By Clyde Chitty

RoutledgeFalmer (Key Issues in Teaching and Learning series) pound;16.99

Professor Chitty’s starting point is that teachers, bombarded with instructions about what to teach and how to teach it, need to reflect on why they are teaching. After all, they are part of an educational revolution. Subject to ever-growing demands from parents, the media and politicians, they have constantly to rethink and reconfigure their role. To do that, he says, they need some recent history. What happened - or, equally important, is believed to have happened - to bring such change about? And what do the changes say about the values that underpin our schools? Do we want schools to reflect society or change it?

The 1944 Education Act, and the “national system locally administered” that it created, formed the foundation, Chitty says, of a 30 - year consensus. Power was decentralised and policy was flexible enough to accommodate changing needs and demands. Overwhelmingly, the comprehensive schools of the Sixties were created by local agreement: the then education secretary Anthony Crosland’s famous circular of 1965 requesting comprehensive reorganisation plans reflected what was already happening on the ground.

But, almost universally, comprehensive schools were initially seen as “grammar schools for all”. At first, too little thought was given to the curriculum and teaching and, although in the early Seventies the Schools Council (another consensus body, with powerful teacher input) was addressing this, it came too late. The right-wing Black Papers had called for a return to selection and formal teaching; a worldwide economic crisis had shattered the cosy assumptions of the post-war years. Suddenly, education wasn’t working. In 1976, the prime minister, James Callaghan, initiated the “Great Debate”, and the stage was set for Margaret Thatcher.

As education secretary under Ted Heath, Thatcher had approved more than 2,500 LEA comprehensive reorganisation schemes. As prime minister, she determined to redress the balance, and the story of how she did so, in the teeth of the “educational establishment” she derided, forms the core of Chitty’s book. It makes enjoyable if occasionally uncomfortable reading: the tension between traditional conservatives and privatisers, or between state power and parent power, or between the “academic” and the “vocational”, still crackles on the page.

What Thatcher wanted, she proclaimed, was “the six Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic, religious education and right and wrong”. Instead, we got an overloaded and archaic national curriculum, and Chitty devotes a chapter to its unravelling, which began with the 1993 Dearing review.

That brings him to 1997, and to the second of the two key questions he poses. He catalogues the schemes and initiatives the Labour government has introduced to raise standards, but he has little time for the BlairByers mantra that standards matter more than structures. Standards and structures are necessarily inter-related: the emphasis on the former serves only to conceal what Chitty rather kindly calls Labour’s “curious defensiveness” about the comprehensive system. The truth is that New Labour is wedded to the market, and the market means selection.

So “modernising the comprehensive principle”, in Chitty’s view, is a way of evading fundamental issues of equality and social justice, not of securing them - and New Labour is aping, in actions if not words, the systematic denigration of the comprehensive school’s achievements that was so marked a feature of the Thatcher years. He is good on this, and on how the myth of failure and teacher extremism was then so sedulously fostered. What he might have added is that so much of it was London-based. For politicians and the media, metropolitan problems were made to stand proxy for a system that outside the capital (and in Scotland) delivered high levels of satisfaction.

What he doesn’t do is discuss the weaknesses of the comprehensive years: the problem, in the inner cities, of the “neighbourhood school”, the failure of so many schools - until a single system of examinations was introduced - to expect high standards from all their pupils, the reluctance of some schools to embrace innovation, to make partners of their parents and pupils. Nor does he discuss the role of the teacher unions and their inability, during the years of cuts and “teacher action”, to build constituencies of support.

But those are minor criticisms. Chitty is reminding us of a fundamental question. Do we want schools to reflect society, or to improve it? Teachers, unlike governments, need to be clear about the answer. Structures matter, as well as standards. Read his book!

Michael Duffy