Schools: Admissions

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Puttnam (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Whips’ Office for allowing me to speak in the gap, and I promise that I will not delay the Minister for very long at all. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for raising this issue. It is interesting to note that over the almost 20 years that I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House, I typically follow the noble Lord in the speakers’ list for debates only to find that everything I wanted to say has already been said by him—sometimes to the consternation of my own Benches. We have been ad idem most of the time for many years.

The wonderful thing about being in this House is that you are able to look back at your own experiences and try to offer them for the future. I should like briefly to give the Minister a short, personal narrative. The day King George VI died, 6 February 1952, was the most important day of my life. It was the day I took the 11-plus exam. I was 10 years old, and indeed most children sat the exam at that age. I have never understood the extraordinary misnomer of 11-plus. I passed, so I got a cap and a blazer and, unlike almost all the other children at my primary school in north London, I went to a grammar school. I never saw my friends from primary school again. An extraordinary wall came down, with them on one side of it and me on the other, and I have never really fully recovered from that.

I am convinced that the only selection component involved in my passing the exam was the fact that my mother took herself off to Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road and bought a batch of old exam papers, which I was then required to go through. I vividly remember sitting in the exam room that day and seeing the absolute horror on the faces of the kids around me as the exam papers were turned over. At least I was familiar with what I was about to do.

I put it to the Minister that never can we go back to a system where life’s chances are determined irrevocably at the age of 10. I am here today because of that one day in 1952. As he was reminded yesterday in Oral Questions, the 1944 Education Act had two routes. It offered the opportunity for children to retake the 11-plus exam at the age of 13 or the opportunity to go to a technical college. There were no technical colleges and I think that only around half a dozen were ever built. I am sure that the statistics are held by the department, but I never knew a child to arrive at my grammar school having retaken and passed the 11-plus at 13 years old; it just did not happen. Effectively, my entire generation’s life chances were determined at the age of 10 or 11.

All I would ask the Minister to do is to remember this story. I have the privilege of sitting in the House of Lords because my mum got on the Tube and bought a batch of old exam papers in Foyles. That opportunity was not afforded to the other 30 children in my class.