HEFFIELD will be comprehensive by 1970, according to Councillor Chris Price, deputy chairman of the Education Committee. In an interview with “The Star”, the local evening paper, he was quoted as saying: “I would like to see the 11-plus end before 1970 if possible. By then, I hope every grammar school in the area will have taken its place within a comprehensive system.” This time-schedule is much quicker than most people expected, and seems that Coun. Price, a teacher himself, has carried the Education Committee away from the normal gradualist approach. Diehard opposition, previously dormant, is now massing. Parents of ex-pupils and pupils of King Edward VII School, a school with 300 years of tradition, close links with Oxford and Cambridge, etc., etc., are forming an organisation which, it seems, will oppose comprehensive ‘schools as such. Even the local Tory Councillors accept the need for comprehensive schools (but want to retain grammar schools alongside them). This extremist organisation from Sheffield’s suburbias will probably involve one teacher from the school who described comprehensive schools, at the conference of Assistant Teachers, as “political interfer- | ence from people who are so unedu- | cated they don’t know any better.” The teachers at the school are more or less 100% against going comprehensive, and so are 90% of the 6th form, according to a census there. On the other hand, it is significant that there have been no real movements of the old pupils from the school against the scheme. Rather the reverse, in fact, a snap check by this writer of former pupils, many of whom are at university and college, having revealed that they are more or less evenly divided on the issue. These divisions are very important, for it is over the future of King Edward’s that the last-ditch battle will be fought before Sheffield goes fully comprehensive.
Steelworkers