Don’t knock my old school

From: Adrian F Sunman, Lunn Lane, South Collingham, Newark.

WITH all due respect to your correspondent Mr Geoffrey Bryant (who doesn’t disclose the type of school he attended), I had the privilege of spending three very happy years at a rural secondary modern school which was second to none.

Discipline was strict but the teachers took an active, caring, and intelligent interest in the welfare of pupils. Hard work and achievement were not only expected but regarded as the norm. Every opportunity to broaden our horizons through outings and field trips was taken.

All pupils had a chance to try their hand at woodwork, housecraft and rural studies, as well as the traditional academic ones. Any suggestion that the education offered at our school was inferior to that provided at the local grammar school would have been met with laughter and incredulity.

When I was 14, a decision was taken to close my school for reasons which had nothing to do with education and everything to do with obeying the ideological diktat of the then Labour Government. My last 18 months of school, spent in the unfamiliar and cramped conditions of a newly-created comprehensive, were far less happy.

It is perhaps hardly surprising that I am heartily sick of people disparaging secondary modern schools and perpetuating the myth that they offered inferior education – I suspect they know little about them. They offered far more opportunities and a much broader curriculum than the extended primary education which was the lot of most young people educated prior to Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act.