Secondary Education for All

Origins and Development in England

H C Dent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136590641
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Education Act of 1944 launched an unprecedented experiment in the history of education in the UK. This book is a brief survey of the routes by which compulsory free secondary education was arrived at, as well as an examination of the position in 1949 and suggestions for the future.

PART I

EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GROPINGS

“SECONDARY education for all” is a 20th-century concept, as yet imperfectly understood. The 19th century made elementary education obligatory for all, and tentatively began to offer secondary education to the intellectually able. The present century is painfully realising that that is not enough, that a complex industrial civilisation cannot be sustained on so slender a foundation of knowledge and skill. To-day almost every country is expanding secondary education; and England has led the way by making it not only available to every child but compulsory for all.

The idea of secondary education for all is in its infancy; that of secondary education for anyone is not much older. It dates only from the second half of the 19th century. The classical education which was given in the Grammar schools of England (and Europe) almost unchanged for a thousand years and more, down to the middle of the last century, is to-day frequently referred to as “secondary education”; but this description is wholly inaccurate. The Grammar-school course was never a “second stage”; it was a highly specialised form of education, originally the foundation for both general and professional education, later purely vocational, and finally, as its vocational value decreased, in England at any rate more and more a ritual, a kind of prolonged initiation ordeal necessary for the acquirement or indication of superior social status. Until about one hundred years ago, when it was rapidly disintegrating, no one ever thought or spoke of it as “secondary education.” If for no other reason, because the term was not known in England.

The words “primary” and “secondary” are said to been first applied to education in France, in 1792. In the Rapport et projet de décret sur l'organisation générale de l'instruction publique which he submitted to the Legislative Assembly in April of that year, Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet proposed the setting up of école primaires in villages and écoles secondaires in Departments. Ten years later the terms were used in a French Education Act, but half a century was to elapse before they became current in England and much longer before they acquired any very precise meaning. Admittedly, they were occasionally to be found in published writings. As early as 1808 R. L. Edgeworth, in his Essays on Professional Education, used the term “primary education” once or twice in a sense not wholly unacceptable to-day and on one occasion¹ referred to “secondary schools.” But it seems clear from the context that what he meant by the latter was not secondary schools in the modern sense at all, but the upper classes or an upper division of the “initiatory” schools which he desired to see set up to prepare boys for entry to the “great” or “public” schools.

Though he referred to “primary education,” Edge-worth never used the term “secondary education.” So far as I know, this first appeared in print in an English publication in April 1832, in one of a series of letters contributed to the Sheffield Courant² by Dr. Thomas Arnold, then headmaster of Rugby School. But, again, the context suggests that what Arnold had in mind was something quite different from what is understood to-day by “secondary education.” He was pointing out that it was difficult for teachers in commercial schools to obtain appropriate academic qualifications because the country had “no regular system of secondary education.” But as he went on to lament that “anything like local universities ... it is as yet vain to look for,” it would appear that he was thinking of something more nearly approaching an Oxford College than a county secondary school.

It was the prophetic insight of Thomas Arnold's son Matthew which first compelled England to think and to talk seriously about “secondary education.” Becoming more and more gravely perturbed about the backward state of this country's education as compared with that of her Continental neighbours (whose systems he knew better than anyone else), and foreseeing the deteriorative effect this must have upon national culture and efficiency, throughout the 1850's and 1860's Matthew Arnold sounded incessantly the warning: Organise your secondary and your superior instruction.

Thanks to him, the term “secondary education” found its way into the Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission in 1868. It turned up again in the Final Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the working of the Elementary Education Acts—the Cross Commission of 1888. But it did not acquire what might be called official status until the commission (dated March 2, 1894) which constituted the Royal Commission on Secondary Education—the famous Bryce Commission of 1894–95.

The term “secondary education” first appeared in an Act of Parliament in the Board of Education Act, 1899, but it was never statutorily defined until the Education Act, 1944. Even the definition contained therein can hardly be called particularly illuminating:

full-time education suitable to the requirements of senior pupils, other than such full-time education as may be provided for senior pupils in pursuance of a scheme made under the provisions of this Act relating to further education. (Section 8 (i).)

But however much definition may have been lacking or imprecise, the idea of secondary education has been slowly maturing in England for at least a hundred years. During the 19th century progress was being made along two quite separate and independent routes: by way of modifying the classical curriculum of the Grammar school and by way of recurrent upthrusts by the elementary school. No connection was established between these two routes during the 19th century; it was not, indeed, until the 1920's that the second was officially acknowledged¹ to be pioneering the way towards a new form ‘of secondary education.

In the first decade of the 20th century a third route was opened by the invention of the Junior Technical school. This had to wait till 1938 for official recognition as “secondary.”²

The endowed Grammar schools³ of England were probably never in a worse state than during the first half of the 19th century. But this was the darkest hour before the dawn; reform was at hand, was already in progress in several of the schools which during the previous century had acquired the status of “great” or “public” school. Between about 1790 and 1860 a line of distinguished headmasters—notably Butler of Shrewsbury (1798–1836), Goddard of Winchester (1796–1809), Arnold of Rugby (1828–42), Hawtrey of Eton (1834–52), and Vaughan of Harrow (1844–59)—revolutionised the moral tone and the discipline and considerably modified the curriculum of the English public schools.

The influence of these and other reformers of the public schools was carried to a wider sphere in three ways. First, through the foundation of many new “public schools”¹; second, through the appointment of men who had served under reforming heads to the headships of leading day schools; and third (this took place later), by the appointment of similar men to the headships of smaller, often insignificant Grammar schools. Many of such men took up these appointments with the deliberate intention of reforming—transforming might be a more accurate word—the schools of which they took charge. An outstanding instance was Edward Thring, who between 1853 and 1887 turned the tiny, somnolent Grammar school at Uppingham into the most progressive public school in the country.

Outside the public schools reform spread slowly. It had not gone far in the smaller Grammar schools by 1864, when, following the report, published in that year, of the Royal Commission on the administration of the nine recognised “public schools,”² a further Royal Commission was set up “to inquire into the education given in schools not comprised within Her Majesty's two¹ former commissions.” In particular, this commission was to:

consider and report what measures (if any) are required for the improvement of such education, having especial regard to all endowments applicable or which can rightly be made applicable thereto.

The Schools Inquiry Commission, as it was officially designated, did its work most thoroughly. It inquired into the condition of 942 schools, of which 782 were endowed schools, and reported in detail upon them all. The picture its Report presented was varied, but in general depressing. Five hundred and fifty of the Grammar schools sent no boys on to the universities, and most of them did not even enter pupils for the “local” examinations recently established by university examining bodies. The teaching of the classics was usually poor; in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Cornwall, remarked the Commissioners acidly, its main purpose appeared to be “to furnish the pretext for the neglect of all other useful learning.”² The teaching of modern subjects was worse than that of the classics.

Individual schools were in scandalous condition. At Whitgift, Croydon, there had been for over thirty years a headmaster but no pupils. At Kingston, Surrey, the head was using the pupils’ dormitory as a billiard room. At many schools nepotism was rampant, the head's relatives or friends comprising the staff and their children the only pupils.

Professor H. C. Barnard rightly says in his A Short History of English Education from 1760 to 1944¹ that “The Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission is a document of the greatest interest because it contains many of the germs of the subsequent reorganisation of secondary education in this country.” But he adds, equally correctly, that “those germs lay dormant for very many years.” They did so not only because the Government of the day rejected most of the Commission's recommendations, but also because many of the proposals made in their Report were at the time impracticable. If it be remembered that two years were still to elapse and a prolonged and embittered debate to ensue before England could make up its mind to have a national system of elementary education, it will at once be realised how impossible it was to effect far-reaching reforms in the field of secondary education.

The Government confined their attention to securing better facilities for secondary education by:

various changes in the government, management and studies of endowed schools, and in the application of educational endowments, with the object of promoting their greater efficiency, and of carrying into effect the main designs of the founders thereof, by putting a liberal education within the reach of children of all classes.

That quotation is from the preamble to the Endowed Schools Act, passed in 1869. It is no exaggeration to say that to this Act is largely due the renaissance of the Grammar school. It provided for the appointment of Commissioners empowered to alter existing school endowment schemes and to make new ones “in such manner as may render any educational endowment most conducive to the advancement of the education of boys and girls.”² If it can hardly be said that the Act fulfilled its declared purpose of “putting a liberal education within the reach of children of all classes,” at least it put secondary education within the reach of many more children than before. By the end of the 19th century the labours of the Endowed Schools Commissioners and of the Charity Commissioners who in 1874 took over their powers had resulted in the approval by Parliament of 902 new or amended schemes. Of these, 235 were made by the Endowed Schools Commissioners.

Among the new schemes many were for the education of girls. The Schools Inquiry Commission, upon representations from the leaders of the growing movement for the higher education of women, had wisely decided to interpret their terms of reference broadly enough to include a thorough investigation of “the important though hitherto much neglected subject of female education.”¹ This investigation revealed that less than 2 per cent, of all endowments for secondary education provided for girls’ schools. In fact, there were altogether only fourteen endowed schools for girls in the country, and of these two were elementary schools.

The Commission recommended a much more equal division of endowments as between girls’ and boys’ schools, and in particular that whenever an educational endowment was being scrutinised with a view to revision of its terms, the claims of girls were to be considered along with those of boys. The Endowed Schools Act gave effect to this recommendation in Section 12, which read: “In framing schemes under this Act, provision shall be made as far as conveniently may be for extending to girls the benefits of endowments.”

The Endowed Schools Commissioners (and later the Charity Commissioners) made good use of their powers under this Section. Within ten years 45 new schools for girls had been endowed; by the end of the century there were 86 endowed secondary schools for girls, containing over 14,0...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface And Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Part I Evolution
• Part II Some Outstanding Problems
• Part III Suggestions for Advance
• Bibliography
• Index