Educational Policy-making

A Study of Interest Groups and Parliament

Maurice Kogan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138487932
• eBook ISBN: 9781351040921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Originally published in 1975. This masterly study of policies and policy-makers in education opens up a major, and fascinating, area of public policy to analysis. In this book Professor Kogan draws together many of his previous findings to provide a searching examination and overview of education and its relationship both to government and to individuals and groups within the system. The result is not only a definitive statement on the making of educational policy, but a study of pressure groups; and in broader terms it is a commentary on the democratic efficiency of the British policymaking process both inside and outside Parliament.

The core of the book is an analysis of the main policies which were the major concerns of educational government between 1960 and 1974. This shows how the various interest groups in education differ in their attitudes and their ways of working; and provides both an intriguing insight into the historical development of education over this key period and a variety of personal views from the individuals who helped to shape this development.

Part I

INTRODUCTION AND POLICIES

Chapter 1

Purposes and Scope

This book shows how a major zone of public activity, the British education service, developed, confirmed and changed its policies between 1960 and 1974, and who were the main agents of change. The approach is essentially historical, but the analysis is also related to the more general assumptions of political science and sociology about the nature of interest groups, the nature of the parliamentary system and of the decision-making process.

So as to keep the study within reasonable bounds it does not refer to Scotland or Northern Ireland, nor to the development of scientific, sports or arts policies, all of which have been, at various times, within the domain of the Ministry of Education and the Department of Education and Science.

To undertake the task properly we should have begun far back in the origins of the public education system, perhaps in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead we have chosen the period from the time, in 1960, when David Eccles was in the middle of his second period as Minister, to the time when Margaret Thatcher ceased to be Secretary of State on 4 March 1974. Although selective within that relatively brief period, we have analysed all the ‘educational’ Parliamentary Questions (some eight thousand), debates, and records of proceedings of parliamentary committees from 1 June 1960 until Parliament dissolved in February 1974. We have seen twenty-two present or former MPs who were active in that period. Of this number, ten were or are ministers.

We interviewed the leaders of most of the main interest groups: the Association of Municipal Corporations (now the Association of Metropolitan Authorities), the County Councils’ Association (now the Association of County Councils), the Association of Education Committees, the Catholic Education Council, the Inner London Education Authority, the National Union of Teachers, the National Association of Schoolmasters, the Association of Assistant Mistresses, the Association of University Teachers, the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions, the Association of Teachers in Colleges and Departments of Education, the National Union of Students, and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals.

We also saw eight present or former officials in the Department of Education and Science and the National Foundation for Educational Research, officials in the Nuffield Foundation, five leading educational journalists, and representatives of the Confederation for the Advancement of State Education, the Advisory Centre for Education, the ILEA and the London Comprehensive Schools’ Association, the National Association of Governors and Managers, and the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics.

We have already acknowledged our debt to them in the Acknowledgements to this book.

Beyond these parliamentary sources and the interviews with some of the main actors, we checked on selected issues through the principal educational journals – The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Education – as well as in other weekly journals, particularly New Society, the New Statesman and the Spectator, as examples of the way the issues were presented to a relatively elite public. We looked at all the cuttings from The Times on educational matters from 1960 to 1974.

Other primary sources were used. We studied all the confidential education committee minutes from 1960 to 1973 of the AEC, CCA and AMC. We also looked at selected NUT papers. DES and UGC annual reports and copies of UGC quinquennial letters from 1946 to 1972 were consulted. The series of ministry and DES circulars was also analysed.

We made use of statements already collated by the author in his two brief books, The Politics of Education and County Hall [1], which give the perceptions of two former ministers and three chief education officers of what happened, and who helped it happen, in the education service within the 1960s.

METHODOLOGY

How usable are conclusions based on data such as these? There were many difficulties. We tried to see every parliamentarian who had been active in educational matters during our period, but we failed to get a full return because either many refused to see us, or we were unable to make sustained contact with them.¹ Most pleaded other commitments, although one former minister wrote, ‘Why, pray, should I help you with your money making?’ There is a general problem of making contact with MPs whose lack of secretarial and other facilities can make them unwittingly elusive. And they must feel themselves overworked by researchers and journalists. In spite of these limitations, however, MPs’ views of the processes and the main issues proved to be so consistent with each other that interviews began to produce a diminishing return, although every individual added at least one new nuance to what has been said before and, at a minimum, confirmed other impressions. We feel that our perception of the MP’s role in educational decision-making would not have been greatly extended if all interviews had been completed.

But the main systematic difficulty was not in tracing the main policies, which can be identified from printed sources, nor in tracing the actions of the interest groups. It was rather in determining relationships between interest groups; in seeing who impacted on whom and with what effect; in identifying those who made the decisions; in short, the process of policy formation. And this is why the interviews were essential although they needed to be supplemented by careful reading of evidence to parliamentary committees and the like. Many of the interviewees were concerned only with one particular area in education or had been involved during only one period. The main actors are busy men who have often been long away from the main events. Many could not have answered many of the questions of a structured interview. So the best we could do was to get intensities of feeling about what the main issues were and with whom they interacted by using free responses to some twelve key questions.

The best way of checking interviewees’ perceptions might have been inspection of files. It was certainly helpful and illuminating to see confidential minutes of meetings of the AEC, AMC and CCA committee minutes. But even that might not give the full picture. Officials do not disclose, even on official files, who or what influenced them in a course of action. And, in any event, the ministry and DES files of our period will not be open for research scrutiny for many years.

We have not been able to look fully at the relationship between central policy-making and the enormous change and drive deriving from local educational politics and administration except when it came through clearly from the central figures we interviewed. Fortunately, however, some of this is being tackled in Professor Myron Atkin’s book which we hope to see published shortly after this volume.

This book is not, therefore, exhaustive in its evidence but it attempts to open up the field.

THE ARGUMENT

This book uses an orthodox model of the policy formation process and follows four main lines of description and analysis. It discusses first the multiple objectives of education, and analyses the main policies evident in the period and the ways in which they have changed over our period. This leads to an analysis and description of the main educational interest groups, and a preliminary classification of them into legitimised and non-legitimised groups. We attempt to assess the impact of some of the most important and to differentiate them in terms of their closeness to authority as represented primarily by the Secretary of State and the DES, and the extent to which they are in consensus or in conflict with national policy formation.

We then turn to a study of the role of Parliament, which shows how far national political activity affects and is affected by the major educational decisions made and enunciated through ministerial speeches, changes in law and other formal administrative action. And both of these sets of evidence are analysed against the national interest group activities.

The components of analysis – changes in values and policies, the role of the interest groups and of Parliament in relation to the central government decision-makers – are then brought together in accounts of how they interact in two areas of action which serve as case studies: the development of higher education and of comprehensive secondary education. We then try to generalise what is found in terms of the main literature on interest groups, elites and pluralism, incrementalism and gradualism, and the extent to which policy generation and maintenance are consensual or conflictual. Finally, we pose questions about the democratic quality and the viability of the British policy generation system.

GENERALISATIONS

The sources of policy generation are so difficult to locate, let alone place in any logical pattern, that detecting the changes in values, or the pressures by which change is effected, is more a matter of art than of analysis. The imagery of political science suggests too much precision: such words as ‘power’, ‘structure’, ‘pressure’, ‘leverage’ all suggest that political activity is analogous with predictable engineering systems. Softer and more modest imagery is needed.

Within these conceptual limitations, the issues which this study attempts to depict are as follows. To begin with, the British system for the government of education is generally assumed to be strong, largely continuous and consensual in its working and in its assumptions [2].

Many of the educational and institutional policies remained largely unchanged between 1960 and 1974 and, indeed, most of them were inherited from the first of the public education systems at the beginning of the twentieth century. The education service was expansionist, increasingly egalitarian and strongly devoted to liberal assumptions about the role of teachers and their relationships with students. A strong institutional fabric ensured continuity through which the main changes, which related less to the content and organisation of education than to ways of making it more redistributive, had to make their way. We seek to establish how consensus was broken, as the expansionist bubble burst, and scepticism took over; although, from what we have observed between 1960 and 1974, it may be that educational institutions and their interest groups are so strong that they will spring back and sustain the larger continuities which they support.

The institutional fabric depended upon interaction between three main sets of agents, central government, local authorities and teachers, who both sustained the continuity and produced change. For example, the setting up of the James Committee on teacher education was consistent with pressure from young teachers who thought that such reforms as the creation of the BEd were not adequate. The 1970 Act which transferred concern for the mentally handicapped from the health to the education authorities was partly the result of teacher insistence that no child is ‘ineducable’. The creation of the Schools Council resulted from teacher objection to the attempt to create a Curriculum Study Group within the Ministry. If the central government, the local authorities and the teachers changed in many of their perspectives, the sanctioned changes came about not so much through a rational process in which all needs were pursued consistently and needs clarified but were, instead, caused by a few political leaders and permanent officials reacting at both the centre and within local authorities to a wider system of interest and pressure and imposing rationality later. At least two of the main movements during our period, towards comprehensive secondary education and towards mass higher education, based as they were on egalitarian values and also deriving from the pressures of the economy, were partly reactions to demographic pressure and to the pressures of an increasingly ambitious and consumer-orientated society. The education service responded within the limits of what it considered feasible in terms of resources and of educational politics.

In two major areas, higher education and comprehensive secondary schools, continuity was broken. In higher education the changes were structural – the development of polytechnics and the Open University and the expansion of universities – but had impact, too, on the content of education, and assumptions about academic freedom. But comprehensive secondary education was tackled incrementally, almost as a natural development from the tripartite system, rather than as a Swedish-style measure of social reform, though sporadic local pressures initiated the whole movement.

In analysing the place of the interest groups, representing the local authorities, the teachers and the various client groups, it is interesting to see whether some of the more powerful are, in the usage of the leading studies [3], more ‘sectional’ in their interests, defending the rights of the teachers or the local authorities, than ‘promotional’ of new causes, and whether this mode of classification is itself useful. While interest groups and their officials include some of the leading exponents of change (as, for example, more egalitarian policies, or the expansion of the higher education system to meet expanding social demand) they often reacted to, rather than initiated, the changes. It is to the less ‘legitimised’¹ pressure groups, such as the National Union of Students, that we have to look for the more radical demands, such as their demands for changed relationships between teachers and students and reforms in the government of higher education. Other, and so far less successful, non-legitimised interest groups pressed for a greater place for parents in the schools. The NUS have been successful in becoming largely legitimised whilst outside the general consensus on many issues. It seems to be no longer true that only the interest groups that conform to the consensus have impact.

In our analysis of the role of Parliament in educational policymaking, our conclusion is not novel [4]. Parliament at most reviews, criticises and helps to aggregate and articulate feelings about policy. Essentially it reacts to, rather than initiates, policy. So far, indeed, are MPs from decision-making, that it is uncertain whether they have even enough authority to review and criticise effectively.

These issues – of what the changes were, of who caused them, of who brought about changes in patterns of authority and government, of who criticised policy – are the concern of this book.

1Twenty-seven MPs declined to be seen or failed to answer our request, including three out of four of the Conservative ministers in office until February 1974 and both of the recent Liberal spokesmen on education. A further fifteen MPs or former MPs were approached and expressed willingness to be interviewed, but interviews could not be arranged with them. Five other interviews were frustrated in a similar way. Sixty-five interviews were conducted in all.

1This classification is elaborated in Chapter 4.

Chapter 2

Some History: From Expansionism to Pessimism, 1960—1974

Educational policies and the values underlying them interact with the moods and fashions of their period. And the actions of politicians, interest groups and professions are both the products and the producers of changes in values and social needs. Education is perhaps the most socially volatile of all collective activities because it incorporates so much at once: the hope that man may change himself so as to be happier, more productive, and a good neighbour; and the hope that social arrangements can incorporate both the best of the past and the promise of the futu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Charts
• PART I: INTRODUCTION AND POLICIES
• 1 Purposes and Scope
• 2 Some History : From Expansionism to Pessimism, 1960–1974
• 3 The Objectives and Policies of Education, 1960–1974: A Classification
• PART II: THE INTEREST GROUPS
• 4 Policy Changes as Perceived by Those Involved
• 5 The Place of Interest Groups in the Decision-Making Process: An Analytical Framework
• 6 Local Authority Associations
• 7 Teachers’ Associations
• 8 The Changing Pattern
• PART III: PARLIAMENT
• 9 Parliament and Education
• PART IV : CASE STUDIES
• 10 The Case of Higher Education
• 11 Case Study: Comprehensive Secondary Education
• PART V: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• 12 Summary and Conclusions
• Selected Reading
• References
• Index