2. Eltham Green in 1957

Bernard Barker

This is my school photograph, from about 1958. I'm wearing, of course, the school uniform, with the bottle green blazer, flannel shirt, grey pullover and official green tie. We wore short trousers until we were fourteen; the girls wore gym tunics until they switched to skirts for the GCE years. My wiry, untidy, ungovernable dark brown hair, inexpertly cut by my mother to avoid the song and dance my brother and I created at the barbers, became a trade mark. Other boys would enquire whether I was a toilet brush, standing the wrong way up, or whether I had been thrown through a hedge. 

I did not mind this very much because I always felt different in some indefinable way. Peculiar with my toilet brush hair, peculiar with my skinny build and dread of the showers, peculiar with my precocious eloquence, peculiar with my socks drooping from my long thin legs. I didn't like drinking the free milk with its thick creamy texture and was scared of the toilets, with reason as it turned out. 

I first visited EGS with my mother in the summer of 1957 for an admission interview. We lived outside the catchment area, so I was eligible for entry only because I had passed the eleven plus and Eltham Green had not recruited its quota of more able students. Although I was used to large buildings and large numbers (there were 45 in my final year class at Kidbrooke Park primary), I was impressed by my first glimpse of EGS. 

Unsure where to go, we entered the building through the steel and glass doors that led into the lower ground floor cloakrooms. 

Eltham Green School viewed from
the Middle Park Avenue entrance in 1988

We climbed the stairs to the office suite, where we met with Mrs Betts, the deputy headmistress, an austere, unsmiling woman whose brown eyes seemed to communicate the wisdom of good conduct. I remember talking about playing with my soldiers on the carpet at home and was embarrassed by this childish admission afterwards. But it made no difference, I was accepted and joined the school in September 1957.

The Assembly Hall 1956 (LMA)

On our first day the new girls and boys were assembled in the Hall to be sorted into classes. Our names were called, in ascending order of presumed ability (i.e. 1CX first). We followed our form tutors in neat crocodile lines, apprehensive youngsters wondering what was to come. 

The Headmaster, at first invisible, was R.H. Davies, M.Sc., who had moved south from Sheffield City Grammar School in 1956. His challenge was to open a new comprehensive school to serve the full 11 - 18 age and ability range. He had few models on which to build, so chose an essential structure based on his experience in grammar schools. The 2000+ students were placed in forms, streams and sets (e.g. A1, B3, C4) with twice-yearly examinations in every subject providing opportunities to rise and fall.  

We were also assigned mixed age tutorial groups within a house system, each named for a virtue, with the first letters spelling out ELTHAM G(reen) S(chool). The houses were:

Endeavour

Loyalty

Truthfulness

Honesty

Ambition

Modesty

Generosity

Sincerity

Your house was selected according to the first letter of your family name. B for Barker placed me under Mr Sidney Buckley in Endeavour House.  

Copying Timetables on the First Day 1957 (LMA)

We were not aware of the 1950s education policy context to which we belonged. But it shaped our lives, whether we knew it or not. The school leaving age remained at 15 throughout our time at EGS, with a significant cohort departing for work without qualifications while the rest ploughed on with examination courses. 

The General Certificate of Education (GCE) examination, against which our school's success was judged, aimed at about 20% of the ability range. There were no credible examinations for the remaining 80% of pupils, beyond the vocational certificates offered by the Royal Society of Arts and City and Guilds. Only 118,000 students were at university in 1962, compared with over two million in 2013.

Florence Horsbrugh
Conservative Minister
of Education 1951 - 54

Grammar schools dominated secondary education in London throughout our time, with the result that Eltham Green always struggled to achieve a balanced ability profile. Nearby Eltham Hill, a selective girls' school, also had a negative impact on the gender balance at EGS. Nationally, comprehensive reorganisation was not encouraged until 1965 and was not fully developed until the 1970s.

Eltham Green in 1957 promised equal opportunities for all but the entire education system was organised quite deliberately and purposefully around inequality and unfairness.