Simply Smith

Whatever the outcome of Bradford's Review of Education one thing is certain, the structure of education in the Metropolitan District will change.

To some it will be the culmination of years of trying to persuade the education authority of the need to bring its three-tier system in line with the two-tier system that the rest of England, Scotland and Wales have been using since the end of the last century.

Indeed, some authorities have never wavered from the Primary and Secondary system of education that has been the envy of most of the world. For the life of me, in my professional opinion, I could not understand why a few misguided authorities decided that First, Middle and Upper was a good idea.

The old two-tier system had served our children well for decades and, for those authorities retaining it, continued to do so. I suppose that Bradford wanted to feel itself in the vanguard of progressive educational thinking. Unfortunately, it was not well thought out at the beginning, it continued to be the subject of constant reappraisal and was finally seen to be what it always was: a hybrid that pleased neither progressives nor traditionalists.

A principal problem that haunted the system from day one was that no two Middle Schools were remotely the same. The Middle School ethos was a fiction.

It tended to create schools whose identities depended largely on historical factors. Many of them retained the Primary School structure until 11+ and then switched to a subject orientated time-table.

The other problem was that, once initiated, the three-tier system was always going to be an expensive one to exit. The advent of the National Curriculum sounded its death knell. While the rest of the country fitted well into the structure of the National Curriculum those with a system like Bradford's found it increasingly inconvenient to square the national circle.

Many parents on the authority's geographical fringe found the move to adjacent two-tier authorites engagingly appealing. The result was that Bradford found itself starved of a significant number of middle class, well-motivated children that might have improved its ratings in the National Schools League.

I'm not saying by any means that the standard of teaching in Bradford's First, Middle and Upper schools was any different to that which might be found in other authorities. What I am saying is that parental perception of the situation was such that when schools found themselves struggling in the League it was easy to blame the three-tier structure and other factors might have been fatally ignored.

Whatever the outcome of the review things will change. Whether they will be for the better has to be for posterity to assess. One thing is certain, though, if some Bradford schools again fail to assert themselves determinants other than simply organisational factors will have to be examined. The winners from this exercise can only be the children. They will re-enter the mainstream of educational practise: Primary and Secondary.

A fact that will enable those teaching and those taught to benefit from a National Curriculum geared to a two-tier structure.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.