Education Policy

Ian Abbott, Michael Rathbone, Phillip Whitehead, SAGE Publications Ltd

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857025777, 9780857025760
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

?A splendid read. Via interviews with several Secretaries of State for Education and a supporting analytical commentary, Education Policy provides a fascinating insight and historical appraisal of English policy rationale?
-Dr David Kitchener, Reader in Education, University of Bolton

?This book should be compulsory reading, not only for people interested in the history of education policy but also for policy makers, to remind them of what has gone before?
-Dr Andrew Townsend, University of Nottingham

From Butler to Balls and beyond, this essential book illuminates educational issues in England and Wales since WWII, drawing on extensive documentary evidence. Inside you will find in-depth interviews with former Secretaries of State for Education and other key decision-makers, including:

- Ed Balls

- David Blunkett

- Michael Gove

- Alan Johnson

- Ruth Kelly

The interviews cover the historical context of their period of office and the lasting legacy of their policies.

This is a must-read for Masters-level students on Education courses and PGCE programmes, and will be valuable to undergraduates studying modern history and social policy.

Ian Abbott is Director of the Warwick Institute of Education.

Mike Rathbone was previously Director of Continuing Professional Development in the Institute of Education.

Phil Whitehead is the course leader for the secondary PGCE (Teach First).

All are at the University of Warwick.

SECTION 1

1945 –1979: THE POSTWAR CONSENSUS

Preamble

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The end of the Second World War marked a period of massive social reforms in the creation of the welfare state which was established to end the absolute poverty and depression of the 1930s. It also marked the beginning of a huge increase in the role of the state in terms of the extension of state planning and collectivism, and the 1942 Beveridge Report introduced momentous changes in welfare, health and education which were aimed at reducing poverty. Although this was also a period of traumatic economic and social change there were high expectations of a new welfare world after the war and a great deal of optimism in all sectors of society. Between 1944 and the mid-1970s the differences between the two major political parties on educational policy were comparatively small and there was agreement that in order to reduce poverty and improve health, housing and education there needed to be full employment and significant improvements in welfare provision.

It was the Labour Party, in office from 1945 to 1951, that had the responsibility for implementing the programme of social reform and reconstruction. The Conservative Party, which was in office for 13 years from 1951 to 1964, made no serious attempts to reverse the Labour policies of 1945–51.

From 1945 to 1979 there were 20 Ministers of Education (later, in 1964, to become Secretaries of State for Education) representing the two main political parties (for a full list see the Appendix at the end of the book) and they each played their part in defining the postwar consensus on the purpose of education.

During this period the volume of educational reform is reflected in the large number of significant education acts, reports, circulars and initiatives that were instigated by the Ministers of Education and the Secretaries of State. These in turn reflect the dominant issues that were being debated and discussed by educationalists, sociologists, the media and the political parties. They also reflect the sets of values that informed these debates and discussions. Some of the key reforms focused on ‘secondary education for all’, the tripartite system, educational inequality and ‘educational opportunity for all’, selection and streaming, ‘wastage of talent’, comprehensivisation, the curriculum and the public schools.

The 1944 Education Act was one of the most important pieces of legislation in the twentieth century and it emerged from the consensus between the major political parties, the churches and the education service. It provided a framework for the education system until the whole-scale reforms introduced by the 1988 Education Reform Act.

Following the 1944 Act there was unprecedented expansion across all phases of education with many more pupils in primary, junior and secondary schools, more young people and adults using further education, more teachers recruited and trained, and an ambitious school building programme – all of which inevitably needed considerable state funding.

However, during the period under review there were economic, social and political events, such as slumps and economic recession, overseas competition and the oil crisis in the early 1970s, which all affected the proportion of Gross Domestic Product spent on education, and it is clear that Ministers of Education almost always had to fight battles with the Treasury to secure adequate funding to implement change and reform.

Through the 1960s arguments about the comprehensive reorganisation of secondary education and the end of selection continued, and there were as Chitty (2009: xiii) points out: ‘local political battles over comprehensive schooling in the 1950s and 1960s’.

The 1960s witnessed substantial changes in important questions associated with the curriculum: the nature and organisation of the curriculum, approaches to teaching and learning, assessment and issues around motivation and teacher and pupil identities. For the first time, challenges to the control of many of these issues came from the government and from a growing number of educational pressure groups.

While access to education broadened overall during the 1960s and 1970s, there were still considerable inequalities suffered by working-class pupils compared to their middle-class counterparts. The private system was relatively untouched by developments in the state sector, and consequently the public schools continued to confer advantages on their pupils.

The ‘Black Papers’, a collection of right-wing articles published between 1969 and 1977, were significant because they attacked ‘the associated concepts of comprehensive education, egalitarianism and “progressive” teaching methods’ (Chitty, 2009: 28). The ‘Black Papers’ added to the general feeling ‘in the country’ that education in England and Wales was increasingly characterised by a fall in general standards, ill-discipline and inappropriate progressive teaching methods.

The 1970s were a period of transition and change within the education system against a turbulent economic, social and political background. There was a definite shift from the relatively consensual discourse about the role and relationship of education and the economy, articulated emphatically in Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin College speech and to some extent in the ‘Great Debate’ about education. Key concerns about the autonomy of teachers, the relationship between the teachers’ unions, local education authorities and central government, the purposes and construction of the curriculum, and the relationships between parents and schools, were irrevocably changed during this period.

Victory by the Conservatives in the 1979 election presented opportunities for the ‘free market’ approach to education which challenged the taken-for granted assumptions of the postwar democratic consensus.

CHAPTER ONE

1944 –1960: THE POSTWAR CONSENSUS: EDUCATION FOR ALL?

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• The religious question
• Private schooling
• The role of the state, the LEAs and the teaching profession
• The eleven plus, selection and streaming
• The drive towards comprehensivisation

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Introduction

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Following the end of the Second World War there was a desire by all political parties not to return to the problems of the 1930s and to introduce widespread social and economic reconstruction. The 1944 Education Act recognised the importance of education in raising living standards and enhancing social mobility. Secondary education to 15 was made compulsory, and free school meals and milk were introduced with a range of other welfare services. Children were segregated at the age of eleven by ability and aptitude into grammar, technical and modern schools. However, education was accepted by Labour and Conservative politicians as a major feature of the welfare state.

This chapter, which will focus on the period 1944–60, will examine that postwar consensus and also some of the tensions that started to appear during this period. McCulloch (2002: 35) provides an appropriate summary of the main focus of this period: ‘… a period during which an initial experiment with a so-called “tripartite” system of different types of secondary schools eventually gave way to a model of a single type of school designed for all abilities and aptitudes, the comprehensive school.’ As well as discussing the drive towards comprehensivisation, this chapter will also consider some key issues relating to key reports and publications, with a main focus on the contributions of Education Secretaries (Ministers until 1964). The issues that will be discussed include: the 1944 Education Act, the different phases of education and ‘secondary education for all’, the drive towards comprehensivisation, the end of selection, the religious question and private schooling. There will also be references to the relationship between central government, the local education authorities and the teaching profession.

Context

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Political, social and economic

The end of the Second World War marked a period of massive social reforms in the creation of the welfare state which was established to end the absolute poverty and depression of the 1930s. It also marked the beginning of a huge increase in the role of the state in terms of the extension of state planning and collectivism. This was a period of traumatic economic and social change but there were high expectations of a new welfare world after the war and a great deal of optimism in all sectors of society. Carr and Hartnett (1996) in their discussion of postwar reconstruction note how the increased demand for improved public education came to be embedded in the commitment to the right to employment, family allowances, improved old age pensions, health, housing and education as enshrined in the 1942 Beveridge Report, Social Insurance and Allied Services. In the Report which received widespread support, Beveridge outlined in principle the concept of the welfare state and one of the five ‘giant evils’ in society, Ignorance, would be combated by the 1944 Education Act.

The period 1944–60, in retrospect, might be described as a fairly lengthy era of uneven growth and opportunity characterised, as Kogan (1978: 27) suggests, in terms of three interwoven themes:

• the rise of expectations as to how the ‘Opportunity State’ would offer widened educational chances as part of the good life;
• the related expansion of the economy and changing distribution of its products;
• demographic pressures and fluctuations.

Initially, however, Britain was only just beginning to recover from the war efforts and despite a postwar boom in some industries and the growing service industry, as Jones (2003) argues, there was a lack of investment compared to other European countries and competition from these countries. Britain was also heavily reliant on American loans to fund the new welfare state. Thus, in terms of the realities of instigating ambitious changes and reforms, Barber (1994: 188) notes, for example, that ‘the Labour Government of 1945–51 had to work on a mass of competing priorities with strictly limited resources.’ The following section identifies the some of these priorities.

Labour in office 1945–51

Labour came into government with a landslide majority. There were enormous challenges within the education system (Hughes, 1979). During the war years there had been considerable debate about the purposes and structure of postwar Britain, and there was profound agreement on the need to remodel post-primary education, raise the school-leaving age to 15, provide free school meals and milk, implement a system of part-time education beyond the statutory leaving age and provide adequate health and welfare services for schoolchildren. Within these key priorities the government also had to develop strategies for dealing with the desperate shortage of school buildings and teachers to cope with the expansion of the system. For example, the Emergency Training Scheme was introduced which brought for the first time into schools on a large scale young men and women with experience of life outside school or college. The scheme which ran between 1945 and 1951 provided 35,000 additional teachers who qualified after just one year’s training. At the same time a special ‘Huts on Raising of the School Leaving Age’ plan was initiated using temporary accommodation in an attempt to cope with the parlous state of school buildings. This might explain why the Cabinet was keen to postpone the raising of the school-leaving age in order to save money on an extensive and new school building programme and the costs of additional teachers’ salaries.

However, as Fieldhouse (1994: 287) notes: ‘Despite the 1945 Labour Government’s commitment to social reform, it did not have a very radical education policy beyond its determination to implement the 1944 Education Act and raise the school-leaving age to fifteen.’

Schools and colleges

In the following sections the origins of the Act and its passage into legislation are briefly described and key issues such as the ‘religious question’, private schooling and the relationship between the state, the local education authorities (LEAs) and the teaching profession are discussed.

The 1944 Education Act and related issues

The Second World War brought to a halt a number of reforms which had been developed in the 1930s, for example the raising of the school-leaving age from 14 to 15 due to be implemented in 1939, the reorganisation of elementary education as proposed in the 1926 Hadow Report, and the 1938 Spens Report on the secondary curriculum. There were increasing demands recognised by the Board of Education from the public and the media for significant changes in the education system in the postwar period.

In 1939, the majority of children in England and Wales attended a 5–11 school and then transferred to a senior elementary school or the senior department of an elementary school to complete the final three years of compulsory education, or they attended an ‘all-through’ elementary school. Barber (1994: 1) suggests that ‘80 per cent of children received no further formal education after the age of fourteen’ when they left to join the labour market.

It should be noted that a small minority of elementary school pupils (just over 14 per cent in 1938) had been given the opportunity to transfer to secondary schools at the age of 10 or 11.

It was very different for middle- and upper-class children, admittedly a minority of the overall school-age population, who attended fee-paying day grammar schools or else had access to the separate public school system. The issue of public school education was a major issue for the incoming Labour government of 1945 and will be discussed later in this chapter.

The types of schooling, which served different classes or groups in society, in existence in the immediate postwar period, are identified by Chitty (2009: 20–1) as follows:

• the so-called public schools;
• the direct grant grammar schools;
• the grammar schools;
• a small group of technical, ‘central’ and other types of ‘trade’ schools;
• the new ‘secondary modern’ schools;
• the old, unreorganised ‘all-age’ elementary schools.

Reference is made to each of these ‘types’ in the following discussion.

In 1941, a detailed document which became known as the Green Book was produced: Education After the War. This took the form of a memorandum from the Board of Education and was circulated confidentially to a variety of organisations to canvass opinions about educational reforms. Chitty (2009: 114) notes that the Green Book ‘contained many of the proposals which were first presented to Parliament in 1943 and eventually became the 1944 Act.’ R. A. Butler became President of the Board of Education at the Prime Minister’s (Churchill) request in 1942 and began the massive task of developing and steering an education bill through Parliament using the Green Book as a foundation upon which to act.

The Education Act of 1944 emerged out of a democratic consensus between the coalition wartime government, the churches and the education service (Tomlinson, 2005). It marked the beginnings of what was to become the most comprehensive and expansionary phase in English education since the 1870 Education Act and introduced widespread reforms across all sectors of education: primary, secondary, further and higher education. The Act followed the publication of a number of key policy and discussion documents.

At its heart, the 1944 Act introduced free secondary education for all, raised the school leaving age to 15 from 1947 (with a further rise to 16 at a later date) and established a tripartite system of education. It was clear that ‘secondary education for all’ would be part of a continuous process ranging from the primary sector, through the secondary sector and then into further or higher education.

Earlier, it was noted that the 1944 Act was based upon the 1938 Report of the Spens Committee and the 1943 Report of the Norwood Committee. The former had argued that educational provision post-eleven was inappropriate and its authors outlined a system based on a tripartite division into modern schools, grammar schools and technical high schools. It should also be noted that Spens Committee also recognised the importance of social and cultural background in pupils’ gaining acce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• List of Abbreviation
• Introduction
• Section 1: 1945 –1979: The Postwar Consensus
• Section 2: 1979 –1997: Marketisation and Competition
• Section 3: 1997 –2010: Blair and Beyond
• 10. 2010 and Beyond: Interesting Times
• Appendix: Table of Ministers/Secretaries of State 1945–Present
• References
• Index