Education Policy, Practice and the Professional

Jane Bates, Sue Lewis, Andy Pickard

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441120496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation physique

This introductory textbook explores education policy, looking at where we came from, where we are and where we are going. In this introduction to educational policy, practice and the professional, the authors focus first on historical policy from the state's first interventions in education through to Thatcherism, and Blair's Education, Education, Education. They then explore the key contemporary policies of recent times and offers a critique on how they have worked in practice, before moving to look at the hysteria that often surrounds education policy, with focus on media representation and the effects this has for the teaching profession. Commentaries and case studies are presented throughout providing an accessible link to what it was really like to learn, teach and live at the time the policy was in place. This title is an essential reading for all undergraduate education studies students.

Part I

Historical Perspectives

1

Policy Dawn 1837–1889

The Rise of Elementary Schooling and Teacher Professionalism

Chapter Outline

Introduction

The Historical Context: The Importance of Social Class

Policy Dawn: Elementary Education and Teacher Professionalism

Educational Policy and Teacher Professionalism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Educational Policy and Teacher Professionalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Summary

Introduction

The process of educational policy making, implementation and review is complex. At the policy-making stage key questions include:

• Who is involved in creating a particular policy?

• Does the language of a policy or policies reveal the assumptions, motivation and values of its originators?

• Does the policy have stated intentions and envisaged outcomes?

• How do the policy makers envisage their policy being implemented?

As educational policies are implemented they present a further set of questions:

• In what forms and with what manifestations does policy implementation occur?

• Are the meanings of these manifestations clear to all those responsible for implementation or are they ambiguous and contested?

• Does the implementation create further difficulties and dilemmas?

• Do those who are responsible for implementation acknowledge the value of a policy and assimilate it; or do they adapt it in ways which are different from the policy makers’ intentions; or are they indifferent or even resistant to its implementation?

And then almost invariably sooner or later policies are reviewed. This may happen in a formal sense: for example, as we shall see, it was nineteenth-century practice to sometimes review the implementation and operation of major educational policies by Royal Commission. More often policies are reviewed informally, being seen as inadequate to meet new needs as they arise. Again, policy review creates its own questions:

• Who has benefited from the implementation of a policy and how?

• What counts as success or failure?

• Have the intentions of the policy makers been met?

• Has a policy had unintended consequences?

• How are any unintended consequences explained and understood?

All of these policy-making, implementation and review questions challenged those responsible for making nineteenth-century policy as much as they do their successors today. History, however, adds its own special twist to trying to understand events in what has become a distant past. Historical contexts are not those of contemporary policy making. The historian, therefore, will attempt to describe what they think is the backdrop to the events they are describing. Inevitably, such descriptions are selective and shaped by the historian’s own preoccupations: they are never that ‘will of the wisp’ – ‘objective’. Yet they do have the great merit of drawing attention to the ways in which policies can never be divorced from the societies in which they sit.

The Historical Context: The Importance of Social Class

Social policy, such as that to do with education, does not happen in a vacuum: it is intimately linked to economic, social and political events. This chapter shows how the social history of the nineteenth century shaped educational policies of the time and affected the emerging teaching profession. In so doing, this chapter and those that follow, lie firmly in a tradition of writing about the history of education pioneered by A. E. Dobbs (1919) almost a century ago when he argued that progress in English education owed less to the zeal of its advocates than to changes in social structure with often no apparent connection with educational movements. The chapter is concerned with elementary schooling because that was the central preoccupation of the policy makers of the time. For much of the century, formal education for most children was an intermittent affair and largely over by the age of 12 years at the very latest. Schools were elementary rather than, in our modern terminology, ‘primary’ simply because higher, or secondary, education was restricted to a very small minority of children. Dobbs defined the elementary school as

a specialised instrument of training and instruction necessitated by industrial developments, which, dissolving the older forms of life, opened access to a more complex existence along a path beset with difficulties and requiring a higher degree of mental equipment than had sufficed in earlier times. (1919, p. viii)

This may be overly simple for modern scholarship, and the condescension to the past implicit in the phrase ‘a higher degree of mental equipment’ certainly grates, but as a positional starting point for what follows, it has considerable merit.

Historians deal in dates. In other words their stock in trade is to attach particular significance to particular years. What counts as a significant year depends on the kind of history they are writing. It may be the coronation or death of a monarch, the outbreak of a major war or the peace treaty that brings a war to an end, or it may be an economic disaster such as a world slump. The chapter bookends here are located in years of industrial and political debate in order to underline the intimate embrace between educational policy and the experiences of social crisis.

Chartism

Why then 1837? In the two generations from the 1790s until the 1830s, British society underwent possibly the most rapid economic and social change in its history. It became neither fully urbanized nor fully industrialized (that happened in the second half of the century), but pre-industrial work patterns and their associated cultural formations were broken up. The heart of the earlier economy lay with the artisan trades, which were groups of men and women possessing particular skills and their own tools who retained considerable control over when and where they worked and when they relaxed and played. Population growth and economic difficulties made it impossible for many of these skilled tradespeople and the artisan trades societies into which they were organized to retain their old authority and independence.

The experience of rapid change led inevitably to a demand for political change which was deep seated enough to begin to redefine the relationship between the English state and its people. At the time, the state was profoundly undemocratic as we would understand democracy today. Few men and no women were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Day-to-day government still remained to a remarkable extent (to our eyes) in the hands of the monarch and his or her advisers in the Privy Council. The House of Lords remained hugely powerful and the major way in which ‘citizens’ sought to influence politics was by petitioning parliament or taking their protests on to the streets, or both.

By the 1790s, such old certainties were breaking down. The American War of Independence and the French Revolution combined with home-grown radicalism to let a different kind of democratic genie out of the bottle. For radicals, democracy was the entitlement of our shared humanity, rather than being vested in property ownership, and they promoted this idea through a myriad of pamphlets, radical newspapers and speeches to sometimes vast popular gatherings. Harried and repressed by an aristocratic state which could not countenance such a fundamental redefinition of democracy, it was nevertheless an idea which refused to die.

In 1837, these radical ideas crystallized around the Charter. Chartism was a diverse and diffuse movement with each locality having its own distinctive characteristics. However, the central features of Chartism included a working-class national leadership, a mass national participation, extensive means of promoting its ideas through radical newspapers and local and national meetings and, above all, a national political agenda on the six points of the Charter. They were:

• universal manhood suffrage

• a secret ballot

• annual parliaments

• payment of members of parliament

• constituencies of equal size

• abolition of the property qualification for MPs.

The response of the state was entirely predictable. Troops were used to suppress Chartist demonstrations and ringleaders were imprisoned, transported or occasionally hung. By 1840, it was becoming clear to some Chartist leaders that the government was unlikely to concede directly to their demands, and some began to advocate what has been termed ‘knowledge Chartism’, that is, the building of Chartist schools and other means of spreading radical ideas to ensure that the new ideas around democracy took root for future generations.

In 1848, popular political Chartism held its last hurrah with a meeting of some 50,000 to 100,000 people on Kennington Common near London. A petition with five million signatures (although possibly only two million were genuine) was presented to parliament and totally ignored. Activity continued throughout the summer but by the end of the year it was clear that Chartism as a mass movement was over, although not the democratic ideal it had fostered.

Why is radicalism generally and Chartism in particular so central to our understanding of educational policy making in the period? The answer to this question lies in the role education plays in society and politics. Just as individuals sometimes see education as a way of fostering their well-being, modern governments invest in education in order to achieve progress, as they see it, for a society as a whole. This was not a point of view to which English governments subscribed before the 1830s, but the Chartists did. They built on working-class traditions of self-education to redefine the role of education broadly and to help bring about the transformation of the relationship between the state and its citizens into a democratic form.

The presence of these self-generated working-class forms of education are now well documented by historians. John Harrison’s (1963) early work on adult education was followed by further studies including that by Thomas Laqueur (1976) which even reclaimed the Sunday school as essentially a working-class creation. Thus it becomes problematic to see state educational policy as simple altruism: to some extent state interest in elementary schooling in the 1830s and 1840s was a policy of replacing emergent popular educational institutions with those that policy makers found more congenial. As we shall see this is not an unfamiliar story in the history of educational policy making.

The Strike

If 1837, the year of the Charter, is now explained as the appropriate beginning for this chapter, why does it close in 1889? The ‘defeat’ of Chartism was followed by a decade of relative social quiescence variously described as the age of consensus, the high Victorian years or the age of equipoise. There were still moments of local working-class protest, some of it highly organized, and the upper and middle classes continued to be exercised by the pernicious effects, as they saw it, of poverty, but there was no mass challenge to the legitimacy of the aristocratic state.

By the 1860s, agitation for an extension of male suffrage reappeared and there was a limited extension of the franchise in 1867, although the right to vote was still tied to property. By the 1870s, women, too, were beginning to agitate for political rights, but it was the onset of a major economic depression in the 1870s which lasted for 20 years and which renewed radicalism. Of course, the world of the 1880s was very different from that of the 1830s. In place of a largely rural population with scattered towns and occasional large cities, England was now thoroughly urbanized. Eighty per cent of the population was now ubiquitously categorized as ‘working class’ and they, together with a vast army of lower-middle-class clerks serving the rapidly expanding commercial enterprises, dominated the late Victorian cities. There was also a renewed popular appetite for discussion of all kinds of ideas, scientific, religious and philosophical, as well as political. Socialist societies in a number of forms appeared to question the current social, economic and political arrangements of contemporary society. The renewal of radical ideas and economic depression came together quite startlingly in 1889 in the Great Dock Strike.

The strike was the single most important event in labour history in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the time, London was the greatest port in the world with ships from all over the world loading and unloading goods to meet the insatiable needs of British industrial, commercial and imperial power. All of this activity was serviced by an army of casual workers who were employed on a daily or even hourly basis as was required and then laid off as the docks became idle. By 1889, some of these men, aided and abetted by representatives from skilled unions, had organized themselves into the Dockers’ Union. In June they struck, demanding sixpence per hour – the Dockers’ ‘silver orb’. The strike was long and bitter and after 6 weeks it looked as if the men might be forced back to work. Their cause was rescued by sympathetic unions in Australia who sent £30,000 in gold for the union coffers. It was enough: the dock owners capitulated to union demands. Symbolically the strike was very important. The alliance of skilled and unskilled workers was achieved in the face of the huge fissure between those whose skills could promise regular employment and the casual poor whose lives were ones of continual struggle and uncertainty.

The relationship between all of this and educational policy making remains to be explored, but in very general terms, an educational system created around the belief that its users came from dissolute and possibly revolutionary homes would no longer serve, as policy makers contemplated the arrival of the twentieth century. A mature working class busy creating trades unions and independent political agencies required different kinds of educational policies.

Policy Dawn: Elementary Education and Teacher Professionalism

This chapter has argued thus far that educational policies cannot be understood if divorced from their historical context and that the most important political contextual feature of the nineteenth century was the emergence of the working class. This is not to say that education was not profoundly influenced by other agencies. The churches and their denominational rivalries were clearly central to the building and maintenance of the schools and the shaping of the curriculum. The responses of the children who attended elementary schools and the parents who sent them there helped to determine the quality of education. Educational policy, however, has a narrower focus. It is produced by politicians, administrators and those who seek to influence them with the purpose of shaping future society. It is therefore about what ends matter most at the time and the means deemed best suited to achieve these ends. This section therefore examines the motivations of those most active in mid-nineteenth-century policy making and the policy outcomes of their endeavours.

Educational policy making really begins in 1839. Prior to that, the state restricted its activities to episodic efforts to support the work of the religious societies who were building schools for working-class children. By 1839 this support took the form of an annual parliamentary grant. However, by 1839 it was also becoming clear that an administrative system was required to oversee this expenditure. Modern cabinet government, whereby the Prime Minister chairs meetings of the great ministers of state, had yet to emerge. Instead, executive government remained in the hands of the Privy Council who constitutionally had the job of advising the monarch in the running of the nation’s affairs. Education required running, and so the Committee of the Privy Council on Education was set up to do the job.

The first secretary to the new committee was James Kay Shuttleworth. As plain Dr James Kay, he had written an influential report in 1834 on the poor of Manchester. An enthusiastic believer in the power of the state to assist those in civil society active in social reform, Kay Shuttleworth’s first task was to appoint two men to the new post of Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI) of Schools. Their role was to inspect schools in receipt of government grants and then to present their findings in an annual report to the Education Committee. Neither of the first two appointments was a conspicuous success. Hugh Tremenheere, who inspected non- conformist schools, so outraged the school managers that he had to be moved to inspecting mines where it was felt he could do less damage. John Allen, his Anglican counterpart, regarded himself as a clergyman first and civil servant second. He insisted on sending his annual report to the Archbishop of Canterbury from whom Kay Shuttleworth had to retrieve it. Despite these early setbacks, the number of HMIs increased steadily through the 1840s and in effect, while continuing to insist on their quasi-independent status, became the major means by which government influenced educational practice for the next 150 years.

By 1840, therefore, educational policy making had delivered two essential principles which were to stand the test of time: the state had a role in fund...