The Comprehensive System and Its Aims
The comprehensive system replaced the tripartite system in most of England and Wales from 1965 onwards, following government guidance, Circular 10/65, encouraging local authorities to reorganise secondary education.
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Method
- Name the guidance that triggered the shift: Circular 10/65, issued in 1965, which encouraged, but did not force, local authorities to reorganise into comprehensive schools.
- Explain what a comprehensive school is: a non-selective school that takes pupils of all abilities from its catchment area, with no eleven-plus exam.
- Apply the stated aims: removing the early, single-exam labelling of the tripartite system, offering genuine equality of opportunity, and allowing late developers to access the same curriculum as everyone else.
- Apply the criticism that internal selection can recreate the tripartite divide inside one building, for example through streaming or setting, which links to Lacey's differentiation and polarisation.
- Apply the criticism that catchment areas can produce social segregation between comprehensive schools, since house prices near a popular school tend to rise, making that school harder for lower-income families to access, even without an exam.
- Note that a genuinely comprehensive, fully non-selective system was never achieved nationally, since some local authorities retained grammar schools alongside comprehensives.
- For a 12-mark discuss question, weigh the case that comprehensives increased equality of opportunity against the case that streaming and catchment-area effects limit how far this was achieved, then reach a conclusion.
Worked example
Explain how the comprehensive system was intended to reduce the class inequality associated with the tripartite system, and give one reason this aim might not be fully achieved.
- State the intended mechanism: removing the eleven-plus exam removes the single early test whose result depended partly on cultural capital, so no pupil is sorted into a lower-status school at age eleven.
- Explain the expected benefit: pupils of all abilities are taught in the same school and can, in principle, be entered for the same qualifications and access the same subjects.
- State a reason this aim might not be fully achieved: comprehensive schools can still stream or set pupils internally, which can recreate a similar divide to the tripartite system inside a single school rather than between two separate schools.
- Give a second reason: catchment areas mean pupils near a popular, oversubscribed comprehensive school are more likely to get a place, and house prices near popular schools tend to be higher, so the school's intake can still be socially skewed by housing cost even without an entrance exam.
Practice questions
Try each question, then tap to reveal the answer.
Q1What guidance encouraged local authorities to reorganise into comprehensive schools?Show answer
Answer: Circular 10/65, issued in 1965.
Q2What is a comprehensive school?Show answer
Answer: A non-selective secondary school that admits pupils of all abilities from its catchment area, without an entrance exam.
Q3Give one stated aim of the comprehensive system.Show answer
Answer: To end the early labelling of pupils as grammar or secondary modern material at age eleven and provide equality of opportunity.
Q4Was the comprehensive system adopted by every local authority in England and Wales?Show answer
Answer: No - some local authorities retained grammar schools alongside comprehensive schools, so selection was not fully removed nationally.
Q5Give one way a comprehensive school could still practise selection internally.Show answer
Answer: Through streaming or setting pupils by ability once they are inside the school.
Q6Give one reason a comprehensive school's catchment area could still produce a socially unequal intake.Show answer
Answer: Housing near a popular, oversubscribed comprehensive school tends to be more expensive, so lower-income families may find it harder to live close enough to get a place.
Exam-style questions
Written in the style of a GCSE Sociology exam paper, with a full mark scheme.
Explain two aims of the comprehensive system of education.
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Explain two criticisms sociologists have made of how far the comprehensive system achieved equality of opportunity.
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Discuss the extent to which the comprehensive system has achieved greater equality of opportunity in education. (12 marks)
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