valley who failed the 11+ were able to go to a fee-paying secondary school in Hexham called the Tynedale High School. But it had closed by my time so the next option was to find a school in Newcastle upon Tyne.
There were some very good ‘posh’ schools in Newcastle (e.g. The Royal Grammar School and Dame Allan’s), but the fees were too high and so were their entry qualifications. You had to be bright to get in!
Fortunately Skerry’s College had an option that took pupils into a class called General B, for those who failed even the entry to the school’s secondary stream - real failures. I was one of those, and it gave us dummies a chance to see if we could make it into the secondary stream starting in Form 1. I made it!
Starting at Skerrys, I had many fears. The first was the fear of failure by not getting into Hexham Grammar School, and then the fear of not being able to keep up with the pressure of a new school in Newcastle with new subjects I had never heard of. And then there was the fear of failing my mother who was working hard to pay my fees. Added to all these was the constant reminder by the ‘seniour aunt’ in the family that I had to work hard and do as well as brother Geoff had done.
Skerry’s was basically a ‘cram school’ in what had been a four-story Victorian house in the middle of Newcastle. There were no grounds, only the pavement outside the front door and sports were not part of the curriculum. When class numbers overflowed, they found us basements in near by houses in Eldon Square to occupy. This had once been a very posh area of Newcastle before the war, but with all the iron railings on each house ripped out for the war effort, it never recovered it's former glory.
The school ran a secondary stream (for School Certificate) and a commercial stream (for shorthand and typing). The two streams ran totally separately.
The school ran a secondary stream (for School Certificate) and a commercial stream (for shorthand and typing). The two streams ran totally separately.
Comprehensive schools
Progress arrived in Bellingham and the North Tyne valley in the 1950 when a large ‘modern’ or ‘comprehensive’ school was opened to replace a number of the small village schools up the North Tyne valley. There had been one in Hexham for many years with another at Haydon Bridge, which made an effort to cover farming in the curriculum. Pupils from up the Tyne valley were transported to Bellingham each day by bus.
What makes success?
Not having studied the mysteries of education theory or psychology, I had aways wondered what was the secret to success in learning. After the tutor training we did at The Waikato Polytechnic I was non the wiser. The main concern seemed to be to learn ‘crowd control’!
But then I talked recently to a teacher from a Hamilton secondary school (public and not private) about what made that school such a success with over 2300 students from a wide area of urban and rural New Zealand. Their students’ achievements over the years have been amazing, and are still on track to make outstanding contributions to society and the world.
My question to him was simple – what is the secret of the school’s success? I was prepared for a long boring waffly reply, masked in layers of corporate speak, as when you think of all the variables involved in learning and teaching, running a large school and its business, and much more – you would not expect a one-word answer.
Expectation
I got a one-word answer - ‘expectation’! I had to think deeply about this as I assumed it couldn’t be that simple. This simply means that you are expected to perform to the best of your ability without having to be reminded, cajoled or threatened all the time. The whole place has to exude ‘expectation’.
Achievement is expected and this comes from the effort YOU are prepared to put in. Your effort will be helped and encouraged by everyone around you – if you want it. This is from both teachers and fellow students, and even down to the domestic staff and the groundsmen. The Principal or Head Master at all times exudes this expectation in all sorts of ways hard to define – both verbal and non-verbal. There’s never any question about this.
So how can this NOT be the case in all schools as it’s such a simple concept? Sadly there are schools that have not clicked on to it, like a secondary school I visited regularly looking for recruits for our agriculture courses at The Waikato Polytech.
The overworked career’s teacher told me that she had to almost hide all the careers information in a corner of the library, rather than on display in a special ‘careers’ room’ the school had developed under her care, as any students being seen going in there were ridiculed by their peers. The culture of ‘expectation’ had clearly been killed off at this school, which was so sad as it was in an area screaming out for improved education. Teachers at that school must have had a massive impact on this situation and they must have been happy to live with it.
Easy to fix - why not?
You would think that it would be so simple to fix – so why is there rampant failure with 40% of New Zealand 15-year-old students now leaving school illiterate, and unable to do simple maths like measuring or giving change. This is a national tragedy, but the bigger one is that nobody in the education bureaucracy knows how to fix it or it would have been fixed years ago. You never even hear much talk about it.
You would think that it would be so simple to fix – so why is there rampant failure with 40% of New Zealand 15-year-old students now leaving school illiterate, and unable to do simple maths like measuring or giving change. This is a national tragedy, but the bigger one is that nobody in the education bureaucracy knows how to fix it or it would have been fixed years ago. You never even hear much talk about it.
Politicians (and especially the Minister of Education) defend their government’s education policy by quoting how much more money they put into education each year, and highlight innovations like paying better teachers more, and rotating them around schools to help other teachers with problems.
Some say despite the fact that today’s young folk all wizards with modern technology, literacy and numeracy and the ability to communicate are not improving.
The 40% failures
We had years of these low-achieving students coming to The Waikato Polytechnic from around 1960 to 2002 to do a farming course, and although many eventually left the industry for a host of reasons led by poor employment conditions, others became successful farmers and industry leaders.
With these students aged 15 straight from school, I found them hard to settle down and start learning. They found it hard to get out of the school non-achiever (dummy) role that had been reinforced by teachers, as soon as they made it clear that they were going into farming. From then on, the school was giving them the clear message that teachers and school culture had zero expectations for them.
The mantra that ‘you don’t need brains to work on a farm’ has lasted for centuries all over the world. ‘Weak in the head and strong in the back’ were the only requirements – and these clearly arrived in New Zealand with the early pioneers.
Even in High Schools in small rural New Zealand towns – this was still the attitude. I expected it to be better as teachers were bound to meet more farming parents at open and sport’s days and the like. Some farmers’ wives/partners were even teachers at these schools.
But I have to admit that farmers themselves are not great promoters of the industry, and regularly told their young ones to ‘get a trade’ as it was more reliable than farming – which was certainly true, and still is. Farmers’ offspring I met were told regularly by their parents that they can always go back to the farm at some later stage in their careers – which some do and when financially secure.
Leave school ASAP
So many of these young men and women told me that they left school at the earliest opportunity (age 15), which they were allowed to if they could prove they were moving to further study or employment. Otherwise they had to stay till age 16.
So many students told me that their teacher told them that ‘it would be better for you and better for me if you left’! How’s that for high ‘expectation’? These same students didn’t achieve one unit in their NCEA, which was unbelievable when you think of the resources at today's high schools.
It certainly tells you something – and it’s all bad. Surely there was some subject they could have achieved something, or some teacher who could have taken an interest in them to offer help. These were not stupid people; they had just been neglected and ruined by the education system and this was, and still seems to be, a national disgrace as far as training for the trades and agriculture goes.
How could the importance of a good education for an agricultural career be ignored, when five years after starting a farming course, the young person could be sitting in a bank manager’s office wanting to borrow half a million dollars to buy a herd of cows and equipment.
Learning had relevance
Once these low achievers at school realised their school days were over and they saw the usefulness of what they were learning – most took off like a rocket, facing up and dealing with their neglected basic education. For some it took quite a while for them to realise that school behaviour (due almost entirely to boredom) was not relevant in a Polytech where they were treated like adults, and that now they or their parents’ were paying fees for their attendance.
Our job as tutors was hard for some students, to let them know that we had expectations for them – as they had spent most of their school days getting negative messages from teachers, and suffering years of boredom which is the biggest killer of learning.
With mature students who came on a Herd Manager’s course, it was easier to build expectations, as many were already senior farm staff, or had come into farming from other careers and wanted to move fast as they had families and commitments to provide for. They had their own clear expectations and we taught what they needed on the farm, before the NZQA Units arrived to bog the system down with paper.
It was rewarding teaching young folk who were used to being treated in a mature way – although there were still plenty of examples of employers who didn’t do this, and support their employees’ attendance at classes. But these students had the confidence to leave poor employers without fear of not getting another job.
Mind maps
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| Example of a finished mind map, built up in stages from a blank sheet in discussion with students' practical experience. Their recall on their mind maps was amazing. |
It took me a long time to realise that a major part of our schooling was ‘to learn how to learn’ – and remember things to pass an exam and then forget them for ever. So many of our farm students had never been taught how to learn – and would sit in class, quiet and fully concentrating with arms folded, presumably assuming that what they were hearing from the tutor would go into the brain storage and be on instant recall when needed.
They had never been taught to take notes and would ask me if they should write down what I was talking about? This was panic stations for me when I realised their problem, and I ended up giving them masses of handouts which I suspected they would never have time to read – a skill some did not have in any case! I regularly went through these in class getting them to highlight the big words and checking they could read and understood them. The totally illiterate I made ist in the front row so I could help by pointing to these big words.
The success in handouts was to use bullet points and short sentences that did not go into more than two lines - preferably only one, otherwise poor readers would miss out large parts of sentences till they came across a short word they could read.
The success in handouts was to use bullet points and short sentences that did not go into more than two lines - preferably only one, otherwise poor readers would miss out large parts of sentences till they came across a short word they could read.
These mature students had great practical knowledge but had never been shown how to learn, so I changed to using mind maps with great success, as we could share our knowledge on the topic, and only write minimal key words on the mind map.
They filed these mind maps and I suggested they could update them in their manager roles for when they had to teach their own staff.
Fear of exams
What terrified them most was when it came to the end of the course – to gain the Herd Manager’s Certificate they had to sit and pass a three-hour exam. The only exam they had ever sat (and failed) was their School Certificate many years ago. Some were so scared of failure that they didn’t turn up for the exam, so didn’t get their certificate after a year’s work.
A few students just could not get their answers down in what we used to ask for as ‘short notes’ of 50 words. Asking for a 100-word answer was way out of the realms of possibility. Their education at school had been ruined for all time due to the system. This was especially apparent with Feed Budgeting exercises on farms where many women remembered such a bad experience with male maths teachers that they were put off the subject for life.
So in the latter years after seeing how producing words was such a struggle for so many, I got them to answer exam questions using a mind map. Their knowledge and recall using mind maps was amazingly successful..
But what was surprising at the end of the course, was that they all said that they had actually enjoyed having the exam - the challenge of it, and their resulting achievement. The all passed using mind maps – as I kept telling them I expected them to do.
Generation Z
Generation X and Y have gone and now we have another educational problem – Generation Z which have very different requirements, according to comments I hear from employers and educators. They are ‘electronic savvy’ but lack the skills of communicating with fellow humans.
They know their rights and will resort to legal action if threatened, for example by being reprimanded by employers. Criticism or negative comment are so easily interpreted as harassment – with legal consequences.
The motivated members of GenZ certainly don’t seem to lack expectation –but tutors and employers say this has morphed into ‘demand’ – regardless of proof of competence. In other words, they expect to be praised, complemented, nursed and not criticised in the old fashioned way which they view as harassment. They are often described as ‘high demand’ people.
This is not helped with the practice now of deleting ‘pass and fail’ from assessments and replacing them with ‘achieve and not achieve’ to soften the reality of life. The best you can do is to ‘achieve with excellence’ but no mark out of 100 can be given. So an employer cannot gauge how well a prospective employee did, which could be done in the old days by marks out of 100.
My sad conclusion
It’s hard to believe that in a highly developed country like New Zealand, so many people can look back on a disastrous outcome from their decade or more of formal learning at school. It's also hard to believe that there are so many teachers in schools who may be teaching, but their pupils are not learning.
But worse still, is there anyone in education research and teaching, at the chalk face and in politics who knows how to fix things? If they do, would they ever be allowed to do so? You have to wonder what goes on at today's teacher training institutions to allow this to happen. Do current professors of education every go into a class of bored students for a couple of weeks, to see how modern theories are working?
But worse still, is there anyone in education research and teaching, at the chalk face and in politics who knows how to fix things? If they do, would they ever be allowed to do so? You have to wonder what goes on at today's teacher training institutions to allow this to happen. Do current professors of education every go into a class of bored students for a couple of weeks, to see how modern theories are working?
So by 2025 when earnings from agricultural exports are required by the current government to be doubled, and 50,000 more trained entrants are needed for the industry, we will look back on a decade of frustrating failure.