Alida Baxter

Renowned London journalist and author

 

 

The State of State Education

Of the greatest problems we're facing nationwide in Britain to-day, only state education is running neck and neck with the NHS – debt, unemployment, crime, lack of housing, they all rank high amongst our worries, but free schooling, a part of British life we've considered our right for so much longer than a free health service, has been failing, for years, those whose lot it was designed to improve. And the effects are appalling, not only for individuals, but the economy.

The latest PISA (Programme for International Assessment) results have caused a furore, because they show how badly British pupils perform in essential subjects, but we already know.

The fact that young people may emerge at the end of the educational sausage machine equipped for nothing but attacking each other or old ladies is a far greater concern than the lack of jobs available to them, because they mayn't have the basic qualifications for any work whatsoever, and the qualifications they do have are often actually meaningless.

It ought to be no surprise, then, that proposed changes to A Level exams should have been widely publicised before this, or that English Literature should be at the head of the queue for a drastic revision that'll make those examinations far tougher. Comments on the decline in the standard of written English, and even the ability to read it, recur like a rash, swarming over print and other media; they're exchanged on the BBC's “Question Time”, where the state of our schools was debated and bemoaned in the week of the latest PISA findings, and where, only a few months earlier, opinion was split about pupils' English usage, with Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia, stating firmly there'd been a marked deterioration, while journalist Matthew Parris blithely declared all was fine. (Years before, on a similar programme, the benevolent Parris also eulogised “The News of the World”, though the paper was forced to close in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, so looking out of a blind eye and seeing no ships seems be a habit.)

In fact nothing's been fine about the general knowledge of our language amongst young people emerging from successive years of education for decades, and the results are the broken shards of it to be heard all around us to-day. Misuse and mispronunciation emerge from Radio 4 by the hour, and I shout at the radio, which ignores me. Aren't you taught anything, I shriek!

And the answer's no, not much, apparently, as according to the BBC's own reports the PISA figures (based on tests of fifteen year olds) may represent an understatement of the truly awful situation: a study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that from the age of sixteen, after leaving their classrooms, young adults in England have scored amongst the lowest results in the industrialised world, in both literacy and numeracy tests.

England came 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries, and we're the only country in the survey where results are going backwards, with the older sector of the population scoring better than the younger. Oh, no, really? The BBC may be surprised, but this was no surprise to me.

Of course it's not just literacy but mathematical standards that are indeed appalling, and there couldn't be a worse time for another huge problem with the English state educational system to be making end of the world headlines. But that's exactly what's happening: the lack of primary school availability is an ever-worsening crisis, and what will happen after that, if children can't even make a beginning by getting into a school?

Professor John Howson, senior research fellow at Oxford University , believes the shortage of places for five year olds to be “the biggest problem” facing schools in England , and according to the Local Government Association almost half of England 's school districts will have more pupils than places within two years. Meanwhile some embattled head teachers can hardly visualise that point, when they're up to their armpits already. Bob Garton, the head teacher of a school in Barking, for instance, told ITV news that playtimes and lunchtimes had to be staggered, and pupils could only fit in if they came at different times. There's talk of mobile classrooms, of children being taught in church halls, and even home schooled (by whom – people whose grammar and Maths are already giving researchers coronaries?).

With the lack of any place a looming nightmare for concerned families, those who want a choice are being driven to ever more devious methods, and such is the demand for a good school as opposed to an average one that newspapers carry reports of parents who rent a flat in an appropriate catchment area, and submit applications for plum places from that address, without ever actually moving from their real family home. So the commute is longer for the tots than the parents – so what?

And remember this fake-address quest for perfection is occurring at the already-squeezed primary school stage, when A levels are more than a decade over the horizon.

The zeal of the hyped-up perfectionists is as frightening as the laissez faire of those who don't care whether their offspring ever know the difference between an adverb and an equation; for even if the Bletchley Park tactics succeed, and a child enters the “right” school, the jockeying for pole position isn't over. I'd never even heard of mentoring for kids a few years ago, unless they had special needs, but now everyone seems to be at it, and the ones setting the agenda are the parents. There's a point at which this is nothing to do with education any more, and everything to do with competition: sessions with a good mentor cost a fortune, but are regarded as a necessity, and I've been told tales of six year olds with an out of school schedule so packed with extra tuition, gymnastics and music that they fall into bed at night more exhausted than someone of eighty home from a double-decker tea dance.

The current abysmal standard of literacy at one end of the scale, and the mania for the right mentor at any price at the other, are phenomena totally outside my experience, but a delightful radio programme reassured me that I'm not alone.

The actor Martin Jarvis and writer Christopher Matthew (both senior to me, but not by enough to brag about) revisited their childhood homes, in Norwood and Surrey respectively, and described the vividly remembered neighbours, friends and activities of the nineteen forties, when they were of primary age. School, taken for granted, was part of their very young lives, but no more than that – Martin Jarvis, devoted early to the “Just William” books, acted out being him or one of his band of “Outlaws”, and both boys ranged far over their home areas, and cycled for miles. In their free time, and long summer holidays, there was no mentoring, no regimentation of their prolific activities, yet both these intelligent, immensely articulate men later excelled. Martin Jarvis went to RADA, Christopher Matthew to Oxford , and their subsequent successes have given pleasure to countless fans.

I too had an excellent primary education, which I accepted as normal, and the only intrusion it made into my spare time was going to friends of my mother to practice on their piano, as music lessons were part of the curriculum, and attending the dance classes I begged my mother to pay for, because all the other girls went. Clear in my mind is the Headmistress querying a routine devised by one nine year old for an end of term concert, with innumerable cartwheels, splits and a can-can, and hearing it explained that the only place dancers could stand still was The Windmill. Her mummy had told her.

But having described my primary school elsewhere, it's about time to relate what Alida and her contemporaries did next, way back when. The system had faults, but low standards weren't amongst them.

Though to begin with (which at the time meant the 11 Plus) Alida did damn all. As so often in those days, I was ill and missed the exam. Not only the first time but the second – a little mentioned fact is that, to cater for anyone who'd been prevented from taking part in such a life-changing rite, there were two opportunities to sit it. But I missed them both.

There followed at my Primary School (St. George's, Hanover Square) an interview with my form mistress, who was so upset she virtually wailed at my mother, “But she is a grammar school child!” I should have been accompanying those of my classmates in the same category to the Greycoat Hospital School , a Church of England establishment like my primary (and these days with academy status).

But my mother wasn't as upset as she might have been, alarmed by the distance of the Greycoat from Soho . It was beyond Victoria , after all, and whilst we had been to Victoria and had a good idea where it was, the territory was strange and the thought of going there daily was daunting. To people in Soho , this was visiting a suburb! Admittedly the uniform was nice, and the school had a superb reputation, but still – Victoria? My form mistress wrung her hankie but, as yet, my mother wasn't too fussed.

The alternative we had to consider was something which I never see mentioned, when people talk now of the Secondary Moderns into which children were dumped, or the grammar schools which guaranteed them a better chance. There was actually a middle way, at least in my area, and that was something called a Central School.

This had a secondary modern, or commercial/technical stream, and a grammar school stream, running side by side. If you succeeded you rose; if you failed you sank.

St. Marylebone C. of E. School was at that time an example of this system, and it was in Marylebone High Street, near to Regents Park . A bus ride away, yes, but a short and well-known bus ride.

The school was a solid red brick Victorian building, with a long established history. There seems no doubt that it was originally founded in 1791, (the school's own website is surely to be trusted) but the internet (as so often) provides more accounts. Dig deep and there are references at that date to a Manor House of Tybourn (now Marylebone) and the fact that although it never seems to have been inhabited by the Earl of Oxford, his “noble collection of books and mss” were deposited in a library built for that purpose “which still remains in High Street, being incorporated in a house which is now a boarding school for young ladies”.

This isn't the only such reference. Reading , writing, music and the French language were all considered very desirable, and a boarding school in Marylebone run by a M. de la Mare was highly regarded.

No specific address for M. de la Mare's establishment is to be found, but references to a boarding school don't rule out St. Marylebone, or the Victorian image and description of it as a charity school which are also to be seen. Interestingly, it had long been felt in some quarters that all the good of daytime schooling for the poor could be undone when they returned to the poverty, disorder and even criminality of their homes, so private schools weren't the only ones who took boarders.

Knowing solely that we could at least get there, my mother took me to an interview with the Headmaster, really concerned for the first time only when we waited in what she was sure must be a lumber room, given the state of the desks. In fact some of the classrooms were in a deplorable state, compared to the glories I had left behind near Park Lane , and the uniform was a deadly bottle green, but the Headmaster was genial, and reassured my mother who, by now, distance or no distance, was beginning to be nervous about the loss of the Greycoat option. She nearly fainted when I was asked which authors I had read and actually admitted to Enid Blyton – my primary school mistress had warned me never to admit such a lapse. But the Headmaster told her that, to cover cases like mine, those who took the top six places in their class at the end of the first academic year were transferred to a grammar school.

In fact, neither I (who came third) nor anyone else was transferred, not even from the grammar level intake. And I had been deposited in the secondary modern gulag.

Happily, the teaching was excellent, and the teachers approachable and encouraging. But the pupils were another matter, whether I was amongst them or not. By the skin of her teeth, one of my closest friends from primary school was in the grammar stream first year (she'd taken the 11 plus, but wasn't the brightest bulb in the box), and she now refused to talk to me – the girls in that class regarded themselves as princesses, but it was a while before I learned why.

Meanwhile, Art and English remained the pleasure they'd always been, and I'd begun French years before, but now I was wallowing in Science. Secondary modern education was aimed at equipping us for the world of work, so we learned about electrical circuits and, oh joy, plumbing!

One of our closest family friends was a plumber, with a workshop in Carnaby Street . He had Victorian reference books with the most exquisite engravings, every line a warning about arsenic in wallpaper, or the dangers of gas lighting, and cesspits; I adored them because I liked being scared (unlike my mother, who simply wasn't scared of anything, and didn't unplug the television before she started repairing it with a screwdriver).

This kind of science, then, was a type I was already acquainted with, and lapped up. In my second year I lovingly drew diagrams of central heating systems, was seated next to a girl who became a good friend, liked all my teachers, and was actually happy.

We had a very pleasant English mistress, and in the dog days after exams and while we were waiting for our results, she was persuaded to read to us from a book that was making its illicit way too slowly around the class: we all dreaded leaving before we'd got our hands on it. I've never forgotten either its title (“The Horror of Abbots Grange”, to this day available on Kindle) or the fact that one of the bravest boys in the class, who'd been thrashed in front of all of us (an almost unbearable sight – remember this was a time of corporal punishment) sat in rapt tension, and begged for the reading to continue after the bell had gone.

That year I came second, and was amongst the top six finally transferred not to a grammar school but to the grammar school stream. But any idea that we'd be universally welcomed was dispelled almost immediately.

Not by our form mistress, who taught Art with unforgettable flair and had the same high expectations of everyone. But by most of our new classmates (understandably, they'd long since formed friendships which still had no admittance signs on them), and – far worse – some of the teachers. Of course we were there to work, and work harder than ever, but this latter group had a social grading system, of which a remark by the quisling Sports mistress was an example; in conversation with a master, while we strained through hurdling exercises, she remarked loudly that of course the girls from the grammar school stream had matured earlier than these others, who were expected to be as backward physically as they had been mentally. And she'd been the physical education teacher for the entire school's girls from the beginning! Small wonder the princesses had believed they were better than the common herd.

One of my favourite subjects, English, was now in the charge of a man who barked “Who are you?” at the moved-up group so loudly he made me jump out of my skin. He was given to strolling between the desks saying disdainfully, “Of course you don't study Latin, do you?” without ever offering to teach it to us, grammar stream or not. And his clear intent was that pupils should never get above themselves, or forget their lowly place. One particularly pretty girl had lately been discovered to need glasses, and when she attended a class without them he destroyed her, heaping odium on her vanity till she sobbed. I was good at his subject, but that wasn't the only reason he actually praised me: I was already plain and bespectacled, so I didn't need more degradation. I just kept my unswollen head down, and got on with my parsing, or writing innumerable Adverbial Clauses of time, manner and place.

But being plain wasn't always a guarantee of safety. Science lessons at this level were conducted in a huge laboratory, with only a limited number of seats beside the front benches, quickly taken by those who knew what they were in for; the rest of us made our way to forms which cluttered the back of the room. And quickly discovered, as the unknown master began scrawling on the blackboard in tiny, cramped writing that, from this distance, it was impossible to read a word. I stared, completely uncomprehending, as he muttered about things which had been learned the previous year: but not by me – there wasn't an electrical circuit or a central heating system in sight. He didn't introduce himself, he wasn't interested in the new pupils, his writing never grew larger or more readable, and the only reason I learned about refraction was that, for a short time, I managed to get a seat near the front.

Even this, though, didn't invariably work. The withering scorn he poured around him like acid was bound to splash me before long. I was so scared of him that I shook, and when he asked me to stand up and go through a calculation, my brain froze. “Look at her!” he jeered, “She can't make a calculation without moving her lips!”

I wasn't calculating, I was praying. I wanted God to strike me dead so I'd never have to see him again.

There is nothing new about contemplating suicide when you're still at school – Graham Greene famously admitted to having done so. And when I read now of the misery of some teenagers, I feel desperately sorry for them, and am grateful that it was really only one teacher who made me so wretched; I didn't have to deal with cyber bullying via email, Facebook or mobile. Outside the dreaded laboratory, I was safe.

In other classes, there were other victims, of someone else. The Maths mistress, I honestly believe, was brilliant but unhinged. One of the princesses (who were all gradually unbending) told me they'd hoped her horrific temper would be improved after her marriage, but that she was as bad as ever now, if not worse. She flew into rages, and beat boys around the head with weighty text books. (In this violence she wasn't alone, just given to it most often.)

She didn't hit the girls, but her screaming could be heard whole floors away. And I'm still amazed that someone with my undistinguished arithmetic should have managed to please her so much, simply because I understood and loved geometry. Along with the beauty of algebra, she taught me a great deal else, which would surface later in life at unexpected times: when I was in my early twenties, a boss asked me to create graphs showing the relative production rates of various company subsidiaries, and I drew huge charts without having to ask myself how. (Yes, nowadays computers can do that for you in a twinkling, but back then there was just the graph paper and the pen and the Indian ink.)

Another inspiring teacher, of a totally different type, was our History master. He was an unusual man who discussed centuries-old cruelties and the viciousness or wisdom of monarchs as though they were in that day's headlines, and because he expected extremely long and well researched essays, he gave us unusually long deadlines for their completion. He also had a habit of awarding ten perfect marks for work that fulfilled the criteria, whilst regarding that as the least you should do. If you'd uncovered little-known details, if you'd illustrated your work with your own facsimiles of crucial documents, burned in the oven to simulate age, you could get a mark of as much as ten plus four.

But looking back what astonishes me most isn't some idiosyncrasy of a particular teacher; no, the big question's how everything was packed into the school's curriculum. Apart from all the other conventional subjects, and Church, there was swimming, daily work in the gymnasium, and in the playground or the park (according to season) netball, rounders, tennis and hockey, while the boys played cricket or football.

In addition, one whole morning a week now was taken up by housecraft, for which we girls went to a separate location with a huge kitchen, where we learned to cook, and to create cakes and pastry even to-day's “Great British Bake Off” would accept – in the early rounds. There'd already been years of Needlework, and looming ahead in Fourth Year was the beginning of a course in shorthand and typing, all within the school day.

Before that, though, at the end of this grammar stream Third Year, came the summer exams and announcement of our results. Classes were large then (twentyfive or twentyeight pupils, or more, were typical) and at this different level I dropped out of the top six; I felt bad enough about that, but even worse when our form mistress asked those who had taken the first fourteen places to stand up. All girls; and she demanded icily how the boys could have allowed this to happen. None of us deserved congratulation, it was a complete disgrace.

To-day the fact that girls out-perform boys is a constantly aired topic, but the girls aren't the ones who are blamed. Yet we fourteen were made to feel wicked. Whichever way you look at it, telling girls that they'd virtually stolen their places was somewhat strange, but it was a different world.

From that point, though, I settled in and began to do better. If I didn't get on with a teacher, I usually discovered the others didn't, either. And close friendships were made, the old distinction might never have existed; we were all in this together. Memories flicker: Tennyson's “M'orte d'Arthur”, learned by heart and never forgotten; “Sohrab and Rustum”, of which I only recall its strange beauty (bear in mind, the poem consists of 892 lines of blank verse). History - the conditions in which women and children worked in Victorian coal mines. The Geography Mistress, given to requests that might have been better worded in a co-ed class: “Has everyone put their finger on Brest ?”

But for some it would be their last year. The school leaving age wasn't sixteen then, it was fifteen. And, strikingly, it wasn't only those who'd never done well who would go, it was some of the very best.

One unforgettable girl was invariably near the top in every subject. She was tall, with a lovely face and shining hair, her short nails and her shirt always immaculate. Yet she would leave without even completing a course in shorthand and typing. Our Art mistress said to her, “You're going to follow your sister?” And she said yes, she too was going to be a comptometer operator.

If she'd envisaged a future as a dress designer or an aeronautical engineer she couldn't have been more resolved, but comptometers were calculators, and what lay before her was a life of punching keys. You can find pictures of those machines on the internet, and references to the fact that they were operated by beautiful girls, which is rather like saying there are pretty girls at the check-out. There's even a quoted remark that being a comptometer operator had the same cachet as being an air hostess. No, it didn't; unless you'd never seen an aeroplane.

I can't imagine what it must have been like for teachers who saw promise like that girl's walking out of the school, but they had no power to stop it.

The horrible problem was money, and the fact that many families needed their children to start earning as soon as they could. Yet no-one talked about it.

When I was first at St. Marylebone, the Fifth Year – those staying beyond fifteen to take GCEs, though only at O level – was so tiny in number it could have been accommodated in a cupboard. But it had grown: my intake must have comprised far more teenagers with ambitions or hopes, no matter what their financial difficulties, because the Fifth Year grew so large it had to be split into two classes by the time I reached it. Some of us became prefects, but only those who excelled at sports could be Head Boy or Girl; I was amazed to become Vice Head Girl, and to be given a badge with the title to pin across my tie (God know what that little trophy would be worth on ebay these days).

But that was the happiest year of my school life, because we could choose our subjects, which implicitly meant choosing our teachers too. Four of us asked to study German, which meant taking the exam after about nine months tuition, from a standing start: none of us had had a German lesson in our lives, but we each had some acquaintance with the language – I'd spent holidays in German-speaking Switzerland since I was four, my closest friend had visited relatives in Austria, and the other two had family members who spoke German, although none of us used it at home. A clash in the curriculum meant that we couldn't also take French, after a minimum of five years of it (and in my case eight), but we were content with the loss, and wanted this other language: we were allowed our German classes, taught by a master I'd last seen in the secondary modern stream, and attacked them ravenously.

Meanwhile it wasn't only the History master asking for ever longer essays, but twentyfour pages was his minimum – easy, when we were writing about the Machiavellian Tudors. And English Literature required no more commitment to memory than usual. “Twelfth Night” was one of our set texts, and we were taken to a Regent's Park Open Air Theatre matinee that fuelled even more whispering about a strange four letter word hidden in it; only one girl knew what it meant, but she smiled mysteriously and wouldn't say.

There were commercial exams ahead, too, in shorthand and typing; subjects which were being taught by a new member of staff, a smiling, friendly young woman who carried us up to lightning speeds in our notebooks and on leaden, clattering, manual typewriters. It was considered that we needed those practical skills: an academic career wasn't envisaged for any of us.

At first. I was spending as long as I could every afternoon in the Art room, painting and painting and painting. And the form mistress (whose territory this had always been) asked if my mother could come and see her. They had a long talk, and I was asked how I felt about teaching Art; teaching as a career. It sounded amazing, until the hurdles were explained. You couldn't take A levels here at St. Marylebone – I'd have to go to another school for two years to sit them, before going on to college.

And the other school would require a whole new extensive uniform. Hearing that gave me a pain in my stomach.

Uniforms were supposed to rule out social distinctions, but the prohibitive cost made them as much of a problem for cash-strapped parents as the best trainers and the latest iPhone to-day: I remember a classmate being desperate in the cloakroom about her outgrown blazer, and telling me it could not be replaced.

And now we'd have to think about an entire fresh one? The sole suppliers of uniforms were the most expensive outfitters imaginable, and it had been enough of a struggle for my mother to get together what I'd needed for St. Marylebone. Already working day and night as a seamstress for a firm in Savile Row, she'd sewn almost all of it herself, only buying my tie and the woven badges for my blazer and beret. My aunt had knitted sweaters in the correct colours. How on earth could that be gone through, all over again? And there was another, even greater problem.

My mother was an Army officer's widow, part of whose small, inadequate pension was a minute amount for me which would cease when I was sixteen. She went to the Officers' Widows Association, to ask if the allowance could be continued until I'd sat A levels, and was told it could not. After the age of sixteen I should support myself.

I don't believe such a decision would be made now, in comparable circumstances: the Association, I'm sure, is a very fine and charitable organisation. But those were different times, and there were so many widows of men who'd been in the services, and so many children.

Yet I loved Art so much … It was years before my mother told me how desperate she'd have been if I'd set my heart on pursuing further studies; she'd simply not have known what to do. And almost as many years before an old school friend confided what her own situation had been. Her parents were divorced, her mother (like mine) already worked long hours, and the support her father was legally bound to pay for her similarly ceased at sixteen. Although she never usually saw him, she made a special trip to beg him to continue the money, so that she could go on with her education and sit A levels, and he too refused.

From to-day's perspective, what's most striking is that the word “university” was never mentioned to any of us.

All that worry, though, and in my case all of it pointless. My own ability to sabotage my life dealt with everything for me: just as at the time of the 11 Plus, I became ill. But these exams meant everything to me and I couldn't miss them, so I pretended nothing was wrong. My usual summer hay fever (for which, at that time, there was virtually no treatment) gave me all the appearance of 'flu, and I was just a bit quieter than usual. The first exams were managed, but by the time the last loomed I was so light headed and voiceless I walked in and out of the German viva without having been able to speak more than a few words. Of History I had no recollection. I gave in and went to our lovely GP, who took my temperature, looked at my throat, said, “My God!” and gave me the antibiotics which, if I'd had any sense whatsoever, I should have been taking all along.

I had come top in History that year, with marks of over ninety percent, and I longed to go to our History master and tell him what had happened, and ask if there was anything I could do, because I wondered dimly whether you could sit a GCE again. But there was no mention of any such possibility. We were all given the impression that you went through this door and it slammed behind you forever, and the History master wasn't as approachable as the Art mistress; I couldn't imagine knocking on the Staff Room door and asking to speak to him – it would have been unthinkable.

At the end of the term I would be going on holiday to Switzerland, but many of my contemporaries would leave school on Friday and start work on Monday, no matter how poor their pay. Initially dithering, when I got home again and found the news that I had indeed failed History and German, the decision seemed to be made. I took a job first in an incredibly snooty art dealer's, and then in an office, where the only criteria were my shorthand and typing speeds. I was ludicrously nervous, but at work people were pleased with you for just being punctual; they even took you out to smart bars at lunch time and paid compliments.

A little heartened, I went back to school (prize-giving day was coming up, and I'd been invited) and knocked on the Staff Room door for the first time in my life. And found some congenial people – I was wearing high heels and eye make up, no glasses (though I bumped into things) and no blazer over the figure I'd actually had a few years now – and teachers shook hands with me and said, “Well!” and the Art mistress smiled and smiled, and they talked about tea. But not the History master. He looked at me as though he'd never thought I could betray him and said, “You failed your GCE”. And I knew somehow there wasn't an explanation in the world he would have accepted. When I attended the prize-giving, I was loaded with so many goodies I shared things around amongst the others for a photographer from “The Marylebone Mercury” (then the local newspaper); but there was no prize for having come top in History. It was stripped from the awards.

Yet the education I'd had that far couldn't be spoiled, and left me with the habit of learning. It wasn't long before I discovered Evening Classes, which were incredibly cheap then, and allowed me to sketch or paint as much as I liked, and when I found this was also a way to take GCEs, I skipped through German and decided to add Spanish, getting the results that were now a purely personal satisfaction: I'd discovered how much I loved language. I read hugely, and I wasn't the only one trying to improve on what I'd got.

My closest friend from school was living in Vienna , where relatives were supporting her through a gruelling course; she spent her time crying in the lavatories and writing me letters which read, “You'd be so good at this, and I can't do it!” But she did do it, of course, and later married a Viennese, returning to England annually to see her family, and sometimes me. These days, she's incredibly well read in both the languages she uses, is at home in art galleries all over the world, and has a profound knowledge of classical music, having attended the Vienna State Opera since she first arrived in the city as a teenager, and had to queue all night for tickets.

I bumped into another friend a couple of years after leaving school, at a party: she'd just returned from an archaeological dig in the Middle East. And someone else was rumoured to have got into an art school – a rumour which proved correct: she still has exhibitions. The dumbest of us went into an Advertising Agency and quickly became an Account Executive; perhaps we won't go on with that.

As for me, I had a career (albeit a prosaic one) even before I became a full time writer. The shorthand and typing speeds and the general knowledge and the languages had all paid off: when my husband got a job in Germany, my boss asked me if I could commute.

I had taken A Level English (which at that time was split into two papers – Literature and Language) in a year, in my spare time, and when I sat it the examination required the study and memorisation of Chaucer in the original Middle English (the Prologue and one of the Tales), two Shakespeare plays, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, a Virginia Woolf novel, a volume of Katharine Mansfield short stories, and Dylan Thomas's “Under Milk Wood”.

It was the Language paper that came as a shock, because we'd been taught so much grammar in school I'd expected to find it easy, but now I had to learn about trochees (a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), spondees (the other way round) and the other units of poetic rhythm – just for starters.

My boss let me have time off to sit the papers and asked when I could take the exam again if I failed (which made me sigh, thinking of myself in my last term at school) but I got an A pass, and began buying the books I needed for A level German. There's plenty to like about eighteenth century drama, but not Goethe's “Egmont” or Lessing's “Minna von Barnhelm”, by me, and it was a relief to hear later from a friendly Bavarian that even Germans didn't find “Egmont” easy.

And then, when I'd been married a year and stopped studying, I started writing for fun. A literary agent had first urged me to write a book when I was nineteen, but he and a publisher had disagreed about the market I should aim at, the agent determined on adults and the publisher on children, and I'd decided if they didn't know how could I, and joined an amateur film unit.

But now it was a publisher himself who invited me to lunch, to discuss all the articles I'd had published, and being an author. You must have enormous energy in your twenties – I still had a full time job and a husband, who moved to Germany ahead of me for a position with an international company. But a book! An advance! A contract! I'd fly over to look at possible places to live, fly back for the working week, and write all night. When a house was found, I wrote madly, walked to the publisher's to hand in the manuscript, and bought my air ticket. As I was told later, it was unknown to go off like that without even seeing my editor about what I'd written. But I didn't know any better, and it had been difficult enough to get my boss to accept my departure.

So I lived in Germany, surrounded by thirtyeight miles of spindly trees, and gradually made friends, with whom I got drunk, swam and went to French classes (!), until it was best to come back – though not financially.

If I'd returned to the kind of position I'd been in when I received that first call from a publisher, I'd have had total security. But I wouldn't, and the mad variety of jobs I took to support myself were wonderful material for my third book; before I'd completed it I was also earning enough from journalism to become a writer for the rest of my working life.

So much else came with that: travelling, teaching, meeting fascinating people, and (late on) out of the blue being offered the chance to take an MA in Linguistics – but by then my little family needed too much attention to be left for any consistent number of hours every week.

How I would have loved it, though, as a parallel interest; and how some of my long-ago teachers would have loved it for me. Because, whichever way they went about it, what they wanted – and in most cases demanded – was that pupils should excel.

I'm not saying we should return to a system which allowed teachers to beat children, to hit them around the head, to throw chalk or blackboard dusters at them (all of which I witnessed) or to pour sarcasm on them till they wanted to die. But the standards they set are a different matter: there'd be a transformation if those were brought back, because we were expected, above all, to learn, and the examinations we sat were exacting, and had real worth.

We researched in libraries, we had to handwrite everything, but it's wrong to blame the internet because to-day some kids download, unread, masses of material. The internet can be, all in one, the resource that for us was made up by textbooks, maps, and other works of reference, and it's marvellous in that respect, but first and foremost young people have to understand and correctly use language, because without that key the whole world is locked against them. Lacking in comprehension, many of them do nothing, while others cheat.

It's the same with Maths: how can you deal with the subject when it becomes complex, if you've never mastered it when it was still simple?

And it's not only to-day's literacy and numeracy which I think warrant a hard look at the past: there's also the matter of health. There was so much physical exercise in our long-ago syllabus that to be overweight required real dedication, and I can only recall a couple of plump figures in the whole school.

All of this has to be addressed, and quickly, because the terrifying figures depict the majority of young people in England as illiterate, innumerate, and obese.

Of course there are excellent schools whose pupils don't fit that description, but there aren't enough of them – hence the hunt for good places, and the machinations of some parents.

Investigating all this, it was interesting for me to find recently just how desirable my old school now is. At St. Marylebone C. of E., as presently constituted, standards haven't diminished, they've risen: it has become a single sex girls' school, taking boys only in that sixth form which didn't exist in my time. It specialises in the Performing Arts, Maths and Computing, has been an academy since 2011, and is designated as a Specialist Art College . There is a new Arts and P.E. building with dance studios, changing rooms, music rooms, a sports hall, art rooms, and a myriad other facilities we'd have been awed by, and it has such a success rate that it's one of the most over-subscribed schools in London.

I can find no mention anywhere of the time it was a Central School – a category it has long left behind, like the extortionate outfitters which no longer exist, but were once the sole suppliers of the (unchanged) uniform. Everything about it seems to imply that all that was good has remained, and been built upon; it's impressive.

That's wonderful, of course, but if schools are over-subscribed it means there aren't enough of them, and we don't just need excellent schools, we need more schools full stop. From the top to the bottom, from the first days in a primary (where the lack is already a crisis) to the last in a sixth form (where the squeeze will be ever more evident as the years pass), the system needs more schools and more teachers.

If we don't create the buildings, and hire the motivated staff to put in them, state education in this country, already creaking, will splinter and cease to exist. We have to ensure that young people can read and write and add and subtract – they used to be able to do all that long before they entered secondary school. Now they stay longer in education than ever before, but the results make scary reading.

These are our future, and they are owed the start in life that good teaching can give them. I can remember what it was like to love learning – I still love the joy of a good new book or a new historical fact discovered – and wouldn't it be great if we could all take for granted that when pupils left school they'd been taught how to learn. Whatever they did later, it would be a gift they could use for the rest of their lives.

© Alida Baxter

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