Grammar Schools

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I should start by declaring a particular interest. Until today, I thought that I was the only Member of your Lordships’ House who had failed the 11-plus. I now acknowledge that I am not and that I share that experience with another.

I want to make a couple of points about failing the 11-plus because it brings lasting shame and humiliation on the life of those who suffer it in a way that makes it virtually impossible to get past it and get on with anything else in your life ever again. To my father, it did not matter. He was a church orphan and said, “You don’t need education. I got where I am today without it, so you don’t need it, either”. To my mother it was shame beyond belief in terms of a social slide down the scale because her family had had two bishops and two Victoria Crosses in the previous 45 years, and never thought of having an 11-plus failure to put with that roll of honour.

I say, bring on more grammar schools if indeed you wish to have them, but please can we have a more proactive policy on what to do with the failures? I think that there is a category of failure that needs to be addressed because it is so serious that pupils in it should not be let loose without some special help. That is my great plea to you all.

I failed the 11-plus for one very simple reason—I could not read. It is very hard to pass an exam if you cannot read the exam paper. I could not read because we were bombed out in 1941, went to Chichester where there was no first school education at all, came back to London in 1945 and I was sent to a school that had been bombed, was overrun with rats and mice and had a cat in every classroom. I had a cat allergy that closed my eyes within five minutes of entering the classroom every day—so I could not read. Nobody did anything about that until they realised when I failed the exam that there was a problem. The people who then started to move on it—God bless them—were in Lewisham Borough Council, of whom we have a distinguished Member usually sitting on the Front Bench here. He thinks that I am paranoid about the behaviour of Lewisham councillors but I am paranoid only because they were clearly out to get me—and very nearly succeeded.

My father had a very difficult time coming back out of the Army. He got an officer’s rank and did not want to go back to his old career in the kitchen. He managed to find some local education connections for me, one of which was a private school which would take me for £18 a term, which was something like 60% of his salary in 1948. So it was a very generous move on his part. The schoolmaster who owned the place was a victim of the trenches in the First World War, and he was running a crammer for foreign students; we were the first school in England to take German students after the war. He had a special class for very backward children, which I certainly qualified to join, but he would not take anyone on until he had interviewed them first. He sat me down and said, “I see on the notes about you that you like to play chess”. I said, “Yes”. He said, “Will you play me?” I said, “Yes, sir”. So we sat down and he said, “Ten seconds a move”—and he lasted 12 minutes, by which time he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, I’ll take you”.

At this point, Woolwich borough council decided that this was still quite unacceptable and sent me to three secondary modern schools to be interviewed, all of which said, “He’ll slow everybody down—we can’t possibly have him”. This is my major concern with all this. Things get out of hand because people in official positions think that they must react in different ways. We must have a better code of practice for what to do about the children who are victims of failure. They then proceeded to serve a notice on my family to the extent that I was going to be deported to Australia. They started that process; they even went to court to get a court order for it. We got a young barrister—I think that it was about the first case that he had ever handled—who was still wearing his RAF uniform when he came in. My mother was always convinced that that was what convinced the lady magistrate; he looked so handsome that she had to let him win his case. It was overturned, so I did not go to Australia—but it was a very close-run thing.

Now, 70-odd years later, I have been chairman of 12 public companies and bodies and have somehow or other found my way into your Lordships’ House. I am 79 years old, so my comeback policy has probably hit the buffers and is not going to go any further—but I am satisfied with what I have got. One thing I leave with your Lordships is that we should please concentrate on what to do with the failures. It is not the clever-clogs who get to the grammar schools who worry me; they will be all right anyway. It is the failures we need to worry about. Let us have a proper policy for them and make that work.