Education in the Post-War Years

A Social History

Roy Lowe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415689229
• eBook ISBN: 9781136590085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides an overview of the relationship between the sweeping social changes of the post-war period and education in England. It outlines the major demographic cultural and socio-economic developments which made new demands of the education service during the twenty years following the War and analyses the responses made by schools, colleges and universities. The book provides not only an informed narrative of the development of formal education, but also an authoritative account of the ways in which suburbanisation and the growth of the new property-owning middle class determined both the rhetoric of education and the structure of the system which emerged through the implementation of the 1944 Education Act.

Part One

Implementing the Act, 1945–1951

1

Reconstruction and Austerity:
The Social Background

The difficulties experienced in returning to normal after the war served only to emphasise how traumatic had been the social upheavals involved and how permanent were some of its consequences. The late 1940s were, for those who lived through them, years of recurrent economic difficulty, with widely publicised balance of payments crises and widespread shortages of foodstuffs and raw materials for the war-weary industries. As one journalist wrote: ‘The war is over, the conditions of war in some respects continue.’¹

If rationing, fuel shortages (especially that of the bleak winter of 1947 which temporarily brought industry to a halt) and austerity provided one enduring memory of the period, there was also another, less immediately apparent reality. It is too easily forgotten that this was an era of full employment, in stark contrast with the pre-war years. The collectivism of the wartime years was redirected by Clement Attlee’s government towards social reconstruction and the establishment of the welfare state. Investment in housing, health, national insurance, education and food subsidies meant that by 1951 a new and unprecedented personal economic security had been achieved for individual citizens at just the moment that national economic security was least sure. With the return of peace and the hope of a more certain future, there was a dramatic resurgence of popular leisure activities, most notably of the cinema and of professional soccer, while during the late 1940s, sound radio enjoyed its greatest golden age. It is appropriate to start, then, by looking in slightly greater detail at several aspects of the social background to this period, all of which impinged on ‘educational reconstruction’, before moving on to examine the schools themselves.

The Impact of War: Collectivism and Reconstruction

First and foremost was the impact of the war itself which led directly to a new readiness to tackle the reconstruction of society. The reasons are not far to seek. First, the unreal lull of the ‘Phoney War’ was rudely shattered by the reality of total war in 1940. The invasion of the Low Countries and the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the sustained experience of the bombing raids on the major cities meant that by the end of 1940 England was suddenly plunged into her gravest national crisis. The sense of solidarity which this engendered was soon apparent. The new political leadership replaced the indolence of the appeasers with a directness and immediacy which appealed to all social classes. This immediacy was achieved in part by Churchill’s use of the radio (a device used similarly by Stalin and Roosevelt), and one vestigial effect of this was that the power of broadcasting in general, and of the news bulletin in particular, was permanently enhanced. A sense of shared suffering was undoubtedly one of the mainsprings of this new solidarity. Although the Blitz was undoubtedly worst in those working-class suburbs close to munitions factories and ports, the fact that the Royal Family‘sat it out’ in London was widely publicised and suggested the extent to which all social groups were threatened. Further, the entry of the USSR to the war in the summer of 1941 meant that, henceforth, a wide political spectrum was ranged against the Axis states, and this fact undoubtedly lessened the reservations which some members of the Left may have felt about participation in ‘Churchill’s war’. This sense of national solidarity, which was only heightened by the continuing experience of food shortages, was the first prerequisite for the acceptance of ‘collectivism’.

Equally significant was the extent to which the government was forced into a direct control of national affairs which would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. The war spawned a series of new ministries whose work meant a quite unprecedented extension of central government power in England. The Ministry of Supply, quickly established at the outbreak of war, was soon complemented by Ministries of Aircraft Production, Economic Welfare, Food, Home Security, Information and Shipping. The ruthless denial of supplies to non-essential industries and the direction of manpower enabled the government to achieve a major redirection of the economy towards the war effort. During the war the engineering and chemical industries almost doubled their labour force to 5.2 million, and the armed services increased tenfold to a figure of over 5 million in 1945. Utility standards, which were to persist into the post-war years, were introduced to cut out extravagance in clothing and furniture and in 1942 petrol disappeared from the private market. The extent of this sea-change is perhaps best illustrated by the provisions in 1941 which enabled the conscription of women to the armed forces.²

Another aspect of social change which was accelerated by the war and which continued into the post-war era was a social disruption which carried with it suggestions, perhaps illusory, of the collapse of social class-barriers. One historian estimated that during the war there were over 60 million changes of address (well beyond the total population); two out of every seven houses were affected by bomb damage, while the number of foreign troops garrisoned in England rose at one point to 1 1½ million.³ The inter-war years had, of course, seen a growing readiness among the unemployed to move in search of work, most notably from South Wales to the industrial Midlands, but the scale of the wartime upheaval was unprecedented, and in this respect the war seems to have marked a permanent widening of the social horizons of the British people.

The most striking facet of this disruption from the educational point of view was evacuation. Over 750,000 children were evacuated from the urban centres in September 1939: within a few months a half had drifted back, to present a spectre of idle children (in many cases schools had been closed or requisitioned for other purposes) which galvanised those involved in the debate on educational reconstruction. There has been much interest in the extent to which evacuation led to a heightened sense of social distance between these town children and their hosts in the rural areas, but historians are beginning to realise that of at least equal significance may be the ways in which the process deepened the social rifts between evacuees. There is some evidence that working-class children may have had real difficulty in adjusting to the demands of evacuation, and in some cases may have suffered permanently from the experience, while children from more favoured social groups may have benefited in the long term from the wider range of experiences which evacuation entailed.⁴

These traumas led directly to wartime planning for the reconstruction of society, and it was clear from quite early in the war that education was to be assigned an important role in this process. As early as February 1940 the Archbishop of Canterbury told the House of Lords that far-reaching social changes must accrue from the war, and on 21 December 1941 a letter to The Times from an ecumenical grouping of church leaders nominated ten principles for the establishment of peace, one of which was ‘equality of educational opportunity’.⁵ A year later the Beveridge Report spelt out the programme necessary for the establishment of a comprehensive system of social security, and established education, together with health, housing and full employment, as the four major planks in the drive towards the permanent achievement of a fairer society.

There were, though, a series of deep-seated reasons for the fact that the educational settlement which emerged from the wartime disruption was essentially conservative in nature. First, the involvement of the Churches in the debate, added to the fact that the war seemed to take on increasingly the aspect of a religious crusade against Nazism, meant that in any settlement the dual system would be sustained and the Christian underpinning of English education would be confirmed. Although the 1944 Bill was presented in the Commons by its supporters as ‘a revolutionary Bill, the answer to the secularism of the century’,⁶ it was, through its deference to the Established Church (Temple, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, a lifelong educationalist was particularly vociferous in the debate) in reality an assertion of the status quo.

Also, the educational settlement which was hammered out in a series of wartime policy documents and enshrined in the 1944 Act was in essence a vindication of Board of Education policy, and to this extent too it held out a limited vision of the prospect of educational reform. This arose partly from the fact that the politics of the 1930s were still awaiting implementation. The 1936 Education Act had been postponed on the outbreak of war, and the raising of the school-leaving age to 15 + remained a pressing need. Thanks to the influence of the psychometricians, who had concerned themselves increasingly with cognition and ‘types of mind’ during the pre-war years, the Board of Education was ready to take on board Labour...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One Implementing the ACT, 1945–1951
• Part Two Education For an Affluent Society, 1951–1964
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index