I was lucky. I passed the 11-plus and was offered a place at a state grammar school. I don’t have any interest in rewriting that part of my history to fit a more convenient story about class or education. Going there gave me opportunities I might not otherwise have had, and I have absolutely no doubt that it helped my career.
I’ve had a successful career in technology and financial services. I’ve led teams, built products, managed people and found myself working in the City of London. Some of that journey began with passing an exam when I was eleven, and I am genuinely grateful for the opportunities that followed.
It is probably worth explaining what sort of school this was, because it belonged to a tradition that was already beginning to disappear even while I was there. Our teachers were Masters and Mistresses, and we rarely referred to them by name when speaking to them; it was always “Sir” or “Ma’am”, with the occasional “Miss”. They, in turn, generally referred to us by our surnames. In fact, we often referred to each other by our surnames too. I arrived only a couple of years after the school had finally abandoned Saturday morning lessons.
In our first year, we were still required to wear shorts and school caps during the summer. The school had its own cadet corps, who would march every Thursday around the area that most schools would probably have called the playground, but which to us was always The Quad. Several of the older Masters still taught wearing their academic gowns, with the last of them retiring only shortly before I left in 1994.
None of this seemed particularly remarkable to us at the time; it was simply how the place worked. Looking back, though, it says a great deal about the culture we entered as eleven-year-olds: formal, hierarchical, steeped in its own history and traditions, and very certain that there was a proper way for things — and people — to be.
But there was another education going on at the same time, and I’m still trying to unlearn parts of it.
Two ‘Classes’ in One
My memory of grammar school is that there were effectively two classes of pupil. Not officially, obviously. Nobody handed you a badge or sat you down and explained the hierarchy, but it was there.
There were the children from comfortably middle-class families who seemed to belong there naturally. They understood the environment and, perhaps more importantly, their parents understood it. They seemed comfortable talking to teachers, asking questions and expecting things. There was an assumption around them that they were going somewhere. They were the children who would lead, achieve and move on to bigger things.
Then there were the rest of us. We had passed exactly the same exam and earned exactly the same place at the school. We were supposedly evidence of the great meritocratic idea behind selective education: find academically able children, regardless of background, and give them an opportunity.
Except getting through the gate didn’t necessarily make you equal once you were inside.
Looking back, it sometimes felt as though some of us were being educated to lead while the rest of us were being educated to be useful to those who would. Study, work hard, behave yourself, get your qualifications and get a respectable job. Be reliable. Be productive. Don’t make too much trouble.
Be a good little drone.
I don’t remember anyone explicitly saying, “These boys are the leaders and you aren’t.” They didn’t need to. Children are extraordinarily good at learning the unwritten rules of a place, and I learned them.
The Outsider
I never really felt that I belonged to the world I had entered. That’s slightly odd because my background wasn’t at all bad or impoverished. My father was a local newspaper editor and was considered more capable than the owner’s son by members of the board, who would sometimes take him into their confidence instead. We weren’t living some grim caricature of working-class poverty, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
Nor was I without connections to the school itself. My paternal grandfather was an old boy who went on to become a skilled engineer. My uncle was a governor of the school, and my cousin attended it too. There was history there. In purely institutional terms, I had every reason to regard myself as belonging. And yet, somehow, I didn’t.
Class is much more complicated than the job your parents did or the amount of money coming into the house. It’s also expectations, confidence, language, connections, family history and an almost invisible understanding of how institutions work. Most importantly, I think it’s about whether you believe the room you’re standing in belongs to you just as much as it belongs to everyone else.
I didn’t.
I often felt like an outsider who had been allowed in, and that’s a very different thing from belonging. When you feel that way, you watch. You analyse people. You learn the rules and try not to do anything that might cause somebody to reconsider your admission.
Looking back through the work I’ve been doing in therapy, I can see how familiar that behaviour became. Be useful, be manageable, don’t cause trouble, don’t ask for too much and don’t give anyone a reason to reject you. None of those things started and ended at the school gates, but school certainly gave them somewhere to grow.
Two Classes in the Same Classroom
There was also something much more tangible behind that feeling of being an outsider. For all the talk of us having passed the same exam and earned the same place, we were not always treated as though we were the same kind of boys.
Teachers spoke differently to you depending, or so it seemed to me, on the class they perceived you to come from. The more traditionally middle-class boys were given a degree of attention, encouragement and latitude that wasn’t always extended to the rest of us. They seemed more likely to be given another chance when they got something wrong, extra help when they needed it, or simply the benefit of the doubt. There were teachers who had very obvious favourites, and those favourites had a remarkable tendency to come from the same sorts of backgrounds.
By the time we reached the sixth form, those differences became much harder to ignore because the school effectively put badges on them. The boys chosen as prefects, or awarded school “colours”, seemed overwhelmingly to come from those comfortably middle-class backgrounds.
These weren’t insignificant distinctions within the little society of a grammar school. They visibly marked out the boys the institution considered worthy of recognition, responsibility and status. Then there were the rest of us — the “normals“, as I think of us now — who might be perfectly capable, work hard and achieve academically, but apparently weren’t the sort of boys the school saw when it looked for its future leaders.
Perhaps nobody consciously intended to teach us a lesson about class through those decisions, but that was certainly the lesson I took from them. We had all passed the same entrance exam, but somewhere along the way it became clear that getting into the school and truly belonging to it were two rather different things.
If I Could Go Back
If I could go back and do those years again with the confidence and experience I have now, I think I would be considerably more troublesome. Not badly behaved, but much less willing to accept that because an adult was a teacher — or a Master or Mistress, as we called them — they were automatically right.
I would challenge some of them. I would call out the hypocrisy when I saw it and question why some boys were treated differently from others. And if class or background entered into it, I’d probably remind them that my own roots in that school went back generations: my grandfather was an old boy, other members of my family had attended, and my uncle sat on the governing board. I had every bit as much right to feel that the place belonged to me as the boys they appeared to regard as its natural heirs.
There are particular incidents I would handle very differently. The teacher who stood in front of a class shortly before our GCSEs and told us that he hoped we would all fail because that was all we deserved would be reported. At the time, he was a teacher and therefore an authority figure, so you absorbed it. Looking back as an adult, I find it an extraordinary thing for somebody entrusted with educating children to say to them. It wasn’t motivational tough love. It was unacceptable.
He’s long dead now, so the opportunity for a formal complaint has rather passed. If I knew where he was buried, though, I might be tempted to take my parents’ dog for a particularly well-hydrated walk in the vicinity.
I’m joking. Mostly.
The teacher who discussed me with other pupils would be reported too. Today we’d have language around confidentiality and data protection that wasn’t available to us in quite the same way then, but you don’t actually need legislation to understand the basic principle. A child should be able to trust that a teacher isn’t going to make them a subject of conversation with their peers. It was a breach of trust and, more importantly, ethically wrong. I wish the younger me had understood that he was allowed to object rather than simply assuming that if a teacher had done it, they must have been entitled to.
Then there was the Master who pulled me out and made an example of me in front of an entire year of the lower school because I’d walked the wrong way down a corridor to get something from my bag. What stayed with me wasn’t really the telling-off; it was watching the “better” boys walk past him doing much the same sort of thing without being questioned.
I accepted the humiliation because that was what you did. He was the Master and I was the boy who had apparently done something wrong. I’d love to meet him now. I don’t think I’d shout or lose my temper. I’d simply give him the dressing-down that eleven- or twelve-year-old me wasn’t equipped to give him, and ask him to explain why publicly humiliating one child while overlooking the behaviour of others seemed like an appropriate way for an educator to exercise authority.
That’s perhaps the biggest thing I would change. I wouldn’t try to become one of their preferred boys. I wouldn’t ask for special treatment, and I wouldn’t want to exchange places with anybody else. I’d simply insist on equal treatment. I’d ask questions. I’d complain when something was wrong. I’d tell my parents more. I’d understand that challenging an adult who was behaving badly wasn’t insolence, and that respect for authority didn’t require unquestioning submission to it.
Of course, that’s very easy for fifty-year-old me to say about a boy who didn’t yet have fifty years of experience behind him. He was doing what he’d learned to do: watch, understand the rules, keep his head down and get through it. I don’t blame him for that.
But if time travel ever becomes an option, there are a few Masters and Mistresses who are going to have a rather more difficult time with me the second time around.
The Grammar School Bargain
This is where my feelings about grammar school become complicated, because it worked. That’s the uncomfortable bit that prevents me from turning this into a simple story about grammar schools being good or bad.
I did get opportunities. I did get qualifications. I built a career that took me far beyond anything eleven-year-old me could possibly have imagined. The education helped me, the discipline helped me and learning how to analyse problems certainly helped me. I’ve made an entire career out of looking at complicated things, understanding how the pieces fit together and working out what needs to happen next.
So I can’t honestly say grammar school damaged me and leave it there. That would be far too simple. It gave me tools that changed my life, but I think some of those tools came with instructions I should have thrown away years ago.
Work hard, learn, use your abilities and make something of the opportunities you get. I’m quite happy to keep those lessons. The others — know your place, defer to the right people, don’t expect too much, don’t draw attention to yourself, prove your usefulness and never become a burden — have been considerably harder to get rid of.
Success Doesn’t Necessarily Fix Class
The particularly strange thing is that career success didn’t magically turn me into the person I thought successful people were supposed to become. I’ve earned good money, held senior positions and worked alongside extremely clever and successful people. None of that made the old class awareness disappear. If anything, sometimes it made the contradiction more obvious.
I could have the job title, salary and experience, and some part of me would still be the working-class grammar-school kid who had somehow wandered into the wrong room and was waiting for somebody to notice.
Perhaps that’s one reason I’ve retained such a strong identification with my working-class roots. I don’t particularly want to become the sort of comfortably middle-class person I once thought I was expected to become. I’m proud of where I came from.
What I would quite like to lose is the idea that being proud of where I came from means I should expect less from life. Those aren’t the same thing.
An Education I’m Still Finishing
Therapy has made me look again at a lot of the rules I’ve accumulated during my life. Some came from family, some from school, some from trauma and some probably came from nowhere more interesting than my own head. Over the years they became tangled together until they stopped feeling like beliefs and started feeling like facts.
Cope. Be useful. Don’t inconvenience anybody.
That’s a remarkably good recipe for producing someone who appears independent and capable. It’s also a remarkably good recipe for producing someone who finds it incredibly difficult to say that they need help, don’t know what to do, don’t want something or, perhaps most importantly, actually want something else.
That last one has become particularly interesting to me recently. I’m discovering how difficult I find the apparently simple question, “What do I want?” Not what is sensible. Not what other people expect. Not what causes the least inconvenience. Not what I’m supposed to want at my age or in my circumstances. Just what I want.
Perhaps that’s another part of my education that is still unfinished.
I don’t regret passing the 11-plus. I’m glad that eleven-year-old boy got his grammar-school place. He worked for it, he deserved it and it opened doors for him that might otherwise have remained closed. Some extraordinary things eventually came through those doors.
But I wish somebody had told him that passing through the same gate as everyone else didn’t mean he should spend the rest of his time being grateful simply to be there. He didn’t have to continually earn his right to take up space, and being given an opportunity didn’t create a lifelong debt of gratitude.
Most of all, I wish somebody had explained that education was supposed to expand the world available to him, not simply teach him where he fitted within it. Though I’m not sure he would have believed them.
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