Education in Britain

1944 to the Present

Ken Jones

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745663227, 9780745663210
• eBook ISBN: 9781509505234
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In the decades after 1944 the four nations of Britain shared a common educational programme. By 2015, this programme had fragmented: the patterns of schooling and higher education in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England resembled each other less and less. This new edition of the popular Education in Britain traces and explains this process of divergence, as well as the arguments and conflicts that have accompanied it.

With a reach that extends from the primary school to the university, and from culture to politics and economics, Ken Jones explores the achievements and limits of post-war reform and the egalitarian aspirations of the 1960s and 1970s. He registers the impact of the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s, and of the New Labour governments which were its inheritors. Turning to the twenty-first century, Jones tracks the educational consequences of devolution and austerity. The result is a book which is more attentive than any other to the ever-increasing diversity of education in Britain.

This comprehensive and accessible overview will have a wide appeal. It will also be an invaluable resource on courses in educational studies, teacher education and sociology.

1
Post-War Settlements

Educational change was not born in wartime – many of the policies established in the 1940s had been debated and planned in earlier decades – but we cannot understand the patterns of education’s development in the mid-twentieth century, or the conflicts that took place around it, unless we grasp the political impact of the Second World War. By 1945, in almost every country that the war had touched, the defeat of fascism had seen the rise of some kind of movement of the left. Usually the left was powerful enough to reshape the economy in a more collectivist way and to strengthen whatever kind of provision had previously existed for the welfare and education of the majority of the population. These achievements left an imprint on many European societies that lasted for half a century and more.

So it was in Britain. The coalition government led between 1940 and 1945 by Winston Churchill committed itself to full employment and a more inclusive system of social security. After 1945, the Labour government of Clement Attlee took reform a good deal further. It created the National Health Service, launched a major programme of public housing and nationalized the coal industry, transport and the Bank of England. These measures were justified partly on grounds of economic effectiveness – what the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto called ‘industrial efficiency in the service of the nation’ – and partly on grounds of social justice: a ‘high and rising standard of living, security for all against a rainy day, an educational system that will give every boy and girl a chance to develop the best that is in them’ (Labour Party 1945).

Linked to redistributive taxation policies, reform laid the basis for a rise in the living standards of working-class people and a reduction in inequalities of wealth. Its effects were also social and political. The role of the state, as planner of reconstruction and guarantor of ‘fairness’ and progress, was legitimized. The lifting of the threat of unemployment greatly strengthened trade unionism. The creation of new and massive institutions of health and welfare brought into existence a large professional or semi-professional class, which developed policy interests of its own. At the same time, the fact that reform was the result of decisive action at the political centre served to cement the support of the majority of the Welsh and Scottish populations for the British state. The depression of the 1930s had gravely damaged the Welsh and Scottish economies – in the inter-war period, migration reduced the population of Wales by nearly half a million (Thomas 2007). The creation of the welfare state, ‘the most important reform for raising the quality of working-class life in the twentieth century’, was manifestly the work of national government, which possessed a ‘capacity for regeneration’ which no local polity could match (K. Morgan and Mungham 2000: 28).

But this capacity was itself limited, first of all by economic circumstances. Impoverished by war, Britain was able to fund the welfare state only with financial aid acquired in late 1945 from the American government. Moreover, as the global economy recovered from the devastation of conflict, the depth of Britain’s economic problems was starkly revealed. The new American-sponsored world order was based on more open trading arrangements than had existed in the protectionist 1930s. Some British companies benefited from this. Many did not (Gamble 1981). Transport, manufacturing and extractive industries – including steel, coal, shipbuilding and engineering – experienced some limited post-war growth, as other, still more damaged national rivals took time to renew their economies. In the medium term, however, their lack of competitiveness became plain, as did the weaknesses of government industrial policy: Labour, according to Hobsbawm, ‘showed a lack of interest in planning that was quite startling’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 272).

Universities and Colleges

Educational planning was agreed to be essential, but the gap between principle and practice was a wide one, not least in higher and further education. Between 1944 and 1947, a series of reports linked the ‘manpower’ needs of specific sectors of the economy to proposals for new kinds of educational provision. Hankey (1945) identified post-war retraining needs; Percy (1945) recommended the expansion of higher technological education; Barlow (1946) addressed issues of scientific manpower and university expansion; committees chaired by Urwick (1947) and Carr-Saunders (1949) made a case for management and commercial education. The 1944 Education Act, and its Scottish counterpart (1945), meanwhile, set out plans for an extensive system of post-school education, based on local colleges and the release of students from the workplace. These schemes and proposals were not without effect, and laid down a basis on which later changes were made. Yet, overall, they were patchy and slow in their implementation. They left in place essential aspects of the existing system, which were resistant to the idea of educational planning, and often remote from any project of social reform (Bocock and Taylor 2003).

In 1945, there were fewer than twenty universities in Britain, and 50,000 undergraduates. They were institutions that were both imperial and national. In the first sense, British universities were the controlling hub of a network which recruited students, trained staff, approved curricula and recognized qualifications throughout the British Empire (Pietsch 2013). In the second, they had long had a cultural and social role that was at least as important as any economic function. In Wales, the establishment of university colleges at Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff in the late nineteenth century had been vital to the development of a ‘new Welsh nation’ (G. A. Williams 1985). In Scotland, a much older group of universities (Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews) had served a similar function, and in the process developed distinct academic characteristics – notably an undergraduate degree, the Ordinary MA, which emphasized breadth of study (Paterson 2003). Queen’s University Belfast gained university status in 1908, when Ireland was ruled by the British as a single entity. In theory secular, in practice it remained, in the post-war years, ‘strongly Protestant and unionist in outlook’ (Kearney 2007: 12), with a tendency to recruit its senior staff from England or Scotland (Rupert Taylor 1987). English universities, likewise, were central to social and political life. Oxford and Cambridge were dominant both numerically and in terms of influence. One-fifth of all undergraduates in Britain were educated at their colleges, and their graduates thickly populated the British political, administrative and academic elite. In addition, ‘Oxbridge’ supplied a set of images of university life and purpose which were deeply embedded in the views of policy-makers – as demonstrated by the Percy Committee’s model of a university: ‘a self-governing community of teachers and students, working together in one place, with substantial endowments of its own, mature enough to set its own standards of teaching, and strong enough to resist outside pressures, public or private, political or economic’ (Percy Report 1945 quoted in Shattock 2012: 10). An idealized form of the pre-war university – intimate, autonomous – was thus projected as a design for the post-war future. High-status knowledge, to which it claimed a monopoly (Salter and Tapper 1994), lay enclosed within its walls.

Though universities were increasingly dependent on central funding, they were not under state control. Legally, they were independent corporate institutions, with charitable status. Practically, the controls upon them were slight. Responsibility for such oversight that did exist was split between different ministerial departments. Government, in the form of the University Grants Committee (UGC), did not intervene in universities’ decisions about how the money they had been allocated should be spent (Shattock 2006): ‘The policy was to have no policy short of giving autonomous institutions as much or as little money as the government thinks it can afford’ (Maclure 1982: 259). Without strong pressure from government, universities tended to retain the values and the self-image of earlier years. They rejected the idea of specialization that was implied by some projects of reform. A university that emphasized science and technology, as proposed by Barlow in 1946, was seen as a contradiction in terms: the essence of a university was that it should be balanced and multi-disciplinary, focused not on ‘teaching this or that subject’ but on ‘training minds’ (Association of University Teachers, quoted in Shattock 2012: 21).

Universities were thus organized around the classic perspectives of liberal education (Rothblatt 1976), based on a body of knowledge associated with ‘old’ social classes, highly selective in their admissions policies and resistant to notions of immediate social usefulness. The transformation of this model of the university, the academic cultures in which it was located and the system of governance that protected it is an important strand of post-war history. But in the 1940s, transformation was not part of Labour’s agenda (Bocock and Taylor 2003); the party’s focus was rather on questions of expansion – an increase in the size of existing universities, and the setting up of new institutions, so that they could play a role in economic modernization. This did not mean the introduction of mass higher education, only a limited growth in student numbers, from 50,000 in 1945 to around 80,000 in 1950. But even with such a moderate approach, Attlee’s government did not find that the universities were willing partners. Oxford and Cambridge would not agree to any expansion in student numbers, though the ‘civic universities’ – such as Manchester and Sheffield – eventually did so. The UGC for a time blocked the idea of upgrading university colleges, such as Southampton and Hull, to full university status. Higher level technical colleges – Acton, Battersea and Salford, for example – increased the number of their students on degree courses, mainly by recruiting ex-servicemen (Robinson 1968); but their elevation to the status of Colleges of Advanced Technology, called for by the Percy Report, did not happen until 1956, with the publication of the White Paper on Technical Education (Ministry of Education 1956).

Policy for university education, however hesitantly it developed, affected higher education throughout Britain. As central funding from the UGC increased, so universities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland saw their future as something that would be determined within a British framework (Paterson 2003). Decision-making about further education (FE), on the other hand, had a strong local dimension. In England and Wales, the 1944 Education Act made FE provision a legal obligation of local education authorities (LEAs). It required them to submit to the Minister of Education schemes of education for ‘persons beyond compulsory school age’. The LEAs could, if they wished, make such education itself compulsory. Supporters of the Act envisaged an ‘educational experiment of very wide scope and tremendous possibilities’ (Giles 1946: 91), involving the great majority of the 15–18 age group, mostly on the basis of part-time attendance in programmes of general as well as work-related education, housed within a single type of institution – the county college.

No date was specified for the general introduction of a county college system, and even in the late 1950s most post-15 year olds were untouched by further education (Crowther Report 1959: 163–5). Employers saw some sense in agreeing the day release to FE colleges of young workers involved in apprenticeship schemes. But their attitude to the general mass of the young workforce was different; since employers were not legally compelled to release such students, they refrained from doing so. The result was that ‘most of those who leave school at 15 rapidly lose all contact with education’ (Crowther Report 1959: 173). They entered employment which was low-waged and low-skilled, but which was secure enough not to encourage workers to seek higher levels of qualification (Todd 2007). In 1960, it remained as true as it was in the 1930s that further education in England and Wales was a patchwork of different kinds of scheme.

Reshaping Schooling

Schooling, much more than university and college education, was a focus of political conflict. Between 1944 and 1947, the education systems of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were substantially changed, via a series of Education Acts – in England and Wales in 1944, Scotland in 1945 and Northern Ireland in 1947 – a synchronization which says much about the existence in this period, across national territories, of key aspects of policy-making. It was in England and Wales that conflicts between different interest groups were at their sharpest and most multi-faceted, and there that the negotiating capacities of the governing class were most called for. In Scotland, politicians and civil servants were convinced both that there was a broad national consensus in favour of change, and that policies were already in place to effect it. In Northern Ireland, there was a similar commitment to change, though an awareness that its patterning would be determined as much by religious factors as by the classic themes of educational reform (Akenside 1973: 163).

The Acts, and the debates that led up to them, were complex and fundamentally contradictory events. On the one hand, they provided the focus of pressure, especially from labour movement organizations, for fundamental change. In Northern Ireland, there were calls, across religious and political divides, for social reform (Bew et al. 1995). In England and Wales, campaigners claimed there was ‘real evidence of a popular demand for a democratic system of education’, a demand expressed through alliances between the main teachers’ union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) (Giles 1946). In Scotland, the widespread desire for a system more democratic and more egalitarian than its predecessors, which would ‘suit the many as well as the old fitted the few’, was given voice at the centre of educational discussion, through the work of the advisory committee appointed by the Secretary of State (Scottish Education Department 1947: 4). On the other hand, the ways in which the Acts were interpreted by administrative elites, endorsed by the Labour leadership, worked to support existing patterns of privilege and class advantage, and selective mechanisms remained at the heart of the system. Despite the radical clamour which accompanied the passing of the legislation, notes Gareth Elwyn Jones, the 1944 Education Act as it was applied in Wales was faithful in essence to the blueprint drawn up by civil servants in 1941 (G. E. Jones 1990: 45). Likewise in Scotland, the 1945 Act did no more than codify changes that had been agreed on in the years before the war, and attempts to extend policy in ways that would achieve more fundamental change were not successful (Lloyd 1983).

‘What does the Act promise?’ asked the Communist and teachers’ leader G. C. T. Giles of legislation for England and Wales. ‘Does it wipe out … class discrimination? Does it promise for the average child something better than the disgracefully low standards of the ordinary elementary school? Does it contain any advance towards equality of opportunity?’ (Giles 1946: 20). He turned for his answers to the text of the legislation, and found there a ‘drastic recasting of our educational system’ (1946: 21). In place of the divide between mass elementary education and a secondary system that rested on selection and fee-paying, he identified a commitment to organizing public education in three stages – ‘primary education’, ‘secondary education’ and ‘further education’ – with the school-leaving age raised to 15 by 1947, and to 16 as soon as practicable thereafter. It mandated local authorities to provide nursery education, to expand provision ‘for pupils who suffer from any disability of mind of body’, and, as we have seen, it envisaged compulsory part-time education for 16–18 year olds. ‘Not less important’, wrote Giles, ‘is the extension of provision for the physical welfare of the children’ (1946: 22). Local authorities were now obliged to provide free medical treatment, as well as milk and meals for all who wanted them.

Thus far, the concerns of Giles, and of thousands of reformers like him, were satisfied: the Acts seemed to promise a free and universal system of education that involved students of all ages up to 18 in a common system, informed by the idea that the ‘nature of a child’s education should be based on his capacity and promise, not by the circumstances of his parents’ (Ministry of Education 1943: 20). But, as Giles acknowledged, this picture was more an ideal than a working model. Responding to the economic climate of the late 1940s, the Labour government made short-term choices that turned out to have longer-term consequences. The provisions of the 1944–7 Acts for compulsory part-time education after the age of 15 were never implemented. Restrictions on capital spending helped ensure that technical schools were left unbuilt. Nursery education declined steeply from its wartime peak, as financial arguments combined with a belief in the necessity of domestic maternal care to stop its growth: the 1944 Act had envisaged the expansion of nursery education, but had not made its provision mandatory; the austerity programme announced in 1947 ensured that local authorities would not use their discretion to preserve or expand it (David 1980; Whitbread 1972). The integration of students deemed to have special needs into the mainstream of the system was not pursued even to the limited extent envisaged by the designers of legislation. At the time, these failings were explained in terms of the constraints of a ‘war-crippled economy’: ‘the facts of the nation’s situation did not allow it’, wrote one commentator of the non-emergence of the post-15 county colleges planned for the late 1940s (Dent 1954: 148). But it is difficult to see finance as the only factor involved. In practice, the Act was blurred, contradicted and compromised not only by the effects of economic crisis but also by its encounter with a variety of vested interests.

Private Schooling

First among these was private education, which included schools of both lowly and elevated status. It is the fate of the high-status schools – the public schools – which concerns us here. During the war, public schools considered themselves a threatened species: teacher unions and the TUC had called for their abolition and headteachers had feared for their survival. But in fact the Acts of 1944–7 left the public schools untouched, and the notion of a universal system of state school...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 Post-War Settlements
• 2 The Golden Age?
• 3 Expansion, Experiment, Conflict
• 4 The Watershed: Conservatism and Educational Change
• 5 New Labour: The Inheritors
• 6 Crisis and Opportunity
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement