Antonia Forest fans

I wonder whether the Tutorial Fifth is the equivalent form for the Fifths? I'm not sure even AF was entirely clear as to how many forms there were - you don't seem to see Middle Remove in the Cricket Cup, for example, though that could just be because they were too delicate to play.

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occasionalhope.livejournal.com

I think Tutorial Fifth were retaking their O levels, having failed them first time round, whereas the Removes were more, as it were, precautionary - a chance every few years to catch up to the year's expected standard before failing.

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Yes, that makes sense - thanks!

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Didn't have them, but they appear in various public school fiction and factual books.
They tend to be sort of temporary remedial classes for certain years, so as the Third is the start of middle school, it makes sense to have a Remove form to ensure everyone is up for it by Christmas. (I seem to recall a Remedial Fifth for those resitting O-levels?)

Other schools (The Shadow Guests, author escapes me) had naming systems like Junior, Transition, Remove, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Shell, Lower and Upper Sixth (as the headmaster patronisingly explains, Shell is from the French eschelle, meaning ladder. Obviously.)

Outside exam years, public schools tended to be very unfussy about when students moved up a form ('got their remove') - if you were felt to be at the standard for the Fourth at Christmas, up you'd go, removed from the Third.

AF explains Third Remove as for those who are behind because of being 'backward, delicate, or plain stupid' and the form doesn't exist after Christmas - the more dim members are in IIIB.
I imagine Kingscote kept anyone who could pay the fees, but my boarding school certainly started pressuring parents to 'find somewhere more suitable for your daughter' by 4th year if they weren't going to get 8-9 A-C grade GCSEs, and refused several people entry to the 6th form.
All the Kingscote girls were encouraged to be all-rounders and develop non-academic talents, but they were all also expected to do the academics (proper upper-middle-class education!)

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helixaspersa.livejournal.com

There's an alternative story about the etymology of upper shell / lower shell etc for public school forms. In the main hall at Westminster School there's a large shell emblem at one end; originally all the teaching took place in this hall, with different forms in different parts of it, and I've heard it said that this is the origin of the term, which then spread to other schools. Though tbh the French idea sounds fairly likely too. At Westminster the 4th and 5th year (years 10 and 11, first and second year GCSE) are the 'lower' and 'upper shell' respectively; the U6 is the Remove as mentioned below.

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ex-lizzzar998.livejournal.com

I think I do remember that Third Remove was intended to be a sort of temporary coaching form, but I'd have to re-read the book and check. Many larger girls' schools, like Sherborne, used to have three or four streams until sixth form, and it just depends on the organization. Kingscote seems to be slightly smaller, generally with just two streams, but it might enlarge to three at stages considered to be particularly important. The ban on netball appears to be related to a feeling that those in need of coaching are more likely to be delicate, but perhaps also indicates that they need to concentrate to their studies to the exclusion of most other things. Remove seems to be a common name for transitional forms in public schools. The upper sixth at Westminster School is called the Remove, although the whole form is called that and it has nothing to do with special coaching.

From: (Anonymous)

In End of term, it says Nicola moved into 3A after Christmas, then Tim and Lawrie at Easter. Presumably the rest of the form moved into 3A or 3B at some point. Perhaps there was no 3rd Remove by the summer term?

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res23.livejournal.com

Yes it always puzzled me too. I assumed that it was some kind of 'catch-up' form, rather than streaming, otherwise girls wouldn't jump from the remove forms back into the A-stream, as Nick and Lawrie did from Third Remove, or Ginty did from Middle Remove after a term in it following her half a term absence after the lighthouse stuff.

I don't quite get how it worked, though. I guess lots of individual attention, perhaps, and maybe a lot more prep, rather than concentrating on outside activities like netball or whatever. And maybe fewer other subjects, with more concentration on the basics, although third remove seemed to do pretty much everything. Perhaps just more allowance for 'patchy' knowledge and attempts to fill in the gaps.

Still, if the A-forms were learning all new stuff that term too, at a great pace, it must have been very difficult to both catch up, and to learn enough of the new stuff to then fit in with them the next term. Again I'm thinking specially of things like maths and science, where learning is quite sequential, and based on previous work.

I never did understand how it worked in St Clares and so on either, when girls seemed to move up to the next form at all kinds of random times, and I couldn't see how that would work with subjects like maths and science, when you need to know the lower level material before doing the higher level stuff. Even for the more topic based subjects like history or geography or English, presumably the eventual exams covered particular topics that would have needed to be covered some time, and jumping around forms like that would result in missing some and doing others twice. Or maybe it wasn't so syllabus based, and there were just end of term exams that covered material done in that term. And while you might have been expected to have a good grasp of history by the time you'd left, nobody would necessarily ever know whether you had studied a particular bit of it or not.

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richenda.livejournal.com

<<<<I guess lots of individual attention, perhaps, and maybe a lot more prep, rather than concentrating on outside activities like netball or whatever Yes - wouldn't the "no netball" be more to do with catching up with academic work than with delicacy - but then it would get association with poor health as the reason for needing to catch up?

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smellingbottle.livejournal.com

I have to say, I've always assumed Enid Blyton was making no attempt whatsoever to be plausible in terms of when she moved people about between forms, but was availing of novelistic licence. I mean, don't Darrell Rivers and the O'Sullivan twins both start in the first form, but are surrounded by girls, also first formers, who nonetheless appear not to be new to the school? Then they all move up to second form at the same time...

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And they're fourteen at the start, but then go through at least six years of education; and the Sixth can't be intended as a finishing education, because they then go on to university, mostly at St. Andrews for some reason.

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Being fourteen makes sense for transferring to boarding school after a prep school - I wonder if Blyton was pressured to refer to forms as First to Sixth in order to make more sense to her readers, most of whom would be transferring to secondary school after the 11+ ?

I figured Darrell and the O'Sullivans both started a term late, except the twins then spend 3 terms in the first form, so that doesn't actually work either.

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tosomja.livejournal.com

I think Enid Blyton wasn't concerned at all with chronology - I remember once as a child adding up how old the Famous Five would be if they had 3 adventures a year (one each school holiday as they were all at boarding school) and they should have been approaching their 20s by the end, yet they hardly seem to age at all. They were stuck in a sort of timeless zone. She probably would have done the same thing to Darrell if it hadn't been for the way that schools have a natural chronology and so children have to grow up. I also remember reading once in a biography of Blyton that she wrote her books amazingly fast and didn't proof read, and nor, really, did anyone else. There were examples like the cook in the Famous Five series who is called various names through the series e.g. Joan, Joanne, Joanna (this is from memory so I'm not sure) and also cats which change gender almost from page to page.

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I started reading the Famous Five when I was six or so, and soon was demanding to have similar amount of freedom to the Five (Anne was ten, Dick and George eleven, and Julian 12 or 13, and they could go off cycling anywhere and even go on camping holidays for weeks on end!)

My parents just told me they weren't realistic. I then realised the Five never went to the loo either, and figured for once my parents might have a point. :(
I'm assuming parents didn't let eleven-year-olds go off on holiday by themselves, even in the 1950s...

From: (Anonymous)

I think Darrell is younger than the twins, but Malory Towers has at least one form split over 2 years - unless Lower and Upper Fourth are A and B forms.

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They had Lower and Upper Sixth, which seemed like ordinary sixth form - was never sure about the Fourths, but only Upper Fourth seemed to be taking School Cert, which suggests two years.

Blyton really isn't worth overanalysing. The Chalet School is even worse for chronology because EBD keeps referring to people's ages, names, relationships etc and still gets most of them wrong - at least EB doesn't pretend to care. AF's 'authorial time' was quite a good solution for someone wanting outside-school detail but without the effort of being a historian.

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coughingbear

Not sure it's appropriate to suggest anyone's 'overanalysing' - after all, plenty of people would think this whole community was about overanalysing Antonia Forest! Lots of us enjoy trying to work out an internal explanation for things, even if we know the author just made a mistake or didn't care.

Not that I am enough of a Blyton expert to attempt it in this case, though I'd note that one could easily be preparing for School Certificate in both Lower and Upper Fourths, each lasting a year - just as I worked towards O-levels in both fourth and fifth year at secondary school.

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Sorry, I wasn't implying you or anyone was overanalysing Blyton, just that there isn't generally enough substance there to come to conclusions about detail, unlike other school story authors (part of that is the age of audience the books are aimed at - it's not that being simpler is a bad thing!)

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Jennings was a series of books with quite a strict chronology but no ageing. Jennings is 10 in the first book, and goes through terms in order Winter-Spring-Summer-Winter-Spring-Summer ad infinitum, one book per term. He has his 11th birthday early in the series, but never any more.

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At the end of Chapter 4, Miss Cartwight explains to the class that being in Third Remove isn't a disgrace, because most of them have a reason why they're behind with their work. There were only 12 of them, of whom (canon) Hazel had missed last term with whooping cough, Elaine had missed a lot of school last year with brothers getting mumps (in quarantine presumably), Tim had travelled too much, the twins' education had been patchy and (non-canon)may have been home-schooled, Pomona had eccentric parents and she may have been home-schooled as well, etc.

Incidentally, I think there must be a Second Remove as well, because Marie says "I was form captain last year" - which seems a bit irrelevant really, as only 7 of the girls in the form were there last year.

[Quick quiz - without checking, name the 5 new girls in 3rd Remove that year.]

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res23.livejournal.com

Pomona, Tim, Nick, Lawrie, Elizabeth.

And now, also without looking, name the other seven...? (6 of them are easy, 1 of them gets mentioned only about once in all of Autumn Term! Though I did list them in the other thread a couple of days ago)

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Hazel something (as far as I can tell, she doesn't have a surname), Marie Dobson, Elaine Rees, Audrey Fudge, Jean Baker, Daphne Morris, and I'm totally blanking on the last one.

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res23.livejournal.com

well as far as I can tell, she only gets mentioned once, in the context of the play, and never again in the series, so it's not surprising if you can't remember her!

Actually I kept thinking that there must be a mistake, and that there should be another one that we keep hearing about, but I can't think of anyone, so this mysterious other girl must have been the 12th.

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She has a surname as well, so I suppose she must have been on the roll. (AF must have had a written form list, I think, or at least had a full list in her mind. My guess is that the mysterious **** appeared a bit more in earlier drafts, and all her other lines were cut in the multiple rewrites. By the same token, Hazel would have had a surname once, even if she lost it later!)

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tosomja.livejournal.com

That still doesn't explain how they manage to catch up with the A form unless they have extra lessons/homework etc, sounds like a tall order, to catch up with a term or more missed school whilst all the others in the A and B forms continued to learn and therefore presumably to get further ahead. It has to be said, that whilst Miss Cartwright says it's not a disgrace, it obviously is, since otherwise she wouldn't need to say that it wasn't, and the twins are definitely disgraced by it!
In addition, it is implied throughout Autumn Term that there is a certain dimness or willingness to follow amongst a few of the Third Remove, which doesn't bode well for their chance of catching up. It is quite a different approach to schools I attended though, where once you were in the bottom set you tended to settle in and be seen as needing extra help and easier work for most of your school career, rather than being spurred on to do extra work in order to catch up with the others. I suppose what Miss Cartwright is really saying is that it's not lack of ability which has meant they are in 3rd Remove, it's circumstances, and therefore they can catch up. But what if it was a problem with ability, I wonder? Would there ever be a hope of catching up?

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