Maureen O'Connor

Beyond the classroom

The outline of a new structure for post school education is now about complete. Assuming that the report of the Russell committee proves acceptable to the government, and there seems no reason in view of the extreme modesty of its proposals why it should not, the Conservative blueprint for the next ten years is fairly clear. Saving an act of God or other intervention, we are to have a steady expansion of places in higher education, a contraction of teacher training places, a new qualification for the sixth form leaver who, for some reason not yet made clear, might not want to go all out for a degree, and a doubling in the numbers of students in adult education. Except for changes in the function of some of the colleges of education, the basic structure is to remain the same. Radical change there is none, nor any real recognition that there may be social changes already at work which could make nonsense of the whole edifice of higher, further and adult education as we know it.

AREAS OF NEGLECT

Victorian classroom. She finally left to take up a post in the sort of pleasant suburban school where she had done her teaching practice.

WOMEN'S LIB AND THE COLLEGES

If they are looking for a battle ground Womens Lib could do worse than launch an attack on further education. It is here, rather than in the higher or lower reaches of the educational system, that the emancipation of women has furthest to go.

Three into two won't go

We are stuck, it would seem, for the time being at any rate, with the binary system, the great divide in higher education which, for all the efforts of the CNAA and the polytechnics themselves, seems as unbridgeable in the essential respect of status as was the gulf between the grammar and the secondary modern schools which prompted the comprehensive revolution. This divide can obviously have an adverse effect on the students who find themselves forced on to the wrong side of it, but it is of even greater significance to the staff who have to spend the whole of their working lives in a system which stratifies and classifies their efforts and relentlessly awards less than full marks to any institution which is not able to call itself a university.