ABOUT ADOLESCENCE IN 1970
SBRITAIN
Historians of science have viewed the emergence of statistics and their institutionalisation in the nineteenth century as a parallel development to liberalism, concerned with ensuring governmental efficiency. But their usage here is dual; they simultaneously justify multiple modes of action and lend a scientific, objective appearance to policy and opinion.1 Twentieth- century developments point even more towards a Foucauldian model: the statistical eye, in the form of opinion polls or the social survey, offers a key tool in the creation of the modern, rational state and the emergence of new modes of subjectivity and measurable opinion.2
Meanwhile, Rose notes how numbers, and their representation in graphs and tables,
progressively displace the textual and descriptive elements of scientific enquiry.3 This chapter contends that, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the number of statistical attempts to
measure adolescent behaviour increased and that quantitative analysis became one of
Brickell’s ‘[w]ays of knowing young people’ which ‘parallel the social construction of youth
1 Theodore Porter, ‘Medical quantification: science, regulation, and the State’, in Gerald
Jorland, Annick Opinal and George Weisz (eds), Body Counts: medical quantification in historical and sociological perspective (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp. 395-396.
2 Savage, Identities and Social Change, pp. 189-192; Laura Dumond Beers, ‘Whose opinion?
Changing attitudes towards opinion polling in British politics, 1937-1964’, Twentieth Century British History, 17:2 (2006), pp. 177-205.
176
itself’.4 Further, I suggest, in a theme that I shall develop in the subsequent chapter, that this
marked the beginning of growing governmental approach to classroom discipline based on the analysis of the school as a system. However, this was no means total, nor were the statistics necessarily amenable to absolute power on the part of those who collected and then publicised them. Indeed, methodologies were frequently critiqued and some actors preferred to continue with older community, landscape models which became more inflected with social deprivationist, ‘problem family’ discourses as the century progressed.5
Brickell’s example of governmentality, for instance, is the case file, but he categorises this simultaneously as an individuated and holistic type of data.6 Grosvenor and Myers, in discussing Birmingham’s educational census, likewise refer to the creation of an expanding ‘surveillant assemblage’ over the course of the twentieth century, with the documents
themselves tabulating and gathering information about a range of aspects of the pupils’ lives.7
Both offer examples of how data, and especially examples of administrative thick and thin description created impressions of behaviour. In this chapter, by contrast, I seek to explore what happened during a period when the case file was overshadowed by an effort to know and understand school discipline through another technology of government: the quantitative lens. The ‘empirical’ approach had long been a staple of the social sciences in Britain and America, and despite criticism from radical practitioners such as C. Wright Mills, it still
4 Brickell, ‘On the case of youth’, pp. 52-53.
5 Welshman, ‘In search of the “problem family”’; idem, Underclass, pp. 79-97.
6 Brickell, ‘On the case of youth’, p. 63.
7 Ian Grosvenor, ‘“All the names”’ : LEAs and the making of pupil and community
identities’, Oxford Review of Education, 28:2&3 (2002), pp. 299-310; Grosvenor and Myers, ‘Progressivism, control and correction’, p. 237.
177
retained a certain power as an analytical force.8 There were several initiatives to measure
adolescent behaviour over the course of twentieth-century Britain, but the 1970s mark a particularly active moment when this type of analysis was undertaken by central government, local authorities and teaching unions. All of these shared a common objective to picture an authentic and ‘true’ extent of what was unquestioningly considered a growing ‘problem’.
The so-called Raising of the School Leaving Age to sixteen (variously abbreviated to RoSLA, ROSLA or RSLA in official documents) – finally initiated, following several delays, in September 1973 – provided a renewed focal point for concern about discipline. If earlier debates about adolescent behaviour – and particularly psychological discussions around the category of ‘aggression’ – had coalesced around issues of definition, during this period it became recentred on the measurement of the adolescent’s capacity for violence and damage to property. The difficulties faced by the various groups that attempted to promote and use these quantitative methodologies point to some of the limitations of the statistical approach. Primarily, it was recognised that issues related to behaviour were connected to social change. But the 1970s also witnessed the emergence of ideas which positioned the school itself as central to stimulating certain behaviours through systems theory. I will discuss this aspect of the 1970s and 1980s changes in the following chapter. This chapter, meanwhile, concentrates on RoSLA as a key factor in focalising attention on the statistical dimension, and on the early-1970s moment as one of transition in attitudes towards adolescence. The prospect of an expanded adolescent population, composed of reluctant pupils who would rather be engaging in economic activity, appears to have been a concern of several teaching unions and these were, I argue, reinforced at the local level. In Brighton, such anxieties culminated in a 1975
178
investigative report produced by the local authority into incidents of violence and indiscipline in schools. But many other groups were involved in gathering and analysing statistics: from the DES (which commissioned its own national survey, similar to the Brighton one, in 1976) to teaching unions (such as the NAS). Debates circulated around the relative merits of this approach, but all of these studies were united by an effort to use numerical data to validate perceptions about the contemporary state of discipline. I wish to posit these methods as a turning away from the ethnographic approaches noted in the previous chapter, although I note that especially in local studies such as Brighton, the older forms of observation could filter through alongside them. The quantitative method, for all that it marked a different,
governmental approach, merely signalled the continuing influence of the wider social sciences into the 1970s.
This chapter is organised around a series of inter-linked, and broadly chronologically ordered, case-studies. In the first section, I examine how concerns over school discipline, which had declined from professional and public consciousness since the height of the ‘blackboard jungle’, re-emerged following the government’s decision to raise the school- leaving age in the wake of the Newsom Report.9 While this was announced officially in 1963,
the concerns of organisations such as the NUT and NAS only reached their apogee as the appointed day approached in the early 1970s. The next part analyses several responses to the resulting perception of increased aggression and indiscipline in the secondary school, through attempts to investigate and quantify the causes and extent of the problem. The difficulties for the surveyors – as unions, councils or government bodies – to define precisely what
‘indiscipline’ and ‘violence’ meant is reflective of a broader difficulty in comprehending the problem in the light of the social changes of this decade. Finally, I explore some of the
9Half Our Future: a report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)
179
archival holdings from the LEA in Brighton to demonstrate how one effect of the survey was the validation of a ‘problem family’ discourse to discipline in schools and an attempt, perhaps never truly realised, to link schools together with the social-work and welfare services that were themselves undergoing profound changes at the time.10
(5.1) ‘Ready in time’: the ‘RoSLA’ adolescent
The headmistress of a secondary-modern girls’ school in Brighton began the 1973 academic year with the usual notices in her log-book about reopening, staffing and organisation. This time, however, there was also an underlined, and on appearances anodyne, margin annotation which stated simply ‘School Leaving Age Raised’.11 There are many reasons why this could
have been placed in the book, but the deliberate – almost ominous – marking out of a change is significant in any consideration of how RoSLA was perceived and how it helped to spur both longstanding and emergent anxieties about adolescents. A variety of agents saw RoSLA as an opportunity for new research and in-service training initiatives. This included the BBC whose RoSLA and After series (broadcast in 1972) featured an episode on ‘Discipline’.12
While much initial concern over RoSLA focused on practicalities and curricular content, the hidden and growing focus was behaviour, and how pedagogy might help to address it. Reflecting back from the mid-1970s, Ronald Cave, an educational administrator for
10Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Local Authority and Allied Personal Social
Services (London: HMSO, 1969).
11 ESRO, ESC 294/1/1, The Knoll County Secondary Girls’ School, log book, 5 September
1973.
12 The BBC produced and broadcast the series ROSLA and After during 1972, intended as an
in-service training programme for teachers. An episode on ‘Discipline’ was broadcast on 17 October 1972, BBC One.
180
Cambridgeshire and co-editor of a volume on discipline, noted that ‘[d]uring the first year following the raising of the school leaving age it was almost impossible to open an
educational periodical without reading alarming reports of increasing disruption in schools’.13
The background to RoSLA lay in the 1944 Education Act and the inter-war period. The 1944 Act had stipulated fifteen as the universal age at which compulsory schooling ended, but it also included a rider clause permitting the age to be increased to sixteen ‘as soon as the Minister is satisfied that it has become practicable’.14 This had the dual benefit, from
the Ministry’s point of view, of attenuating the partisan controversies of the earlier period and addressing the problem of restricted public finances in the post-war era.15 These
developments are significant because they indicate the role of the school in demarcating adolescence, and how that category often expanded to fit the boundaries imposed upon it. The leaving age bookended schooling, defined the adolescent’s place within the wider social order, and demarcated a period in the life-cycle in which the local state could actively
intervene in young people’s lives. By 1963, it had become normalised for fifteen-year-olds to be in school and they were no longer the subject of earlier alarms around the ‘blackboard jungle’. RoSLA threatened to expand the age upwards and bring a new, older adolescent cohort into the ambit of the school, reinforcing the ‘problem’ element of the previous upper cohort. Unlike earlier controversies over the leaving age, however, the debates of the late- 1960s and early-1970s were targeted around the perceived shift in type, behaviour and attitude of the adolescent population itself. Such concern was, in turn, granted a heavily gendered dimension by the fact that, although there had been voluntary fifth-formers prior to
13 Ronald G. Cave, ‘Foreword’, in Clive Jones-Davies and Ronald G. Cave (eds), The
Disruptive Pupil in the Secondary School (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1976), p. 6.
14 Education Act 1944 (c.31), section 35. 15 Hendrick, Images of Youth, pp. 213-249.
181
the 1970s, these were often girls on ‘commercial’ and ‘pre-nursing’ courses rather than boys who had more opportunities for employment or vocational training upon leaving school. In this way, RoSLA and its concerns remained very much a question of male adolescents.
In the aftermath of the Newsom Report, the government announced its intention to introduce RoSLA at the start of the 1970-1971 academic year. However, the economy drives of the late-1960s saw the initial target delayed until 1972-1973. No sooner was the plan announced, than problems were being identified. The NAS, later to be openly concerned with the prospect of behavioural difficulties, was initially anxious about expenditure and
resources. In a pamphlet entitled Ready in Time?, the organisation warned that, unless investments were made to ensure suitable accommodation, schools would not be able to take on the extra pupils in reasonable condition.16 Such concerns were repeated in its recruitment
materials and at its conference, which resolved to welcome the plan provided more resources and investment were forthcoming.17
It was in the direction of behaviour and discipline, however, that anxieties about RoSLA moved, and researchers responded in earnest by seeking to develop new pedagogies of discipline. The Schools Council, established in October 1964 to promote research into curricular and school organisation prior to RoSLA, ‘decided, at its first meeting … that high priority should be given … to a programme of activity in preparation for the raising of the school leaving age’.18 One working paper that emerged from this outlined an ambitious series
16 National Association of Schoolmasters, Ready in Time?: some observations on the raising
of the school leaving age , with particular regard to the attitude of the National Association of Schoolmasters (Hemel Hempstead: NAS, 1966).
17 NAS, Tomorrow’s Schoolmaster: a guide to the policies and services of the National
Association of Schoolmasters (Hemel Hempstead: NAS, n.d. [c.1974]), pp. 10, 13.
18 Schools Council, Raising the School Leaving Age (Working Paper No. 2) (London: HMSO,
182
of inter-related research projects, including one to compare the influence of ‘geographical area, socio-economic circumstances, scholastic aptitude, parental influence and personal qualities’ to teachers’ perspectives about RoSLA.19 Most of the booklet was concerned with
curricular changes, yet lurking behind this was the question of behaviour and how the school might keep the new fifth-formers on side through courses tailored to their needs and interests. Secondary education was defined, in a series of tropes that have already been examined, as a period when children developed ‘self-awareness’. ‘By the fifth year’, however, ‘their
personal and mental maturity will make heavy demands of the teacher’s understanding and knowledge’ as educators sought to help ‘pupils … to enter the world of ideas’.20 This was
significant, for it emphasised the adult nature of the adolescent, what the report itself termed their ‘near-adult awareness’ which meant that they did not respond positively to being ‘demoted to the status of children’.21 The pedagogy of discipline post-RoSLA was clear:
adolescents needed to be treated with greater maturity, and a more congenial approach, which would be reciprocated.
Teaching unions likewise increasingly turned to the subtext of behaviour in their RoSLA discussions. Like the NAS, the 1965 annual general meeting of the AAM passed several RoSLA-related resolutions. These urged greater investment to be materially ready to accommodate a new school cohort, but equally declared, in revealing language, that ‘all change in re-organisation should be organic and not cataclysmic’.22 The AAM also outlined specific policies for dealing with poor discipline post-RoSLA, including a 1974 resolution in
19 Ibid.,pp. 3-4. 20 Ibid.,pp. 8-9. 21 Ibid.,p. 22.
22 Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, (MRC), MSS.59/4/1/28, AAM papers,
183
favour of special ‘units for disturbed children’ to be ‘staffed by teachers with special training for this work’ and, in 1977, the need to identify ‘effective sanctions and forms of discipline to deal with pupils who are disturbed, disruptive, noisy, destructive and even violent’.23 Such pessimistic attitudes were reflective of a broader mood across teaching, sociology and psychology that there had been an increase in violence as a social phenomenon, reflected, as we saw in Chapter Three, in Agatha Bowley’s 1974 volume, Children at Risk.24
These concerns prompted institutional responses. As the appointed day approached, the NAS held a special conference in Birmingham in December 1971 on the topic of
‘management, organisation and discipline’.25 This was symptomatic of a professional concern
that the opinions and voices of teachers were not being respected, or even sought. In this sense, the conference’s concern with ‘authority’ can be read in multiple ways. ‘The concept of authority runs through the speeches. […] When the authority of the school is undermined the school society suffers’, claimed the introductory paper, placing the teacher’s own professional authority together with the general authority of the school. Crucially, however, the unique threats posed by adolescents in the school were also related outwards, to society at large, such that ‘[t]he opposition of teenagers to authority is not a result of what happens in schools. It is more an expression of ideas imposed upon them in the society outside school’.26
This marked an effort to reappraise the vision of authority, a pedagogy of discipline founded on inculcating healthy (and, in a more explicitly gendered formulation, masculine) citizenship
23 MRC, MSS.59/4/1/32, AAM papers, Conferences Reports for 1973 and 1974, resolutions;
MRC, MSS.59/4/1/34, AAM papers, Conference Report for 1977, resolutions.
24 Bowley, Children at Risk, p. 44.
25 R. B. Cocking, ‘Introduction’, in NAS, Special Report: Management, Organisation and
Discipline (Hemel Hempstead: NAS, 1972), p. 1.
184
and shared social norms in a more frightening and seemingly violent world. Terry Casey, the NAS’s general secretary, asserted in his contribution to the conference proceedings that ‘school violence’ had undergone a ‘qualitative’ change in recent years which was
characterised by a new ‘attitude’ on the part ‘of the aggressor’.27 Violence did not need to be
physical to be dangerous: ‘To destroy a teacher’s lesson by mindless “taking the mickey” is just as vandalistic as destroying the school WC. To insult a woman teacher or a man for that matter with a foul expression is as much part of violence as a blow on the face’.28 As one headteacher reflected in 1976, these new attitudes were connected to more wistful nostalgia for an apparently simpler age of disciplinary problems. ‘[T]here was a certain chivalry in these proceedings [i.e: poor behaviour and its disciplining] twenty-five years ago’, he wrote, whereas ‘today’s disruption has rawer and more intense connotations’.29 This reflected a shift
in perceptions of violence, away from the romanticised quality of Blishen, and towards one characterised by a lower tolerance towards aggressive behaviour as a social phenomenon.
Teachers’ views were indicative of changing social attitudes towards youth more generally, and of their role in and out of the school. These are worth recalling as this chapter turns to the quantitative approaches undertaken by various bodies. The statistical exploration of behaviour provided one way of attempting to make these qualitative and intangible
changes – in society and in the adolescents themselves – more comprehensible. It was equally a tool for stimulating public and media interest in the issues. Yet despite the assertion that the change, always confusing and unspecified, was qualitative and hard to grasp, the call was
27 Terry Casey, ‘Authority and discipline’, in NAS, Special Report: Management,
Organisation and Discipline (Hemel Hempstead: NAS, 1972), p. 36, 51-56.
28 Ibid., p. 36.
29 Bernard Baxter, ‘Tackling the disruptive pupil’, in Clive Jones-Davies and Ronald G. Cave
(eds), The Disruptive Pupil in the Secondary School (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1976), p. 69.
185
always for efforts to measure it quantitatively, subjecting it to statistical analysis. Such tensions within the motivations for the approach underlay problems in defining precisely