Surviving school

My parents were very ill-advised about my secondary education. I was raised in Shirley, a suburb just outside the Birmingham City boundary. At the time I was in primary school, Shirley fell within Warwickshire Education Authority, regarded as one of the worst in the country. Children from Shirley who passed the ‘11 plus’ exam had the option of going to grammar schools in Birmingham, and many took advantage of this. However, by the time I was eleven, Shirley came within the new Solihull Education Authority, which set up its own grammar schools. The whole of my ‘A stream’ class in primary school went to the new Tudor Grange Grammar School, while my parents sent me, alone, to King Edward’s Camp Hill Grammar School in Birmingham. At 13, I passed to King Edward’s School, which at that time was a direct grant school, with a combination of fee-paying students of well-off parents and scholarship boys from ordinary families. So all my social connections and friendships were disrupted twice in two years, and I moved to a school where I knew no-one and with an ethos I found incomprehensible. To make matters worse, I needed to take three buses each way to get there, with a commute of over an hour.

The ethos of the school was incomprehensible because it involved a strange nostalgia for an imagined mediaeval England. The headmaster renamed his post ‘chief master’ to revive some supposed tradition, and the school was organised into ‘houses’ to mimic private schools. The school’s sports teams only ever played private schools such as Bromsgrove School, Malvern College and the like, and never the oiks of such schools as King Edward’s Camp Hill. Around the school were boards with the names of old boys who had gone to various Oxbridge colleges. London University was given a board on its own, and there was one for ‘other universities’. Classics was the most esteemed academic subject, and there was a sneering approach to anything practical. I completed a science project on computers (then in their very early days), and the teacher dismissed it for being too technological. There were endless petty distinctions and grades among the students, all to create a world of dull conforming hierarchy. So a school in a metal-bashing city famous for its inventiveness and outspokenness produced students equipped to thrive in a synthetic medieval nostalgia.

I left the school with relief at the age of 18 and went to Handsworth Technical College and completed three social science A levels in a year. My life opened out: I enjoyed the chance to learn as an adult, study things I enjoyed, and meet people from different cultures. I then went to the London School of Economics and studied at a time when English universities were at their peak, full of new ideas about education and the world, taking students from a wider social background than before, but not yet swamped by the vast numbers who come to university now. In those days, undergraduates were tutored by professors and the leading academics of the day: mine included Alexander Irvine (later Lord Chancellor); Edward Mishan (the first economist to challenge the worship of growth); and an American lawyer William Letwin (father of the Conservative politician).

Now my life has come full circle. I work in a university about a quarter of a mile from King Edward’s School. It takes me a long commute of an hour to reach work from home. The University is thankfully more aware than King Edward’s School of the need to be in the forefront of knowledge and to engage with its City. But I miss the intellectual challenge I encountered at the London School of Economics, and the hope for a better future which inspired me when I was a younger man. I was unhappy with the synthetic mediaeval nostalgia of King Edward's School, but I can now see that, for its teachers, it was an attempt to maintain the continuity of the human spirit after the terrible years of war they had experienced. Their beliefs, however old-fashioned, were in any case superior to morality of money and power that eventually triumphed in England.