The Dreaded 11+ Exam

Origins Some of this is similar to some content in Education success? What drives it? It's 'expectation' also by Clive Dalton

Back somewhere in history, an educational guru must have decided that the most effective way to teach kids was to stream them at an early age so they could be taught to suit their educational potential. So the 11+ was born and had a massive negative effect on thousands of lives over decades, and we Reeds Charity School (Church of England) kids suffered its effects severely. It was the biblical promise of the sheep being separated from the goats, and most of us at the Reeds school in my time there were culled!

I started school on my birthday in November 1939 so it was winter and war time. We all had a great time in the infants with Mrs Mary Forster, with our slates and styluses but soon replaced by awful bits of rough black board and chalk. Mrs F taught us how to write our letters and then to read, and parrot the first tables till we knew them by heart both forwards and backwards. It was war time of course, so we were never far from our gas masks in their brown carrying boxes with a string for a strap to carry over the shoulders. These were kept in the porch hung on pegs with all our winter clothing of coats, home knitted balaclava helmets, scarves and gloves.

We had frequent drills where we had to put the awful thing on, and see if we could suck to hold a sheet of paper on the end filter. It was always such a relief to get the horrible thing off.

Mrs F got the Rev W.J. (Daddy) Flower to come in regularly to talk to us, and tell how they used to pick tea in his time in Ceylon using a sprig of privet as a visual aid. He also ran Sunday School in the classroom each week that most of us were made to attend under sufferance.

Mary was a kind disciplinarian but things changed when we moved up beyond the red curtain that was pulled along to separate us after morning prayers into Jean Milburn’s junior class. Jean was a skilled user of the ruler on your held-out hand on demand or knuckles as she prowled around spotting faults. I wrote her a letter of thanks on her 90th birthday and got a lovely reply. I reminded her of a composition I wrote about going to the mart, where I commented on the amount of ‘clarts’. She corrected that to ‘mud’ which didn’t please me as any Bellingham lad knows the difference!

She was a very thorough teacher and we were competent writers with pen and ink by this time we moved into the seniors with Head Master Joe Lumley. Here my problems, and those of countless others started and would affect us all for the rest of our lives. It’s quite scary now thinking back over seven decades of what could have been in our lives from those early days with Joe and the dreaded 11+ exam.

A world renowned educationalist, Professor Ken Robinson, who also failed his 11+, describes the core of education being about ‘aspirations’ – both by the student and the teacher for the student. So streaming at any age, and certainly at age 11 is the worst thing you can do to a child. Failures are assumed to be dummies, and if taught like a dummy, how can you fail to believe you are a dummy and give up wanting to learn.

Three of us now Octogenarians can still remember the day of the 11+ exam. John McPhail and I sat together but David Armstrong was at the school allotment (probably for some misdemeanour knowing David), and Joe never sent anyone to get him when the papers arrived. So he know nothing about the exam. Not surprisingly like John and I, he failed!

Sending pupils to the allotment was a great way for Joe to lighten his teaching load, as he never went there. He left the supervision and teaching to the big lads in the last standard before they left at age 14. I remember these being Tom and Bill Forster, Bill and Cliff Charlton and Fenwick Daly. Tom Forster told me that he was so sick of being sent to the allotment that one day he told Joe he wasn’t going! Tom was a big lad so Joe probably accepted his decision.

Any teacher with aspirations for their pupils would have provided coaching before the exam, and the numbers passing would have been a feather in their cap? Not Joe for some reason.

We really learned nothing as we were taught nothing, and I’m sure it was Joe’s belief that none of us lads or lasses would ever be brain surgeons, so any great teaching effort was not worth it. We lads had a future of spreading muck on farms or hewing coal in Hareshaw pit, and the lasses would get work serving in shops or in service as skivvies.

Out of our cohort of about 8-10 pupils under Joe’s command, only Gilbert Nicholls passed the exam, but he was a very studious bright lad to start with, so he’d pass despite Joe’s efforts. No girls passed the exam, and Joan Forster, sister of Tom and Bill would be the only one who passed years ahead of us.

But to be fair, Joe made us fluent in the ten commandments and in singing, so to this day without hesitation I can render the first verses of ‘Nymphs and shepherds come away’, ‘There was an old Cooper who lived in Fife’ and ‘Jerusalem’. My favourite commandment is never to covert my neighbours ox nor his ass, and I’ve made sure I never did that.

There was a great status from going to Hexham Grammar School, and nobody need ask how you were doing. You had a uniform and you played rugby and cricket and you had proper gear! Joe used to send us for so-called sports with the big lads in charge to a field with deep rigs and furrows owned by Jackie Potts of the Fox and Hounds. We had a soccer and rugby ball and a cricket bat and stumps but just filled in time to keep out of class.

A few of the Bellingham exam-failed lads like my brother Geoff and Tommy Thompson went to the Tyndale High School (THS) in Hexham with Lawrence Dagg of the Hott farm, but it had closed by my day in 1946.

Only David Armstrong and I went on to fee-paying secondary schools in Newcastle, me staying with an aunt in Wylam. I sat an entrance exam for Skerry’s College which was a large Victorian four-story house in Eldon square, where as well as secondary they taught commercial subjects such as shorthand and typing. I failed the entrance exam but thankfully they had a special cram class for dummies (called General B), and I joined it to prepare for a Form 1 start. I hated the place but it crammed in what we needed to get a School Certificate and escape.

I often think what Joe Lumley cost my mother who went out to work to pay my train travel to and from school, then my books and then the fees over four years. She house cleaned for toffs and baked for Gertie Elliot at the Temperance hotel in the village. Never forgetting this was a massive motivation for me to learn!

It must have been an enormous blessing for North Tyne pupils when the Bellingham new Modern School was opened and the dreaded 11+ bit the dust. It had certainly done life-long damage in dictating the lives of so many young North Tyne kids, aided and abetted by unmotivated teachers who saw a country school as a great way for a quiet life.

Clive’s profile

Born 6 Noble Street, Bellingham 1934,
Reeds School 11+ exam - failed
Skerry’s College School Certificate
Daft Laddie - Reedsmouth farm Robert Allen, Demesne Farm Bob and Jack Beattie
Kirkley Hall Farm Institute Certificate - Premier Student
Kings College B.Sc.(Hons) Durham: Ph.D.(Wales)
Lecturer Leeds University School of Agriculture
Research scientist New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture
Author 20 scientific papers and 10 books.