The British Education System

“Neither social justice nor economic efficiency have ever been the real priorities in Britain’s education policy and it shows.”


It would be foolish to condemn both economic efficiency and social justice as failures in Britain’s education policy. As Sanderson has revealingly concluded : very often throughout the 20th Century, both concepts have not been wholly mutually exclusive. Indeed, Sanderson cites the desire for social justice and Britain’s post-war economic malaise as inter-linked, with a causal relationship. We may identify that, in the post-1945 equality-geared social environment, education was adapted by both political parties to fit a general scheme of encouraging social justice : equality of opportunity and outcome for all social classes. However, this had not always been the case in British educational policy : and thus this essay shall attempt to argue that real social justice as a priority has only really been implemented after 1945, and then its results were mixed. Egalitarian educational policy has not proven enough to shake the rigid class system which still often determines which type of schooling a child receives : even more so at higher education level and university, which are still dominated by the children of the middle-classes. We may observe that before 1945, British educational policy was dominated not through any desire to change the existing system, but merely to modernise and extend schooling to the general populace. The crucial shift in education policy : that of the post-war drive for social justice, in turn had an adverse affect upon economic efficiency : only 1.2% of secondary school children attended Technical Schools between 1947-1962, schools geared to train children technologically and provide crucial links with industry. Therefore it would be wrong to claim that neither social justice nor economic efficiency have ever been real priorities in Britain’s education policy : the latter has been sacrificed in recent decades for the former, and considerable attempts have been made (despite the limitations of the British system) to engender social justice within education.

Despite entrenched institutions in the 19th Century, the development of publicly-subsidised education after 1833, followed by the development of state-provided education after 1870 was one of the most remarkable applications of the principle of state intervention prior to 1914. In 1839, the governments establishment of the Privy Council Committee on Education helped the scale and scope of government support for education increase significantly. The introduction of capitations grants for individual pupils in 1853 marked the first kind of adoption of social justice in the realms of education : granted, its effect was highly limited, but the seeds were sewn for future progress. However, there are more negative instances with regard to government involvement with education, for example in 1862 the Vice-President of the Education Committee Lowe told the House of Commons that its preferred solution, after investigating the state of educational provision, “if the schools do not give instruction, the public money will not be demanded, but if instruction is given, the public money will be demanded.” Lowe himself argued that the purpose of ‘payment by results’ was not to reduce educational expenditure, but to ensure governmental finance achieved positive results. The period 1833-1870 undoubtedly witnessed some major changes and improvements in educational provision : the number attending increased, quality of educational provision improved and literacy rates also increased. However, poorer families simply could not afford to send their children to even subsidised elementary schools, and secondary education or even university was simply out of the question. The Forster Education Bill 1870 brought about a significant change here. The advent of parliamentary reform led to the election of a new government with a majority to embark upon substantial legislative programmes and, in the long term, forced bipartisan governments to give much greater consideration to the ways in which changes in educational policy could be used to win support from working-class voters. The Forster Bill however, has been attacked for its alleged failure to recognise the importance of the different forms of privately funded education which was already on offer. West argues that the government deliberately ignored the success of voluntary and private institutions, and that the advent of direct state intervention led to a reduction, not an enhancement, in educational progress. Many children continued to live in areas where the rate of school attendance was comparatively low and the standard of provision inadequate. It did not make state education universal, compulsory or free.

The fees charged by elementary schools were still a major stumbling block for working class parents wanting to send their children to school. The 1876 Sandon Act imposed a duty on the parents of every child to “cause such child to receive efficient elementary instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic” - and only in 1880 was education compulsory nationwide. Sandon attempted to extend the principle of free education to areas which were not covered by school boards by transferring the power to remit school fees to the Boards of Guardians, but many parents refused to apply to the Guardians because of their association with the Poor Law, therefore very few children received the benefits of free education. However, in 1891 legislation was finally passed which resulted in the vast majority of elementary school children being exempted from school fees. The MP for Merionethshire Ellis argued the measure could be justified, “on the grounds of social justice” and thus marks the high point in 19th century education legislation. However, it was avowedly concerned with the question of elementary education, and did not attempt to provide the vast majority (the working class) of children with anything further. By the end of the 19th century, therefore, it was compulsory for all children to undergo a recognised form of education aged 5-12 : and yet there was no real sense of societal justice, the rich and affluent only progressed to higher levels of education, and no effort was made by the state in an attempt to rectify this by providing equality of opportunity for the children of the working class. Such attempts were first engendered by the Liberal governments during the Edwardian period : in 1907, the Liberals attempted to increase the proportion of working class children taking up places in secondary schools by offering a higher grant to schools which made 25% of their places available free of charge. The 1918 Education Act, which became possible through a growing demand for enhanced educational opportunities before the war, had been conceived of to provide enlarged and enriched opportunities of education to the children of the poor. It gave local authorities the power to establish nursery schools for the under 5’s, abolished fees in public elementary schools once and for all and raised the minimum leaving age to 14 across the nation. However, despite high hopes aroused by the Act’s terms, it failed to achieve many of its most important objectives : the proposals to establish both nursery schools and continuation classes for children after they left school failed to survive the initial round of public expenditure cuts in 1921. There had therefore been some attempt at social justice : yet not significant enough to engender real change.

The real problem for engineering social justice lay, by 1922, in the secondary schools. The Labour Party statement from 1922, Secondary Education For All, stated, “the improvement of primary education and the development of public secondary education to such a point that all normal children, irrespective of the income, class and occupation of their parents may stay in secondary school until 16.” The adoption of the ‘Hadow Reorganisation’ in 1926 moved for a clear break at 11 - and, to a large extent, institutionalised the principle of ‘selection by differentiation’ and reinforced the position of the selective secondary school at the apex of the post-primary education system. However, the failure to raise the leaving age to 16 reflected the deep divisions the subject aroused. It was widely recognised that many working class parents would only be prepared to allow their children to remain at school if they were offered maintenance as compensation for the cost of keeping their children in school : this merely added to government fears that an increase in the school leaving age would lead to a substantial increase in government spending. Fisher’s 1919 Committee to investigate scholarships and free places found that a minimum of 400,000 children were being prevented from taking up places at secondary schools for which they were academically qualified and thus recommended the number of free places to be raised to 40% by 1921 : yet the Geddes Committee urged the government to abandon any plans for increasing the number of free places, and its figure remained lower than the 40% proposed by Fisher. Floud’s research demonstrates that if anything, there appeared to be a widening gap between the educational opportunities offered to children of social classes 1-4 (professional, managerial, supervisory) and those from 5-7 (skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled workers). Heath and Clifford have argued that even though the gap between the proportion of children from affluence backgrounds who attended secondary schools and the proportion of working class children attending these same schools may have widened in absolute terms, it also narrowed in relative terms because the proportional increase in the attendance rates of children from poorer backgrounds was larger. However, even if the gap did narrow, it remained the case that only one in ten working class children attended secondary schools before World War II , as compared with over half from social classes 1-3. Therefore there still existed a substantial gap between the educational chances of higher classed children and the chances of children from the lower classes by the end of the interwar period.

Many have further proposed that the methods used to select children for secondary school places favoured the child from a middle class background. Oral interviews and written tests often used language and reference points much more familiar to the middle class candidates. The interwar years have further been seen as ones of stagnation in the field of higher education. The failure of the 1919 University Grants Committee meant that universities continued to draw the majority of their funds from endowments, local authority grants, tuition and other fees. In 1920, the government introduced state scholarships in order to enable disadvantaged students to take up places - yet only around 360 scholarships were being awarded annually by the end of the 1930s. Floud argued that the gap between university prospects of children from state as opposed to private secondary schools actually expanded. When she compared the educational experiences of children born before 1910 with those born between 1910-1929, she found that the proportion of children from social classes 5-7 who attended university increased only from 0.47% to 0.74%, whilst from classes 1-4 it went from 3.05% to 6.26%. We must question whether social justice was ever really engineering between 1876-1935. Both Gilbert and Simon regarded the interwar years as failures in education policy. Sanderson characterised the period 1914-1944 as one of “missed opportunities”. Gordon, Aldrich and Dean wrote that, “in spite of various innovations the overall verdict on this period must be one of stagnation rather than progress.” The period up to 1944 left the country with inadequate secondary, further and higher education, particularly in terms of science and technology, inadequacies which were soon to be reflected in the country’s relative economic decline. Some have heralded the advent of the Butler Education Act of 1944 as the turning point, which sought to extend secondary education to all while implementing a number of substantial reforms aimed at, “removing the disparity between the amount and quality of education received by children from different classes.” Most significantly, these included the raising of the school leaving age to 15, a clean break between primary and secondary education (setting in place a clear hierarchical ladder) and further steps to help the poorer families deal with sending their children to school for so long : such as free school meals. Yet there was very little in the Act which was innovative, with the Hadow Report advocating in 1926 the raising of the school leaving age. Adonis and Pollard further claim that the reforms of the Act merely replaced one differential with another that was equally biased against the working classes : raising the leaving age led to demands for higher levels of qualification, however children from working class families were still only entering higher education, such as colleges or university, in very small numbers.

By 1956 the very system of secondary education through which the 1944 Act had been expected to secure greater equality of opportunity was attacked by Crosland as “divisive, unjust and wasteful.” However, the period 1954-63 was one of unprecedented educational expansion and expenditure. Under the stimulus of the 1958 white paper, Secondary Education For All : A New Drive, a major attempt was made to modernise secondary education. Yet the failings of the tripartite system of secondary modern, technical and grammar schools : coupled with the increasingly recognised fallibility of the 11-plus examinations led to a shift in Labour policy after 1953 to a commitment to comprehensive education engendering social equality. Labour’s egalitarianism was further sustained by Heath from 1970, over 3000 new comprehensives were established and in 1972 the school leaving age finally raised to 16. The replacement of the 11-plus with the comprehensive system supposedly ushered in a new phase of social justice : Sanderson associating the dreaded 11-plus with “too close a relationship of selection and success with social class background.” Tripartism was thus condemned for being highly conservative : instead of providing genuine equality of opportunity it reflected and reinforced social inequality. However, as the number of comprehensives grew, so too did the demand for private education : increasing affluence enabled those middle class parents who so desired to secure the ‘best possible’ education for their children : therefore, due to the inherent nature of British classes and patterns of spending, it would be ultimately impossible to engineer total social justice as Crosland had envisaged, with every child attending a state comprehensive school.

With regards to economic efficiency, research undertaken by Sanderson has revealed illuminating insights into the relationship between the continued drive for social justice and its affect upon economic efficiency. Sanderson highlights an essential dilemma of attitudes to the educational system which underlies contemporary development since 1945. This was the dilemma of the ‘right to rise’ versus ‘the needs of industry’, and he remarks, “it is not inevitable that there should be a conflict between the social justice and industrial motives in education.” We may trace such a conflict back even to the interwar period : the overall rate of growth of junior and senior technical schools was extremely slow : in 1938 there were only 31,516 children attending all types of junior technical schools as compared with 470,003 in selective secondary schools and 5,091,975 in public elementary schools. Many local authorities were reluctant to incur the costs associated with the construction and equipment of technical schools and they received little support from the employers whose future workforces they were supposed to be training. At the end of the Second World War the key assumption with regards to education was the firm belief in its capacity to bring about equality of opportunity ; expanding educational opportunities would bring about greater social justice in keeping with the “People’s War” idealism of the time. This has created crucial areas where a concern about education for social justice or expanding opportunities has been at odds with the need for education for industrial efficiency. The former has too often been allowed precedence over the latter, and thus a negative relationship emerges. The fate of the secondary technical schools can be used as a prime example of the neglect to economic efficiency. These did not grow to produce the technicians needed by British industry. They declined in number from 321 in 1947 to 225 in 1976. Venables created a ratio of all the secondary school children attending the three different types of school, technical, grammar and secondary modern : the results were startling, 1:7:17 - his conclusion is fitting, that “the ratio provokes grave doubts as to whether this is a proportion appropriate to the needs of a commercial and industrial nation.” The technical schools were further damage by a trade union suspicion that they would lead to an over-production of the skilled technician class driving down their wage levels. The post-war Labour Education Ministers considered that they best served the interests of the working classes who supported their party by accepting the basic assumptions of the 1944 Act and downplaying the technical school. By 1961 London had 59 comprehensives, 21 grammars and only 5 technical schools. The basic politics of the situation was that the Conservatives were concerned to defend the grammar school and to resist the comprehensive at almost any cost : therefore, with neither left nor right deeply committed to a tripartist system the loser was the separate technical school. Ministers such as Sir Edward Boyle and civil servants such as Morrell dismissed the technical schools worth : claiming that the grammar schools could do anything that they could. However, the technical schools did have an overlooked ethos disposed towards industry which the grammar schools lacked. They were linked with local technical colleges which had the direct links with local industry and firms that grammar schools did not.

However, the true undermining of the technical schools can be witness through their absorption into the comprehensive schools of the 1960’s : after all, the motives behind comprehensivisation were predominantly those of social justice. The technical schools were swallowed up by grammar and comprehensive schools on grounds of social justice, equality and expanding opportunities. Sanderson notes that, “this is increasingly recognised as one of the most serious deficiencies of the educational system and a major cause of the skill shortage which weakens British industry even in times of high employment.” With regards to higher education, the pattern is relatively similar. The expansion of the new universities in the 1960s was another area where interests of social justice predominated over the needs of industry. 29% of science department of these new universities (such as York and Lancaster) had no contact with industry by 1970. There was thus a clash between higher education for technology and industry and expansion as an act of social justice in which a swing away from science and technology was inevitable. Technological universities (Bath, Brunel, Aston for example) created in 1966 were in the position of wanting to expand to serve industry but being committee to areas where there was insufficient student demand : UMIST had 20% of places unfulfilled in 1964. The polytechnics were another example where the pursuit of growth and diversity led to a diversification of purpose away from their prime concerns to industry. They began a ‘policy drift’ away from their technical purposes, expanding by seeking more students in the arts and social studies. The Vice-Chancellor of a technological university noted of the polytechnics : “given a choice between status and industrial and economic relevance, status wins every time.” The government further accepted these increased numbers as it enabled them to point to the general expansion of ‘higher education’ to mask the cuts imposed on the universities in the 1980’s. Furthermore, the polytechnics and the Open University have catered for women and mature students’ education which did not include aspirations to a career in industry. Sanderson notes that economic efficiency was sacrificed for, “the excessive English reverence for a humanities based liberal education and a reciprocal disparagement for the technical and the vocational.” From the Victorian period to the 1930s technical education was seen specifically as the education appropriate for artisans and directly relevant for industrial occupations. Yet since 1945 something broader has been favoured as a more general education : highlighted succinctly by a comment from the Ministry of Education in 1959, “the new concept is that the technical colleges are first and foremost centres of continued education, not of narrow vocational education.”

There have been notable achievements in English education in this period - the ladder of opportunity provided by the grammar schools, the eradication of the unfairness in this by the comprehensives, the expansion of independent schools catering for new cohorts of the middle classes and the educational equality for females. Yet the achievements have been chiefly in the fields of expanding and emphasising opportunities rather than in the generation of productive knowledge and specialised skills for industry. The over-concern with expanding numbers and opportunities has therefore forced establishments into the cheaper alternatives of the humanities and away from the more expensive, yet industrially relevant technical education. To conclude, priorities in educational development have been argued in terms of social justice rather than economic return. Therefore we cannot claim that neither social justice nor economic efficiency have ever been real priorities in Britain’s education policy : it seems as though one has been sacrificed for the other.


Bibliography

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G. Sutherland, “Education” in Cambridge Social History of Britain vol.3
B. Harris, The origins of the welfare state
M. Sanderson, “Social equity and industrial need since 1945”, in A. Gourvish and A. O’ Day, Britain since 1945
G. Sutherland, Ability, merit and measurement
B. Simon, Education and the social order 1940-1990
M. Sanderson, Educational opportunity and social change
P. Brown, Schooling ordinary kids
A. Adonis, A class act