Earl Marshal School: towards an inclusive education

For five years in the early 1990s, as the Conservative government attempted to drive through the new educational policies heralded by its Education Reform Act of 1988, a comprehensive school in Sheffield was the site of a bold experiment in progressive education. Located in a working-class, inner-city area, Earl Marshal School was ethnically highly diverse, with students from Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni and Caribbean families; white students made up less than 20 per cent of the student roll. With Chris Searle as headteacher from 1990 to 1995, these students, aged 11 to 16, were exposed to a very different kind of schooling from that envisaged by the government — with its newly introduced national curriculum, competitive league tables between schools and authoritarian system of inspections carried out through the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Instead, Searle refused to exclude students for misbehaviour; did not sheepishly follow the national curriculum; was not over-impressed by OFSTED; sought student democracy; and involved the local community in the affairs of the school. Inevitably, he drew fire from OFSTED, from other headteachers, from the local education authority (LEA) and even from David Blunkett, the Sheffield MP who from 1994 was Labour’s shadow secretary of state for education. In the end, they were able to unseat him, depriving Sheffield of the benefits of his ideas. The headteacher who opposed the permanent exclusion of students was himself, as he puts it, ‘permanently excluded’ from the job that he loved and lived for.