By Harry Mottram: This is the final part of former student of Kings of Wessex Dr Laura Carter’s short history of the school in Cheddar. In previous episodes we learnt about education in the 19th century with Hannah More and her sisters opening Sunday Schools before Victorian reforms saw a slow increase in universal education – initially for primary school age children. Then in 1834 the Church of England, took control of the embrionic establishment and in 1870 under the Elementary Education Act children up to the age of 13 were given compulsory education. It was still a rather mixed set up and it took further acts of parliament to ensure children must be in full time education up to age of 10 in 1876.
The Conservative Government of 1902 passed an act which introduced educational authorities who began wrestling some of the powers off the Church of Engand including that of Cheddar. Senior education above the age of 11 began in 1921 and was firmly established in 1944 under the Butler’s Education Act which was added to in 1947 when the Tripartite System, consisting of grammar schools, secondary modern schools and secondary technical schools was establised. Cheddar was a secondary school while Hugh Sexey’s was the Grammar School with an exam at the age of 11 to decide which shool was the one for those who passed or failed.
TIn previous episodes Laura Carter explained the situation after the Second World War, of how the school was run and how in 1964 Harold Wilson’s Government decided to end the two tier system and introduce comprehensive education. In the early 1970s Kings of Wessex was created under the leadership of the head Keith Herring – but there was still much work to be done as the new system of primary, middle and senior schools came in – in part it was to use the existing buildings from the old system.
Former student of Kings of Wessex Dr Laura Carter lectures in British History at Université de Paris and here she continues her history of KOW as as we move up to the modern era:
The comprehensive intake was introduced progressively from 1974–6, with the total school population already reaching 562 in September 1974. Throughout early 1976 Herring visited the closing grammar school to run assemblies and host joint parent’s evenings. By that summer, teachers were working to set up the new school, a period characterised according to Herring by a ‘relaxed and happy atmosphere’ in which kitchen and teaching staff cooperated (‘all “workers” together’).
The first fully comprehensive intake, in September 1976, saw c.800 pupils start school.
Herring’s vision of the new comprehensive school hinged on the ‘Community’, a word he often capitalised to give it extra gravitas, such as in the first booklet to pupils and parents sent out in 1976. In the short term, this meant ‘uniting the two schools’. ‘So far no problem between these school pupils has been experienced’, Herring wrote tentatively of the secondary modern/grammar school pupil mix, in a logbook entry for October 1976. Medium term, Herring appears to have put relations with parents, pastoral care (‘…a place where every pupil will feel secure and happy), and ‘back up
services’ slightly ahead of academics, with the hope that the latter would flow from the former.
Meanwhile, the secondary modern and grammar school PTAs cautiously merged, launching with a spring dance, barn dance, fabric evening, and cheese and wine party in 1976. The discourse of ‘Community’ reoccurs in Herring’s newsletters to parents throughout the 1970s. In 1977 he outlined his idea of ‘The Community’s School’ further in a piece for the LEA’s general newsletter, stressing the schools ‘open door’ policy (‘…to everyone in the area to come into the school at any time and sample the atmosphere’), involvement of ‘Community Users’ and efforts to marshal the school’s accommodation and resources for sport, music, academic, and leisure opportunities for adults and the
elderly. His vision, forged also in Leicestershire, clearly echoed Henry Morris’s Village Colleges.
This school portrait is, unfortunately, based almost exclusively on top-down documents. Herring’s optimism and positivity for a utopian comprehensive community dominates the archival record and it is alluring, especially in light of the wider national picture in the 1970s. But it perhaps masks a deeper bitterness within the community around losing the small, country grammar school in Blackford, which had opened as a co-educational boarding school in the 1890s with a seventeenth-century endowment. In the 1990s the Cheddar Valley PTA published a booklet that included some ‘Memories of 1976’ written by pupils who moved from the grammar school to start sixth form in the new comprehensive in Cheddar. ‘Straw boaters’ and ‘old-fashioned caps’ were replaced with a new, comprehensive school uniform of ‘black trousers, cream shirts and brown jumpers and ties’. Another boy from the grammar school remembered wondering: ‘Would the Kings of Wessex boys be a bunch of hard nuts? Would the Cheddar girls be sexy?’.26 Such comments, although selective and nostalgic, at the very least suggest that issues of class and sexuality were at the fore of teenage minds when it
came to reorganisation.
A careful blending was also pertinent when it came to the curriculum. The nuts and bolts of the grammar school offering were to be maintained, supplemented with sprinklings of comprehensive novelty and secondary modern practical subjects. The school adopted University-style nomenclature to package or perhaps disguise this complex recipe, organising the school into three academic Faculties (Maths/Science, Humanities, Creative Arts/Recreation). The 1976 parents’ newsletter contained a snippet of information on the new subject of Drama, offered at CSE and O Level and placed in the ‘Creative Arts Faculty’. Drama was justified as making an important contribution in
‘…the fields of personal, social, emotional, and linguistic development’. Parents who remained ‘more mystified still by the above account’ were invited by the Head of Drama to ‘come and observe some Upper School classes first hand’. Additionally, there was a further four ‘Service Faculties’: Resources, Careers, Opportunity (‘special learning problems’), and Activities. Initially, the Sixth Form catered to a continuity of A Levels from the grammar school (offering the same subjects, ‘supplemented by some further design and practical subjects) and one-year conversion O Level courses for those who took CSEs up to fifth form. In a report of the first school year, Herring made a
special effort to boost the CSE examination, writing ‘Without in any way lessening my commitment to ‘O’ Level, I do wish to promote and emphasize to parents and employers the value of the C.S.E.
Adults in the community were also welcomed into the Sixth Form to take O or A levels (at a charge), which by 1977 was being taken up by a handful of locals. This comprehensive school even had a ‘School Bursar’, recruited from the banking sector and in charge of school finances and staff administration. This was allegedly unusual for schools in the 1970s. Emerging from this was another novel extra-curricular feature: the ‘School Bank’. This enabled students to open an account to pay for school expeditions, ‘purchases of completed Handicraft or Home Economics work’, and to save up (their accounts also accrued interest on savings). The bank was established to ‘encourage thrift’ and to ‘familiarise pupils with the procedure of banking’, with the administration run by staff and senior pupils taking Business Studies as a practical application of their skills.32 Other extra-curriculars on offer included Badminton, Christian Union, Chess, Keep Fit, Jazz, Fencing, Folk Dancing, Ballroom Dancing, Public Speaking, and
Philately.
Not everything was as shiny and bright as this menu suggests. The new comprehensive school had to deal almost immediately with financial cuts. As Herring announced in the parents’ newsletter for 1976, Somerset Education Authority was being forced to cut budgets in mid-1976, which would cut the school’s everyday running budgets by 4%, pose a threat to the number of lunch-time supervisors (pending trade union agreement), and, critically, remove free transport for upper school pupils
travelling to the school from adjacent villages.
Later logbook entries suggest Herring’s dismay at these decisions, as he wrote in October 1979: ‘The deputies and I discussed at length which of the probably impalatable [sic] cuts on educational expenditure we would fine least noxious’. Another
blow to the school’s corporate life would come in the early 1980s, when Somerset LEA cut all music tuition provision.
Herring continued to use corporal punishment throughout the 1970s but his entries tend to give more detail and justification than his predecessors had, with comments such as ‘breaking a clear and specific instruction’, ‘as a last measure to try to save him from being sent elsewhere after recent truancy’, or, ‘in an attempt to do what talking to has failed to do’. Pupils (boys) were becoming more creative, for example bringing a bottle of whisky to school and drinking it and letting off smoke bombs and stink bombs on the school premises. There were no records of corporal punishment between 1980 and 1984. The punishment book ends with the sentence: ‘Cane thrown away, 1 Nov
1984’.
The snippet of logbook entries that we have for the 1980s (up to October 1983) highlight the Head’s continued optimism, but also a focus on exams and credentialization for all, including concerns about pupils with ‘no CSE aspirations’ and what to do about the ‘Opportunity Department & the pupils who are not entered for many CSE Examinations’. Pupils were perhaps becoming more demanding and
more dynamic in relation to their superiors: Herring recorded a chat with the Lower Sixth in January 1981 about a petition they had made to have their restriction to do morning study only in the Library removed. In the same month he saw parents about ‘a growing disagreement with the school; first about the wearing of an ear ring by their son and second their refusal to allow him to do a detention for misbehaviour’.
The Kings of Wessex received an HMI inspection in October 1988, on the eve of the first round of GCSEs. By this time there were 858 pupils on the roll, 198 of which were in the sixth form. However, more than one third of the school buildings were of temporary construction and almost all classrooms were at full capacity. There was poor access for physically handicapped and the library provision was considered outdated. Despite these material constraints, the inspectors noted very high attendance and academic performance that ‘Test results provided by the school indicate that ability levels are higher than Somerset averages’. They witnessed good relationships and a caring atmosphere in the school.
As late as 1988 Cheddar’s school had ‘no pupils whose home language is not English’, highlighting the relatively insularity of this rural, albeit large, comprehensive school to trends and changes totally reshaping comprehensive schools elsewhere in the UK. The school also had two units which were singled out for doing good work: one for pupils with hearing impairments and one to support ‘other pupils with statements of special educational needs’. The HMI report reveals a fairly widespread use of setting: setting or wide ability bands in the lower school in all subjects, except practical and social
studies which were mixed ability. In the upper school, core subjects were taught in ability sets, whilst option and practical subjects were a mixture of sets and mixed ability. Less able pupils in 1988 were labelled as the ‘opportunity group’, and they were taught separately to mainstream classes. This was considered by the HMI to be effective in terms of building their links with the community, but was depriving them of wider social opportunities within the school.
Inspectors praised the use of drama and role play in lessons such as English and Geography. But there were some critiques of the depth of pupil reading and writing, and a general wariness of the school being too narrowly focused towards exams. Examples of when the moral and social dimensions of everyday life were connected to school work were highlighted, for example in a drama class when ‘improvisation explored concepts of power, gender, and social class’. Relatedly, the HMI had some clear criticisms around an awareness of gender issues and race/multiculturalism in the school,
encouraging them to adopt an ‘Equal Opportunities’ policy. Indeed, three times as many boys as girls were noted to be taking physics, whilst twice as many girls as boys took biology. The fourth-year electronics class was all male, whereas child development was all female (the inspectors learned that
boys who applied for this course had been rejected because ‘their motives were doubted’). Health education was deemed to be poor overall, with a general focus on Christian values and the family.
The 1990s and 2000s saw the school expand in terms of equipment, buildings, awards, schemes. Keith Herring retired in 1994, the same year that the school got a new, purpose-built library (‘Learning Resource Centre’, due to a fundraising initiative by the school) and IT suite (in September 2004 all teachers got their first laptops). By February 1997 England’s chief HMI recognised Kings of Wessex as ‘one of country’s best schools’.
For the previous editions of this history see:
Notes
Former student of Kings of Wessex Dr Laura Carter lectures in British History at Université de Paris and has written at length about the school. She is the author of Secondary education and social change in the UK since 1945, for the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge and her new book Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (Oxford University Press, 2021) is now out.
For more on Dr Laura Carter visit https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/people/laura-carter
For more on Kings Academy visit https://www.kowessex.co.uk/
Axbridge News is edited by Harry Mottram and is published for the interest of himself and fellow residents.
Harry is a freelance journalist. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc
Email:harryfmottram@gmail.com
Website:www.harrymottram.co.uk
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