Ian Hislop's School Rules - Season 1

This first programme looks at how both state and private sector schools dealt with religion and had differing ways of instilling morality and discipline in their students. It also shows how experimental education was a feature of schooling after the First World War with tales of liberal teachers and their revolutionary methods.

The thirties are often thought of as the Golden Age of English education, with well-mannered children happy to be taught by kind but firm teachers. Behind the image, Ian Hislop discovers an overcrowded, underfunded system dominated by Victorian thinking and, above all, the cane. Not surprising then, that in reaction the thirties saw a wave of progressive teaching methods, left-wing teachers and attacks on public school privilege. The culmination of this was the Butler Education Act of World War II and a battle with both Churchill and the Church of England to get it passed.

An examination of the shifts in educational policy from the fifties to the present day, from the post-war 11-plus exam, through the beginning of the comprehensive era, the transformation of public schools and the progressive educational methods of the 1960s and 1970s to today's market-led system. Includes an interview with Sir Rhodes Boyson who, as a school teacher in the 1950s, was part of a growing number of teachers who disagreed with the inequalities that the eleven-plus examinations fostered. 

As the move towards a fairer comprehensive system gathered momentum, `progressive educational methods' had taken hold by the mid-1960s. Hislop looks at the most notorious example of this in this period when, at the William Tyndale school in Islington, a cadre of six left-wing teachers presided over a junior school which descended into anarchy and scandal through radical teaching methods focusing on `freedom and the individual child'. The ensuing public enquiry resulted in the six teachers losing their jobs.