A Century of Education

Richard Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415243223
• eBook ISBN: 9781134545261
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education is a country's biggest business and the most important shared experience of those who live in it. A Century of Education provides an accessible, authoritative and fascinating overview of the role and nature of education in the twentieth century. Eminent historian of education, Professor Richard Aldrich has assembled a team of contributors, all noted experts in their respective fields, to review the successes and failures of education in the last century and to look forward to the next. A succinct overview of twentieth century social, economic, political and intellectual developments in the first chapter is followed by chapters on ten key topics. Each chapter has four sections: a review of the educational situation in 2000; a similar assessment in 1900; changes and continuities throughout the century; and a conclusion reviewing the lessons for today and tomorrow. This is a work of information, interpretation and reference, which demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of education during the twentieth century and identifies educational priorities for the twenty first. For anyone interested in what has become the most important Issue of our time, this unique book is set to become a classic text.

Chapter 1: Primary education

Peter Cunningham

The situation in 2000

In the year 2000 the work of British primary schools is highly visible and politically contested. Whether visibility derives from their contentiousness or vice-versa, and how the relationship between these two features has changed over the course of a century, poses an interesting question for historians of education. Primary teachers currently suffer an uneasy relationship with the State and complain that their work and their schools have become a political football. Compulsory education of children between the ages of five and 11 is managed and conducted within a statutory curriculum framework, but pedagogical style varies from teacher to teacher and from school to school, reflecting the individuality of the teachers and the ethos of individual schools. A new departure in the closing years of the century was the launch of ‘national strategies’ for literacy and numeracy which sought to impose some uniformity on teaching method, as the introduction of a national curriculum ten years earlier had done on the content of what primary school children learned. The account below will follow two themes in primary education: curriculum discourse between State and teachers, and increasing visibility of the primary school which brought that discourse into the public arena.

There are competing claims in the description and explanation of changing practice in primary schools. New Labour’s Green Paper in the spring of 2001 claimed achievement of a ‘transformation’ in primary education over their term of office from 1997 to 2000, illustrated by a rise from 65 to 75 per cent in the proportion of children gaining level 4 in English at Key Stage (KS) 2 and a similar achievement in maths from 59 to 72 per cent. Important as these indicators may be to short-term policy the measures reflect a narrow definition of primary education, and their significance as measures of change is open to question. So, too, are the explanations offered for this achievement:

The wholehearted commitment of governors, teachers and nonteaching staff across the country has been the key to the success so far in raising standards of English and mathematics. Every day, in all 18,000 primary schools, they are using their professionalism to take forward the national strategies and integrate them with the wider curriculum. All the evidence shows that primary heads and teachers are now enthusiastically committed to the teaching methods they have learnt from the national strategies.¹

From this account it would appear that professional culture took a sudden turn, fired by enthusiasm for government strategies which at last solved the problem of how to teach. Historians may reserve their judgement on this narrative of ‘transformation’, but the claim is of interest as evidence of a presumed need to restore public confidence in primary schools through political propaganda, a confidence which political propaganda had in previous years been bent on undermining.

Study of the professional press might produce a contrasting view, one of low morale, of teacher disaffection and a failure to recruit new staff, given the bureaucratic direction of their work over the past decades.² Pressures arising from increased visibility and accountability of primary teachers at the turn of the century are illustrated by the case of Marjorie Evans, a primary headteacher accused of physical and mental abuse towards children, whose case was publicly pursued through conviction by magistrates, reprieve on appeal, lengthy investigation by the Local Education Authority (LEA) and by a tribunal of school governors before eventual acquittal.³ This visibility and accountability affects children’s experience of primary education too, currently through increasingly intensive and continuous testing and reporting, and through the ranking of their schools in league tables. League tables are based on the results of standard assessment tasks (SATs) which echo the scholarship and elevenplus examinations of previous eras. The scholarship exam in the first half of the century affected relatively few, the eleven-plus later constituted a single terminal assessment point for all, but now assessment impinges throughout primary school from baseline assessment on entry through KS1 and KS2 SATs, with intermediate forms of assessment increasingly applied.

Within the primary age range children may be taught in separate infant and junior schools, in first and middle schools or in all-through primaries; the schools may be secular or denominational. They may be large institutions with hundreds of pupils, more typically found in urban areas, or small schools with rolls of less than a hundred serving rural populations. The national curriculum structure is overlaid upon this institutional variety, in three Key Stages. A Foundation Stage caters for children from the age of three (some primary schools have nursery classes or other preschool provision closely attached) until the end of the first year of compulsory schooling, when they have reached the age of five. Over the age of five, children move on from ‘Reception’ classes to follow Key Stage One for two years, and then proceed to Key Stage Two for a further four years.

Applying the parameters of primary education in 2000 determines a concentration on the age range 5 to 11. The century dawned, however, with schools defined less by age range than by social class, and elementary schools began the century with the heritage of providing a working-class education within a compulsory state system (although its success had also attracted many of the middle classes too). The compulsory age of schooling in 1900 was 5 to 13, although ‘babies’ had been admitted from the age of three. Official recognition, in the 1926 Hadow Report, of ‘adolescence’, a construct emerging from physiological, psychological and sociological study of growth, begins to rationalize a break in schooling at 11. ‘Babies’ had meanwhile been excluded from elementary schools but nursery provision, sometimes closely associated with the schools, was an increasing focus for attention. In the Hadow Reports of 1931 and 1933,⁴ the nursery/infant and junior phases within primary education were increasingly sharply distinguished, and in many areas separate schools provided for each phase. The 1944 Education Act, in establishing secondary education for all, put the official seal on universal primary education almost by default, and by that time a quite distinctive ‘culture’ of primary education had emerged, informed by developmental psychology. A later attempt during the 1960s to extend this culture up the age range led some local authorities to provide ‘middle schools’ (for ages 8 or 9 to 13 or 14) reinforced in some instances by practical considerations of providing new school buildings for an expanding cohort of children and for comprehensive secondary provision. The corollary of the middle school was the ‘first school’ which embraced the infant and ‘lower junior’ age ranges.

Whatever changes have taken place over time in primary education, any attempt at explanation has to extend beyond government policy. Working our way back across the century by revisiting classrooms past, the evidence speaks as much of cultural and technological transformations as of policy change. Comparing the classroom of 2000 with that of 1975 a proliferation of information technology might appear the most striking feature. Over the past 25 years the microcomputer has become central to learning activity in the primary school. Desktop computers, laptops and palmtops as part of the classroom furniture, sometimes a separate computer suite, and children regularly engaged on the Internet, are an increasingly common sight. Teachers have become managers not only of children but also of complex technical resources. A quarter of a century earlier, however, a succession of visual and technological aids, most notably video, had already made a significant difference to the style of interaction between teachers and pupils and the nature of children’s learning. In 1950, classes were perhaps 50 per cent larger than they are now with groups of some 40 to 50 as the norm, and partly as a consequence of these ratios relationships between children and teachers were more formal. A variety of teaching resources, books and equipment facilitated more flexibility in teaching styles and a modicum, at least, of independent learning. Children were beginning to move a little more freely and with less regimentation about the classroom and the school. Retreating to the classroom of 1900 the numbers of children per teacher would be far greater again, with classes up to twice the size they are now, and teaching styles consequently much more rigid and regimented in the main. Relationships between teacher and pupils were reflected in, but also determined by, the design and use of space, desks fixed in long rows facing the front. A striking contrast, too, would lie in the children’s appearance, their general state of physical health, nourishment and clothing. Such perceptions forcibly remind us that understanding historical change in primary education requires far wider considerations than teaching style and performance indicators.

Change over time has to be explored, therefore, in a variety of dimensions, such as government policy nationally and locally, the structures of primary schooling which result, the physical environment of primary school buildings and classrooms, the prescribed curriculum and the teacher’s role, curriculum in practice and the lived experience of teachers and children. These dimensions intersect and interact, and the priorities adopted in examining them will determine the sources on which we draw.

Curriculum history has a long pedigree going back to Birchenough and Bramwell but has more recently shifted its focus from the prescribed to the enacted curriculum.⁵ Oral history has offered a route to uncovering the pupil’s voice,⁶ and that of the teacher.⁷ Depaepe and others have preferred to use the teachers’ press as a source for classroom history, arguing that professional journals facilitate Geertz’s ‘thick description’: ‘They enable us to look behind the scenes at classroom practice and to gauge the strategy, ulterior motives, reservations and hidden meanings behind pedagogical and didactic practice’.⁸ Professional journals cover practical matters as well as pedagogical and general social issues, documenting for historians the links between the two. Another way into the history of classroom activity has been more archaeological, drawing on pictorial evidence and on artefacts.⁹ This approach has amongst other merits that of focusing attention on technology, otherwise surprisingly taken-for-granted.¹⁰ The technology of primary curriculum and pedagogy through magic lanterns, slide projectors, radio, cine-projectors, television and computers has had untold impact on the classroom as a space and on teaching and learning. Latterly National Curriculum record keeping brought filing cabinets into the primary classroom, the literacy and numeracy strategies boosted ‘big books’, whiteboards and overhead projectors. The teachers’ press is rich with historical sources in the form of manufacturers’ and retailers’ advertisements and in critical discussion.

The situation in 1900

‘Primary’ schools were so designated in revolutionary France and recognized by Webster’s Dictionary in 1828, but the legislation that introduced universal schooling in England and Wales established ‘elementary’ as the preferred label. Public elementary schools retained this statutory designation until 1944, and the label remained in popular use. Meanwhile the term primary was increasingly adopted in professional discourse from the later nineteenth century onwards and gained official sanction in the Board of Education’s Consultative Committee reports (the Hadow reports) of 1926 and 1931.¹¹

A growing body of published writings on elementary education in the years around 1900 provides ample documentation for the aims and intended methods of teaching. Our understanding of these elementary schools at the turn of the nineteenth century is also helped by an abundance of visual evidence, as many buildings remain from the School Board period¹² and furniture and artefacts survive in schoolroom museums up and down the country. Above all they coincide with an era when photography became an important ritual and medium of communication so that school and class photographs abound in local archives. Visual images of unsmiling children in crowded and cramped classrooms offer clues to the experience of primary education at the time. Apparatus such as Froebel’s ‘Gifts’ laid out for use, children’s work displayed, for example rows of identical line drawings, and on the walls framed pictures of monarchs or Christian images offer detailed evidence for curriculum. As rich and as treacherous as any written document, however, school photographs offer multiple readings.¹³

Elementary schools of circa 1900 live on, too, in the published memoirs of those who taught or learned in them. F.H. Spencer recalled his early years as a teacher in the 1890s, much of it with the upper standards of teenagers but also in the middle of the school:

This meant arithmetic and English (grammar, composition, reading, dictation, spelling – all still regarded as separate subjects), geography and history, drill (still the only form of physical education, though it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Century of Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Key Events in Education in the Twentieth Century
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Primary Education
• Chapter 2: Secondary Education
• Chapter 3: Further Education
• Chapter 4: Higher Education
• Chapter 5: Central And Local Government
• Chapter 6: Teachers
• Chapter 7: Pupils and Students
• Chapter 8: Special Educational Needs
• Chapter 9: Curriculum
• Chapter 10: Qualifications and Assessment
• Conclusion