Talk:Secondary modern school

message: I agree emphatically, there is no need for this article and another with a different capatilisation. Davidkinnen 18:06, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger Request 

message: Previous debates on old article removed. 
My apologies to anyone who feels I have overstepped my mark by replacing the old article. I felt that it made sense in the light of the widespread changes currently being introduced on the Tripartite System as a whole. I would take no offense if anyone were to take sections of previous editions and reintroduce them- I have only implemented a full change to ensure the text scans, and have done my best to include all information mentioned before.
--Evil Capitalist 21:21, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Article Replacement

message: (The above is now very long to read on a screen - and so I'm starting this subsection for any further discussion of this point.)
I've just re-read the article and I still say the same. Someone coming to it with no knowledge - say a kid at school researching this matter - will get a wholly false view of Sec. Mod. schools. And anyone who attended them - at least in later years - will be offended by the false Dickensian depiction of them. Pennypennypennypenny (talk) 19:24, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: While I am not opposed to the article reflecting the way secondary modern schools have evolved and the educational opportunities they have provided in more recent years, I feel it is vital that it does not lose sight of the situation as it was when the majority of the population passed through them. I left a secondary modern in 1969 with CSEs though, even then, the 5th year in which CSEs were taken was optional and the majority of my contemporaries left in mid 1968 (at the end of the 4th form) having had no opportunity to sit for qualifications of any sort. I believe only two of us went on to university (via 'O' and 'A' levels taken at a technical college). I eventually gained a PhD and a university lectureship so the system as a whole did not fail me. However, I am convinced that a number of my contemporaries - my intellectual equals or better - were educationally short-changed. Perhaps I can also throw some light on the degree to which the curriculum was locally decided: all boys at our SM were taught navigation, hardly a likely choice for a nationally chosen curriculum but entirely appropriate for a school, like ours, located in a fishing village.--ColinSMill (talk) 10:39, 25 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Biased article 2

message: I strongly believe that, as has been suggested above, the article needs to be divided chronologically if it is to describe the secondary modern school over its entire existence (i.e. 1944 to the present day) This would allow many of the issues that are currently contentious to be resolved. There are a number of statements with highly time-dependent validity- for example "Secondary moderns prepared students for the CSE examination ..." which is untrue prior to the introduction of the CSE in 1965, partly true between 1965 and 1972 while the 5th year in which the CSE was examined remained optional, and true from 1973 until the CSE gave way to the GCSE in 1988.
The article does not even mention the significant dates in this sort of progression or give any statistics relating to them. For example, the proportion of secondary modern leavers with some sort of qualification was almost zero in 1944. By 1970 (when approximately 56% of all school leavers had some qualification) somewhat over 40%  of secondary modern levers must have obtained some qualification. Given that only about 1% of today's school leavers are unqualified the qualification rate in secondary moderns probably continued to rise. In its current form it would be difficult to incorporate this sort of information without casting each statement with time-line related caveats and rendering the thing almost unreadable.
As an aside, there seem to have been a number of euphemisms used for secondary mods. even in their hay-day. Mine, for example was a "county secondary" and became a "community college". I'm sure this adds to the difficulty of properly allocating schools to this category.--ColinSMill (talk) 16:06, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dividing the topic chronologically 

message: The article currently states  What other terms were used elsewhere and does anyone know what the official equivalent replacement term was/is? Do we have any refs for this? -- Trevj (talk) 19:36, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I know there are no official terms at national level. Practice has always varied from one place to another. This is the same as with "grammar schools": some schools that used to be selective at 11, but are now comprehensive, still call themselves "grammar school", while others that are still selective are _not_ called "grammar school". Others with that name are in fact now independent and not part of the state system at all. So the name of the school does not necessarily mean anything. My recollection from the 1960s, when there were more of them than now, is that some, maybe most, secondary moderns did not call themselves that. In my own area they were just called "(Insert name of place) School". -- Alarics (talk) 21:24, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Secondary modern schools today 

message: I have transfered the unencycylopedic comments below, from a previous version of the article where they were inappropriate, to here -so they can be considered. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 14:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Unchallenged Criticism

message: This article is very misleading. I was a "baby boomer" who found himself shunted off to a secondary modern in 1960, along with some very bright children, simply because there were so few grammar school places for us all. Selection for secondary modern education had little to do with ability, it was a product of rationing the very limited number of grammar places. Pupils within secondary moderns were streamed. In our school (in Surrey) the top stream all went on to take GCE O levels and had done for many years. The second stream took the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) school leaver exam, replaced by CSE in 1965. The school had a sixth form offering A levels and some pupils went on to university. Hardly the dumping ground for factory-fodder which this article suggests. I do agree, however, about the lack of encouragement to take A levels or progress beyond O levels. I bitterly regret the fact that no teacher invested so much as one minute of their time post-GCE to advise me on further education options. We were just left to leave and find a job.
:That sounds as I understood the system operating in that period. The problem with this article is it presents a picture of a secondary modern school when in fact they operated very differently at different times and in different places. I taught for a while in a secondary modern and there were A-level students. By contrast, the grammar school I attended had a significant number of secondary modern students arrive in the 6th form to take A-levels (they were certainly not left behind) but this is a decades and a decade after your experience respectively. One significant factor was the proportion of children who attended grammar school (it varied widely). Another factor was investment in secondary modern schools. In some places they were underfunded "dump" schools. In others they were very well funded and great care was taken to give students a good education. Generalisations are therefore misleading. Francis Davey (talk) 17:23, 12 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: A View from the Coalface

message: I attended Glastonbury High a secondary modern school from 1977 to 1982. It was located on the St Helier estate in the London borough of Sutton.
I must say it provided limited opportunities and had an academically low achieving curriculum. The school suffered from disorderly classrooms and frequent bouts of teacher issued corporal punishment which were used to restore order. Glastonbury high school closed in 1989.
Edit by 
Thank you it just got put in the wrong place. If you have any more opinions about St Helier estate or Glastonbury, or details of what happened to it, can you post them here or on my talk page
 I wish you had done what I have just done and TX to the talk page. These comments can provide useful clues when searching for references and building up the two articles I have flagged. Happy New Year- ClemRutter (talk) 14:24, 31 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Parking a comment

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Just cleaning up some errors in the uncited history section at the start.
I'm preparing the 1940s sub-article of Rab Butler's biog at the moment, so have been doing a fair bit of reading about this.
Specifically:
I'm not aware that the Fisher Act of 1918 had anything to do with setting up selection for the secondary level. It extended the school leaving age to 14, but most kids in state and voluntary (i.e. church) schools were educated from infancy through to 14 at that stage. Hiving off older kids into separate schools from the age of 11 was recommended by the Hadow Report of 1926 and was only very slowly implemented because of financial cuts in the early 1930s.
The Butler Act of 1944 was mainly concerned with nationalising the church schools, appeasing the CofE by making RE compulsory, and enshrining that there should be separate state schools from the age of 11, with an aspiration to get the school leaving age up to 15 (a move postponed from the 1936 Act) and then to 16 eventually (not implemented until the early 1970s). However, contrary to myth, it did not say anything about separate schools. Selection was simply the educational doctrine of the time (Butler later wrote in his memoirs - 1971 - that he approved of academic selection but that he had never said that the 3 "types" of kids necessarily had to be educated in different schools).
Citations please, if somebody thinks otherwise.Paulturtle (talk) 04:02, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Go for it, WP:BOLD do try to add references. ClemRutter (talk) 07:49, 12 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: When we get to discussing the reliability of sources the talk page is very helpful. The facts are in the wrong paragraph. The addition of the stats is useful- especially to those of our readers who weren't there at the time. I have seen those figures before but can't remember where: I threw out all my History of Education books and notes in 1978.--ClemRutter (talk) 14:56, 1 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using the talk page 

message: This edit has been reverted back in despite my challenge and despite my pointing the editor to what is required per WP:ONUS on my talk page. The section is about the tripartite system and the 11+ exam, which is, to my knowledge, always called the 11+ (and that is how our Eleven-plus page describes it, with no exception for Buckinghamshire). Moreover, Buckinghamshire was by no means unique in having middle schools with a later changeover. As per my reply to the editor, Surrey also used this system and other places did too. Why an exception in the text just for Bucks? The Hansard debate is talking about school entry at 12 but not the name of the exam, and at a time where secondary modern schools had long since been abandoned in other counties, so the discussion is exceptional in that regard and does not evidence this anyway. Thus we have no evidence that the exam was called 12+ in Buckinghamshire at the time. I will revert this again now, and unless proper evidence is presented that (a) it was called that and (b) it was an exception only in Buckinghamshire, this edit must not be reasserted. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:13, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  12 plus