Comprehensive school

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A comprehensive school is a secondary school that accepts pupils of all abilities. Comprehensives have dominated British secondary education since the 1970s and currently educate over 90% of secondary pupils. There is an ongoing debate about the merits of the Comprehensive System.

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Operation

Comprehensive schools in England and Wales are usually neighbourhood schools taking their students from a defined local catchment area. But parents have an element of choice in choosing a high school and it is not uncommon, especially in towns and cities, for students to travel some distance to school.

The principle of equality of opportunity underpins comprehensive education. Students share the same facilities and teachers, though most schools use some form of selection to group children by ability in individual subjects. Most comprehensive schools take students from the age of 11 to 16. Some have a sixth form, entry to which is often on an open basis, with some students taking A levels, whilst others follow vocational programmes.

In Scotland a very different system is used, which, whilst based on comprehensive education, has different ages of transfer, different examinations and a different philosophy of choice and provision.

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History

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Early Comprehensives

The first comprehensive school was Holyhead County School in Anglesey. Other places that experimented with comprehensives included Coventry, Sheffield, Leicestershire and the West Riding.

The main testbed of comprehensives was London, where LCC Education Officer Graham Savage, influenced by the US High School system, sought to build a system of equal-access secondary schools. The first purpose-built comprehensive in the country, Kidbrooke School in Greenwich, was opened in 1954 at a cost of £560,000.

These early comprehensives modelled themselves firmly on the grammar school, with teachers in gowns and lessons in a very formal style. The opening of the Rising Hall Comprehensive in Islington in 1960 offered an alternative to this model. Embracing the progressive ideals of sixties education, the school abandoned corporal punishment and brought in a much more liberal attitude to discipline.

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Nationwide implementation

The Comprehensive System results from a policy decision taken by the 1965 Labour government and implemented by Circular 10/65, an instruction to local education authorities.

Over the next 10 years many secondary modern schools and grammar schools were amalgamated to form large neighbourhood comprehensives, whilst a number of new schools were built to accommodate a growing school population.

In 1970 the incoming Conservative government continued the process. The secretary of state for education at the time was Margaret Thatcher, who went on to be a vociferous critic of comprehensive education. By 1975 the majority of local authorities in England and Wales had abandoned the 11 plus examination and moved to a comprehensive system.

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Post 1976

In 1976 the then Labour prime minister James Callaghan gave a speech at Oxford's Ruskin College. He launched what became known as the 'great debate' on the education system. He went on to list the areas he felt needed closest scrutiny: the case for a core curriculum, the validity and use of informal teaching methods, the role of school inspection and the future of the examination system. Callaghan was not the first to raise these questions. A 'black paper' attacking liberal theories in education and poor standards in comprehensive schools had appeared in 1969, to be followed by a second in 1971. The authors were the academics Brian Cox and A E Dyson. They were supported by ex-headteachers, led by Dr. Rhodes Boyson, who had left teaching for a career as a Conservative MP. The black papers called for a return to traditional teaching methods and an end to the comprehensive experiment.

That debate has continued since, and the comprehensive ideal is no longer seen as the goal of education policy by many educationalists. Many comprehensive schools have become specialist schools, notionally able to select up to 10% of the student body. This reflects government policy which states that parents have a right to choose which school their child should go to, depending on their interests and skills.

Currently, most government initiatives focus on parental choice and information, implementing a pseudo-market incentive to encourage good schools. This logic has underpinned the controversial league tables of school performance. Other ideas have included getting successful schools to share knowledge and best practice through partnerships with nearby schools; opening city academies or closing and reopening 'failing schools'.

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Debate and issues

Supporters of the Comprehensive System argue that it is unacceptable on both moral and practical grounds to select children on the basis of their ability. They also argue that comprehensive schools in the UK have allowed millions of children to gain access to further and higher education, and that the previous selective system relegated children who failed the eleven plus examination to a second class and inferior education.

Critics of comprehensive schools argue that the reality has been a leveling down of provision and a denial of opportunity to able children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who might once have expected to pass the eleven plus exam and have the advantage of a grammar school education.

During the late sixties there was heated debate about the merits of streaming pupils. In grammar schools pupils were taught in different classes according to their perceived ability. At first the comprehensives copied this structure, but the failings of streaming, principally that it failed to reflect the spread of abilities in different subjects, led to experiments with other methods. One controversial method, mixed ability teaching, was widely adopted. Over time however it was supplanted in many schools by 'setting', where children are grouped by ability in different subjects, allowing the possibility of being in the 'top' set for mathematics, but the bottom set for History.

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Comprehensive Schools outside England and Wales

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Scotland

In Scotland all publicly funded primary and secondary schools are comprehensive. The Scottish Executive has rejected plans for specialist schools as of 2005.

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Republic of Ireland

In Ireland comprehensive schools are associated with secular values and a broad education.

These schools were introduced in to the Republic of Ireland in the 1966 by an initiative by Patrick Hillery, Minister for Education, to give a broader range of education compared to that of the vocational school system which was then the only system of schools completely controlled by the state. Until this time education in Ireland was largely dominated by religious persuasion, and in particular the voluntary secondary school system was a particular realisation of this. The comprehensive school system is still relatively small and to an extent has been superseded by the community school concept.

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External links

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