Education in Britain Since 1944

W Kenneth Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415761789
• eBook ISBN: 9781134533701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published 1978.This volume examines the purpose and the functioning of the present education system inthe UK and when it was originally published it was the first overall review of developments in British education since the 1944 Education Act. It discusses some of the most significant reforms which have stemmed from developments in the primary schools, in particular from the adoption of child-centred and progressive methods of teaching.

1 An age of discontinuity

You have never heard of Merulius lachrymans? Unless you happen to be a surveyor, a carpenter or a mycologist it is highly unlikely that you will be acquainted with the species. Unseen, insidiously, it spreads its microscopic spores through woodwork and plaster, feeding on moisture as it grows, until one day floorboards collapse, a staircase caves in and all at once the unfortunate householder finds himself faced with a massive repair bill. Too late, he discovers to his cost that Merulius lachrymans is well and truly named.

To begin by suggesting that British education is currently in a near-ruinous state is bound to seem less than convincing and to diagnose it as a case of advanced dry rot may be thought a pun in poor taste. Outwardly, at least, its structure has every appearance of being sound and in good working order. Still, appearances can be deceptive and there are good reasons for suspecting that there is something rotten in the present state of affairs: how else to explain the growing public concern about falling standards and the widespread talk about an alleged decline in the quality of life? Lord Hailsham, for one, is inclined to believe that the Constitution itself, time-honoured and unwritten as it is, is no longer weatherproof nor its foundations secure. In fields other than education abrupt discontinuities in the politics of planning are the order of the day. In terms of René Thom’s catastrophe theory, in short, we find ourselves in a situation in which the lines of force are so conflicting that the only certainty is that whatever happens next will be dramatically unlike what has gone before.

In any case it is as well to begin by acknowledging that education is no longer ‘in’. Such an acknowledgment has to be made quite independently of the depressed state of Britain’s economic affairs and the low morale which accompanies it. In the U.S.A., Sweden and West Germany — countries still enjoying an affluence which we can only envy — leading thinkers share this same sense of disenchantment with the established system of education. Throughout the Western World, indeed, the mood of buoyant optimism which characterized the 1950s and 60s, the years of expansion, has been replaced by one of profound scepticism, not to say sour disillusion. It is unnecessary to appeal to the literature of educational dissent typified by such authors as Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, John Holt and others of that ilk, in order to convince oneself that there is something seriously wrong with institutional schooling in its present form, when the best available research evidence points to conclusions scarcely less radical than theirs. The investigations of Coleman and Jencks into equality of educational opportunity (or rather the lack of it) in the U.S.A. and the surveys carried out by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in twenty different countries have consistently shown that social background and home conditions account for a major part of the differences in individual scholastic attainment and that schooling, by comparison, exercises a relatively minor influence. What it amounts to is that we have been expecting far too much of the schools: increasingly, they have been saddled with functions and responsibilities which were formerly discharged by other social agencies — family, Church, neighbourhood and work-place. Their failure to cope, though not their fault, now leaves them open to criticism and recrimination. As a consequence, the zeal for reform in the early 1960s, inspired by faith in the school as the seedbed for social justice, has been followed by a headlong retreat into cynical disavowal. In the event, the hopes placed originally in grandiose schemes and policies based on ‘positive discrimination’, for example the Educational Priority Area projects, have been sadly disappointed, and the realization that things have not turned out according to the intentions of the proponents of these and other reforms is not softened by the belated admission that when all is said and done the impossible takes a little longer. Not surprisingly, ‘innovation’, so recently on everyone’s lips, is now well on the way to becoming a dirty word. Teachers, parents, politicians — all are weary of, and bewildered by, the non-stop changes that have been taking place. Enthusiasm for the cause of educational reform, to put it mildly, is at a low ebb.

As an OECD report observes:

When the considerable expansion of educational facilities was envisaged a decade ago, it was more or less assumed that by making more facilities available and distributing them properly in the right neighbourhoods and areas, there would be a marked change in the social composition of student bodies, and in the flow of people from less favoured classes into secondary schools and into higher education institutions. This has not happened to the degree expected.[1]

It is as though education had been tried and found wanting. From less than two per cent of the Gross National Product in 1944, the proportion devoted to the educational services has risen to 7.5 per cent in 1976, say the critics, the inference being that this escalation of expenditure has some kind of law of diminishing returns built into it. Financial cutbacks being necessary anyway, the temptation is to look for scapegoats — and education is usually the first to be picked upon.

In order to understand what is happening in the current debate on the state of British education it is worthwhile taking a look at the polarization of opinion in other countries, if only for the sake of reassuring ourselves that the issues raised and the problems whch generate most heat in that debate are neither peculiar to Britain nor confined to it. The remarkable transformation which has occurred on the American scene since 1970 is reviewed by Fred Hechinger in a book with the provocative title Murder in Academy: The Demise of Education, in which he points out that the situation in the U.S.A. is critical, if not positively alarming, in the sense that for the first time education is now under attack from both left-wing and right-wing factions. As he says, ‘In the past, when education had to ward off only the attacks of the reactionary right the consequences were confined to occasional short-term setbacks. Popular faith in each generation’s capacity to do better than its predecessor was inseparably linked to education as, in Horace Mann’s words, the “Great Equalizer” and “society’s balance wheel”’[2]. This link, he fears, may now be broken and popular faith in education exposed as a cruelly deceptive myth.

In West Germany, likewise, school reform is decidedly out of favour: according to Hellmut Becker, everyone from the Federal Chancellor himself down to the caretaker of the humblest Berufsschule is sick and tired of hearing about it. ‘Both left and right agree on this. The far left thinks that school reform in the first place was never really intended, in the second place has not occurred, and if it ever had occurred would have been an instrument for reinforcing the power of the ruling class’[3]. Becker notes that this polarization of political ideologies is rendered the more striking by the fact that although the arguments used by the two sides are contradictory their dissatisfaction is shared.

In a catastrophe set of the kind analysed by Rene Thom the lines of force are drawn so as to cause points in the three-dimensional graph curve where sudden discontinuities are liable to occur. A soap bubble swells and bursts, a man drops dead from a heart attack, a firm goes bankrupt. Not that all ‘catastrophes’ are as final and irreversible as these. Even the most abstruse topological calculation cannot predict when they are likely to occur or what form they will take, but even if only in a very general way, Thom’s theory can be helpful in setting the parameters for such apparent discontinuities. To put it less melodramatically, in a situation of unbearable stress, as when an individual, an education system or even a whole nation is subjected to powerful and opposed forces of attraction and repulsion, the tendency is to fly from one extreme to another. Caught between the impulses of rage and fear, the cornered dog either snarls and rushes to the attack or retreats whimpering with its tail between its legs. The difficulty is to decide what tips the balance one way or the other.

Whether we are content to say that British education is merely suffering from a temporary setback or take the gloomier view that it has come to the end of an era and is now entering what Thomas Kuhn described as a phase of ‘crisis’ in which ‘shoddy science’ is the rule both in its theory and practice, makes little difference: either way, the indications are that it is so far down the slippery slopes of recession that no upturn in its fortunes can be expected in the foreseeable future. Long the darling of the progressives, it is now in danger of becoming the whipping boy of a vindictive arrière-garde, whose cry is, ‘Back to the Three Rs and all that’. It seems only the other day that top priority was being demanded for measures to combat an acute shortage of teachers; now, thanks to the fact that officials in the Department of Education and Science contrived to get their sums so hopelessly wrong in the first place, thousands of newly qualified teachers look like being permanently unemployed and many Colleges of Education are to be closed down. Accident-prone planning, to be sure, is not confined to the educational field. The point about this example is that except by those whose livelihood depends upon keeping them open, the closure of the Colleges appears to have been accepted without a peep of protest, even hailed with glee by certain sections of a hostile press. A leader-writer in the Daily Telegraph (16 November 1976) goes so far as to urge the total abolition of teacher-training — as good an indication as any of the recent about-turn in educational thought and the willingness to put back the clock.

Since 1973, when one by one the traffic lights turned red and the educational boom was abruptly brought to a halt, policy-making has found itself impaled on the horns of a dilemma not unlike that of Thom’s cornered dog. Should it stand still and maintain the status quo as best it can in the hope that the situation will ease sooner or later? Not a chance. Should it conclude that the evidence of a law of diminishing returns operating in the system is so convincing that there is nothing for it but to cut its losses and embark on a policy of retrenchment? Or should it intensify the search for alternative forms of organized learning and more effective means of deploying resources of manpower and finance?

‘The indispensable remoulding of education demands that all its elements — theory and practice, structure and methods, management and organisation — be completely rethought from one and the same point of view’, as the Faure Commission affirmed in their report Learning To Be. Brave words, but how to translate the rhetoric of this stern imperative into everyday practice? ‘Education must shift into the future tense’, says Alvin Toffler[4]. ‘Now the past, to all intents and purposes, no longer exists’, says John Vaizey[5]. But the past, alas, is heavy on our backs, the present is confused, and the future looks bleak. All in all, it is not a good time to be writing a retrospective account of developments in British education in the post-war era!

On the face of things it may appear that the swing to the right will continue and that a policy of retrenchment must ensue. It is easy to forget that popular commitment to the cause of education is a fairly recent phenomenon in British society and that there is no guarantee that it will persist. Almost invariably, the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century were pioneered by minority groups, more often than not in the face of stiff opposition from public opinion. Churchill, for one, was disinclined to support proposals for a new Education Bill when they were first mooted in 1941-42, and not simply because he was heavily preoccupied with prosecuting the war effort: ‘Your main task at present is to get the schools working as well as possible’, he told the President of the Board of Education in a curt memorandum — a sentiment which would probably be endorsed by any Prime Minister today. Gosden notes that

possibly the greatest contrast between the prewar and postwar situation was the much greater willingness of central and local authorities to spend far more on education in real terms — in spite of economic policies of stop-go. The predominant attitude came to be one of expecting a measure of growth in expenditure from one year to another. The predominant prewar attitude had been one of containment of, or an actual reduction in, expenditure. This change was no doubt a reflection of changed social and political values as a consequence of the war.[6]

It is at any rate conceivable now that the continuous growth-curve in educational expenditure has been arrested that we are about to witness a return to pre-war attitudes towards policy-making.

In general, however, the period has been characterized by a number of basic trends which can safely be projected into the future. Dominant among these has been the drive for equality of opportunity, an ideal capable of widely differing interpretations. Unquestionably, this drive has gathered its political momentum from the rise in levels of aspiration and expectation on the part of the masses, in particular of the younger generation, who are more apt to question authority than their predecessors ever dared to do, who insist on the right to participation in the decision-making process, and who favour a more open institutional framework than the one imposed upon them by a bureaucratic system. At the same time, the period has been notable for the steady increase in state control of the education system at all points. It is for this reason that thinkers like Torsten Husén warn that schools as now constituted are on a collision course with society.

Back in 1944, when the present author was writing Education in England, he quoted two of the most eminent planners of the day, first F.A. Hayek: ‘We can, unfortunately, not extend the sphere of common action and still leave the individual free in his own sphere. Once the communal sector, in which the state controls all the means, exceeds a certain proportion of the whole, the effect of its actions is to dominate the whole system’; the second, Karl Mannheim:

The only way in which a planned society differs from that of the nineteenth century is that more and more spheres of social life, and ultimately each and all of them, are subjected to state control. But if a few controls can be held in check by parliamentary sovereignty so can many .... In a democratic State sovereignty can be boundlessly strengthened by plenary powers without renouncing democratic control.

Looking back, it is easy to conclude that the second of these contradictory social theories has been the more influential in bringing British education to its present pass.

Certainly, developments flowing from the 1944 Education Act were motivated by a strong belief in the power of school reform to bring about social reform on the one hand and economic growth on the other. On both counts this belief has been seriously undermined during the past decade. As regards the first, it seems pertinent to remark that even if it could be proved that schooling per se exercises a relatively insignificant influence this would be no excuse for dismissing it as unimportant. In fact, the research evidence on the effects of formal schooling, plausible as it is, remains as contentious and open to different interpretations, as the research evidence on the relationship between genetic endowment and environmental influences in human make-up. Supposing that it could be shown conclusively (which it cannot) that eighty per cent of a person’s intelligence — whatever that is taken as meaning — was determined by the parental genes at the moment of conception and that nothing could be done to change it subsequently, this would be all the more reason for concentrating on those aspects of the environment which are capable of being changed. By the same token, if it could be shown that eighty per cent of a person’s life chances are attributable to social background and home conditions, this would be an argument for reinforcing, not relaxing, the work of the schools.

The evident failure of expansionist policies to produce the expected economic returns is the more puzzling, seeing that the failure is largely restricted to Britain. Without necessarily thinking that fifty-odd developing countries cannot be wrong in believing that the educational enterprise is wealth-creating, why should the validity of theories of ‘investment in human capital’ be called in question? The answer can only be that in their more naive applications — as in the British expansionist policies in recent years — such theories can have disastrous consequences. Says Peter Drucker, from whose book the title of this preamble is borrowed, ‘There are few areas where right action depends so much on right theory as it does in economics. Yet in few areas is accepted theory as inadequate to the demands of practice and policy or to what we know.’

What little we do know can be gathered by comparing the educational and economic records of West Germany and the United Kingdom in the post-war period, as well as those of the U.S.A. Whereas in the U.K. the reorganization of secondary schools on non-selective lines has proceeded apace along with massive increases in the number of university students, new foundations, polytechnics and the rest, the West German system has remained for the most part traditional in character, retaining its highly selective Gymnasium, its numerus clausus for would-be university entrants, while providing vocational and apprenticeship courses for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• 1 An age of discontinuity
• 2 The continuous process — primary education
• 3 The continuous process — secondary education
• 4 The continuous process — tertiary education
• 5 The control of education
• Index