Schooling and Social Change Since 1760: Creating Inequalities through Education 9780815347163, 9781351169561

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. An age of revolutions, 1760–1830
2. Workshop of the world, 1830–1895
3. Embedding privilege: The charitable status of elite schools
4. Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914
5. Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939
6. ‘The safeguard of social stratification’: Education, 1939–1979
7. Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

‘This book performs the important civic service of showing the ways in which the English education system has worked consistently for over two centuries to sustain and reinforce those inequalities which continue to be such a marked feature of contemporary English society. Clearly written and well-organised, the detailed narrative shows fully how the careful and critical study of education over the long term is such a valuable perspective from which to study British society.’ Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Policy, University of Cambridge ‘An essential guide to the troubling history of educational inequalities in the UK and how they explain our contemporary social problems.’ Gary McCulloch, Brian Simon Professor of History of Education, UCL Institute of Education

Schooling and Social Change Since 1760

Schooling and Social Change Since 1760 offers a powerful critique of the situation of British education today and shows the historical processes that have helped generate the crisis confronting policymakers and practitioners at the present time. The book identifies the key phases of economic and social change since 1760 and shows how the education system has played a central role in embedding, sustaining and deepening social distinctions in Britain. Covering the whole period since the first industrialization, it gives a detailed account of the development of a deeply divided education system that leads to quite separate lifestyles for those from differing backgrounds. The book develops arguments of inequalities through a much-needed account of the changes in education. This book will be of great interest for academics, scholars and post-graduate students in the field of history of education and education politics. It will also appeal to administrators, teachers and policymakers, especially those interested in the historical development of schooling. Roy Lowe is one of Britain’s best-known historians of education, having published extensively over a long period on the history of schools and universities. He was for some years President of the UK History of Education Society and was awarded an OBE for services to education in 2002.

Routledge Research in Education

This series aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. It is not confined to any particular area or school of thought and seeks to provide coverage of a broad range of topics, theories and issues from around the world. Recent titles in the series include: Curriculum and the Generation of Utopia Interrogating the Current State of Critical Curriculum Theory João M. Paraskeva Sport, Physical Education, and Social Justice Religious, Sociological, Psychological, and Capability Perspectives Edited by Nick J. Watson, Grant Jarvie and Andrew Parker Quality and Equity in Education Revisiting Theory and Research on Educational Effectiveness and Improvement Leonidas Kyriakides, Bert P.M. Creemers, Anastasia Panayiotou, & Evi Charalambous Creative Learning in Digital and Virtual Environments Opportunities and Challenges of Technology-Enabled Learning and Creativity Edited by Vlad P. Gla˘ veanu, Ingunn Johanne Ness, and Constance de Saint Laurent Reconceptualizing the Role of Critical Dialogue in American Classrooms Promoting Equity through Dialogic Education Edited by Amanda Kibler, Guadalupe Valdés and Aída Walqui Pioneering Perspectives in Cooperative Learning Theory, Research, and Classroom Practice for Diverse Approaches to CL Edited by Neil Davidson For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Education/book-series/SE0393

Schooling and Social Change Since 1760 Creating Inequalities through Education

Roy Lowe

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Roy Lowe The right of Roy Lowe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-815-34716-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-16956-1 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is dedicated to three people Jorge Mascaro David Quinn and Mohammed Shah Without their expertise and dedicated care this book would not have been written. They represent the very best of our National Health Service. I dedicate this book to them, and to all their colleagues who were there for me when I needed them, with my unfailing gratitude.

‘The hereditary curse upon English education is its organisation on lines of social class’ RH Tawney, Equality, Allen and Unwin, London, 1931, p. 143. Illustration by Yannick Wojtan

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

x xi xii

1

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

1

2

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

30

3

Embedding privilege: The charitable status of elite schools

60

4

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

75

5

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

93

6

‘The safeguard of social stratification’: Education, 1939–1979

111

7

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

135

Conclusion

170

Index

177

Preface

The coronavirus crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement are among the many recent developments that have made it crystal clear that Britain is a divided society. This book explains how, over the most recent 250 years, the education system has played a central role in embedding, sustaining and deepening social distinctions in Britain. It is written in the belief that, despite popular claims that education promotes social mobility, the contrasting life chances of those of a different gender, ethnicity, social class and region are due, in considerable part, to what goes on in schools, colleges and universities. The book identifies the key phases of economic and social change since 1760 and shows how the education system is closely intertwined with these developments and can only be fully understood in this context. Covering the whole period since the first industrialization, it gives a detailed account of the development of a deeply divided education system, which leads to quite separate lifestyles for those from differing backgrounds. Written by one of Britain’s best-known historians of education, and based on a lifetime of research in this field, this book will be of interest to all who wish to familiarize themselves with an important aspect of the development of modern British society. This is the first book to develop a synoptic historical analysis of this kind in a single, accessible volume. It presents a controversial and carefully argued case that has important implications for policymakers, and will be of interest not only to research scholars and students of education but also to the wider public.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the help, encouragement and support I have received from several people. First I must thank Jenny Ku (Hsiao-Yuh Ku) who made the original suggestion that I might write this book, and who, at every stage of its writing, has proved an extremely reliable and insightful proof-reader and commentator. Numerous other colleagues and good friends have offered advice and comment. Peter Cunningham, Simon Szreter and Gary McCulloch have all read parts of the text and given greatly valued comment and insightful criticism. Encouragement and support has also come from Vincent Carpentier, Geoff Sheringham, Tom O’Donoghue, Man Miao, Yoshihito Yasuhara, Yoko Yamasaki, Sir Dexter Hutt, Peter Weatherall, Cameron Bradley, Finlay Wojtan and in particular Brian Dempsey, whose witty reflections on the text have kept me grounded. I thank too colleagues at Routledge, in particular Emilie Coin and Will Bateman, who have offered constructive advice and assistance throughout. Particular thanks also to Cecily Blench and Justine Bottles for their careful and detailed work in getting the book to press. Yannick Wojtan’s graphic design enhances the appearance of the work enormously. I thank him too. My thanks also go to Taylor and Francis (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 0046760X.2019.1674932) for their permission to include extracts from my recently published work, which appeared in History of Education (R. Lowe, ‘The charitable status of elite schools: the origins of a national scandal’, History of Education, 49, 1, pp. 4–17). As ever, my wife Kathy gave her help and support at every turn, with detailed proof-reading and suggestions for amendments and redrafting based on her experiences during a long career as a classroom teacher, and our shared perceptions of what is wrong with the English education system and of what might be done about it. As ever, her forbearance and tolerance went well beyond the call of duty. My thanks go to all these people. Without their support and encouragement it would not have been possible to write this book. I emphasize, though, that any shortcomings of the text, as well as any judgements I make and the opinions I express in it, are all entirely my own responsibility. Roy Lowe

Introduction

Education in England: intentions and outcomes I have spent a lifetime thinking about, researching and writing about schools and schooling in modern Britain.1 Over time, my work on the historical development of the English education system has driven me reluctantly to the inescapable conclusion that schools and colleges have been the melting pot in which the multiple inequalities that are now a major characteristic of our society have been promoted, confirmed and institutionalized. As I will seek to show in this book, this has happened for several reasons, but two of them lie within the education system itself. The first is that, for over two centuries, the attempt to establish a fairer and more equal society has never been more than one among many of the stated intentions of those arguing and working for the provision of educational facilities. Over long periods of time this aspiration has been more notable for its omission than for its inclusion. Today’s popular preconception that schooling is about the establishment, among other things, of a fairer society is a relatively recent phenomenon. Further, educators have generated some outcomes that were precisely those that they intended to avoid, or at least that were at variance with the public statements of those founding and supporting educational institutions. Secondly, I would argue that, rather than being the beneficiaries of the education system, children and students have become increasingly its victims, as parents and educators, seeking the best for those in their care, have imposed their models of what are the preferred outcomes and sought-after career routes on the younger generation. This book is my attempt to explain these ideas and to show something of what I think has been the real impact of the education system during the two and a half centuries since the coming of industrialization. But these rather stark claims demand some explanation at the outset. First, why has the creation of inequalities become the one dominant outcome of our system of schooling? Consistently, over time, those planning and working within the education system have made clear why it was necessary. A number of key themes recur consistently. Education is needed to generate the skills young people will need as adults in employment. Schools are a necessary element in the promotion of a happy society and a docile labour force, trained in habits of compliance and reliability. Education is necessary to ensure popular allegiance to the dominant

Introduction

xiii

religion or to a particular sect or denomination. A successful education system is one key to the maintenance of social order. Education is vital for the preservation of key elements in our culture. It has also often been claimed that education is needed to identify, develop and promote the best talent, to find the potential of students, to nurture it and in the process to develop a society that is increasingly meritocratic. It is worth emphasizing that this rationalization was little heard during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but has become increasingly dominant more recently. It is worth pointing out at the start too that a meritocracy is not necessarily a fairer or more equal society, but is likely to be one that has its own ways of generating inequalities. And from time to time it has been suggested that education enables the young to experience as wide as possible a range of human endeavours to help them find the most fulfilling ways to live their later lives. This is an argument that has tended to come from ‘progressives’ and from those pressing for a child-centred education system. Some of these claims, or versions of them, have been applied also to the promotion of higher education. The way in which this has been stated may have varied over time, but essentially these are the arguments used to justify the establishment of an education system and ultimately universal schooling. Sadly (or perhaps not depending on your particular viewpoint), as I will try to show in this book, these objectives have never been more than partially achieved. Rather, in reality, what has developed is a system that exists to shore up the position of those who already enjoy economic and political dominance and that ensures that their children retain the advantages that are shared by those of their social class. It might be expected that education exists to promote economic development and transformation, and with it social mobility. Beyond doubt, the economy has benefited enormously from the education system in myriad ways. The social changes that have followed have been immense. But, rather than promoting social mobility, education has become a massive vehicle for its suppression. Ironically, this has occurred despite the fact that thousands have attributed their own social standing to the schooling they received. In this book I will try to explain this apparent contradiction. Rather, I will seek to show that education has become the agency through which power, influence and economic dominance, as well as disadvantage and impoverishment, are passed from generation to generation. I would argue that this has become its great unspoken social function, and in this book I will also attempt to demonstrate how and why this has occurred.2 Obviously, in one sense, there is nothing new in this observation. A generation of sociologists has highlighted the importance of what is known as ‘cultural capital’ and a number of scholars, working at the interface of sociology and history, have sought to apply the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu on ‘social reproduction’ to education.3 Perhaps the most notable is Fritz Ringer whose major work, published in 1979, on Education and Society in Modern Europe 4 sought to argue that there were underlying similarities between the education systems of all of the major European countries as they coalesced into their modern form in the late nineteenth century. All became segmented; all experienced curriculum differentiation between educational tracks that tended to cater for different social groups; and, in

xiv Introduction the process, all became more efficient at transmitting social and economic advantages from one generation to the next. So there is nothing new about the overarching argument. What is new in this book is the attempt to demonstrate the working out of these ideas to English society, to show how, over two centuries, England became the prime example of a country in which the more education responded to the changing demands of society at large the more it became a vehicle for social exclusion.5 Moving on to my final claim, it seems clear that in this situation children are most certainly the victims.6 Their needs have taken second place to the demands of wider society and the ambitions of their parents. What this has meant in reality is that all too often the practicalities of economic growth have placed massive constraints on what they have been taught. Rather than setting out to develop the full range of human potential, schools have established curricula and examination systems that narrow the learners’ experience and that identify ‘elite’ routes towards well-paid employment. The more prestigious and profitable the employment, the fewer and the more inaccessible become the curricular routes that lead towards it. We now have an education system within which everyone is doomed, with very few exceptions, at one point or another, to fail. Or, if they are seen to have succeeded, it is at the cost of a massive narrowing of their world view, their interests and their career trajectories. What I am seeking to show in this book is that these are not just recent developments but have, over time, become underlying characteristics of the English education system. The book is my attempt to tell the story of how this came about.

Industrialization and education During the second half of the eighteenth century, the pace at which English society was evolving began to quicken markedly. Since then it has barely slackened. Developments in agricultural production and industrialization, together with major changes in trade and marketing and advances in medicine, facilitated an unprecedented growth of population. This, in turn, generated an expanded market and the enlarged labour force that made further change inevitable. At some moments and in particular locations change was barely perceptible year on year, and at others it occurred traumatically, in response to technological developments, urbanization, changing economic conditions or major wars. Once it had started, this industrial revolution, which began in Britain, dragged other societies into modernization and became the motor of continuous change, both social and economic. It became unstoppable, generating successive bursts of industrial renewal, so that by the start of the twenty-first century Britain had experienced, arguably, at least three further periods of economic growth, each of which might be called industrial revolutions in their own right. Each of these had its own central features. The first industrial revolution arose from the growth of the heavy industries, coal mining, iron and steel manufacture and a textile industry based on the exploitation of cotton and wool; the second saw the coming of a more highly technical productive sector at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. This involved the development of electrification, a new chemical

Introduction

xv

industry, the manufacture of motor cars and bicycles and massive improvements in gas and water supplies. A further economic growth spurt involved the development of the service sector following the Second World War and, most recently, another economic upturn was attributable to the birth of the digital age and globalization at the start of the twenty-first century. These phases of economic growth were interspersed by periods of recession, or at least of economic downturn, with the result that the two centuries covered by this book have seen a series of economic cycles. Three major wars have further complicated this story; these were the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars. Each had their own complex economic impacts, not least during the twentieth century the over-stimulation of heavy industries, which then suffered badly with the return of peace. An understanding of these economic cycles is essential if we are to comprehend successive phases of educational development, which were all, in one way or another, responses to new demands from the economy. That is why, I believe, any meaningful account of the development of education in England must be, to some extent, an economic history. As English society developed, so did the education system respond to the new demands and expectations that were placed on it. This book is my account of the interaction between social, cultural and economic change on the one hand and educational developments on the other during the most recent two and a half centuries. It is only by trying to understand the complex interplay between schooling and the society it serves that we can begin to understand the social functions of our education system. At times moulded by external demands, and yet at the same time shaping society in ways that are often barely recognized, the schools, colleges and universities of England have been, and remain, a key element in social progress. At first glance this claim may seem to sit uncomfortably with my first suggestion. But in these pages I will try to show that there is no contradiction between accepting that the schools and colleges were one important catalyst of economic development whilst, at the same time, working to damp down or minimize intergenerational social mobility. What follows is my account of how that happened and why it happened as it did. It is my view, and many readers will see it as controversial. Some will disagree. But this book is intended not as the last word, but rather as the start of a discussion. I hope it will be read in that spirit.

The characteristics of English society At the start, I want to establish what I see as some of the major characteristics of English society, which relate, in one way or another, to the education system. I have borne them in mind as I have written the main text and I ask the reader to consider them and keep them in view. In brief, they are no more and no less than a striking series of inequalities. They were all evident at the beginning of our period, and they persist to this day. Almost all of them have been confirmed or institutionalized by the education system. First, and central to this book, it has to be recognized that England was in the eighteenth century, and remains in many ways today, a gendered society.7 This was arguably the greatest single fault line running through English society. Two

xvi Introduction centuries ago women were completely excluded from some walks of life and from many social activities. Most women lived lives that were restricted to the domestic role and to motherhood. These were the hallmarks of a deeply patriarchal society. As recently as my own childhood women always walked respectfully, several yards behind the males in my family, as they all made their way to morning prayer on Sunday. In some chapels they sat separately. Some social groups retain many of these kinds of characteristics even down to the present time, although today the contrasts are generally less marked. But they remain and are pervasive in many parts of the domestic sphere and the workplace. Although females comprise almost half of the labour force in England at the present time, they occupy only 12% of the directorships of FTSE companies. There are many other indices of inequality. But the question this raises for a study such as this is what part have schools and universities played in reducing these contrasts? Has the education system been an agent for change or a retarding influence? Some might say ‘both’ in one context or another. That is the first issue (and arguably the most important issue) that underpins this book. The second characteristic of English society that also persists to this day is a strong sense of social class.8 This pervades just about every aspect of social life. Whether it is in patterns of employment, residential locations, leisure pursuits or almost all aspects of social behaviour, the English remain acutely aware of the social class implications of what they are doing, and all, without fail, identify themselves with one or other social group, even if these are sometimes idealized projections rather than reflections of day by day reality and even if the groups they identify with are constantly changing in ways that defy precise categorization. This is central to our story, since it is essential to recognize that particular social groups have come to colonize particular parts of the education system. Thus the education system itself has become one of the most important determinants of these social distinctions, although the relationship between schooling and social class formation in England has always been complex and full of contradictions. The first oddity, but an important one, to point out, is that of the grammar schools. At the beginning of our period, most towns had a grammar school (and had done for 200 years). They constituted, in effect, a nationwide system of secondary schools for boys. They offered a classical education, the ‘grammar’ referred to in their title being that of ancient Rome (and in the case of the more prestigious schools, that of ancient Greece). They prepared young men for the professions and for life in the administrative jobs that the growing townships required. Although originally planned as charitable schools for the indigent poor, they had become by the start of our period the schools that educated the middle classes. Eventually several of these schools, by taking increasing numbers of boarding pupils and, in the case of the London schools particularly, by moving to rural locations, gained national recognition as ‘the public schools’ and became the schools of the national elite. So, even by 1760, the provision of secondary education had already generated a subtle hierarchy. During the nineteenth century this hierarchy became more pronounced. Despite this, it remained a system of schooling that was closed to the poor, whatever had been the original intentions of the founders.

Introduction

xvii

Meanwhile, the daughters of the middling and upper classes had to content themselves with an education at home, usually under the supervision of a governess. This meant a focus on domestic ‘accomplishments’ such as needlework and painting, but often involving singing, playing a musical instrument or maybe the acquisition of a foreign language, all designed to enhance their marriageability. Those lower in the social scale, whether male or female, had been dependent on dame schools, which were in effect a small-scale system of child-minding. But from the start of the nineteenth century, the elementary schools that were beginning to appear in towns and villages provided a more systematic education. This elementary schooling did not become free until the final years of the nineteenth century. It was only then that the vast majority of the population began to attend regularly. This was the schooling of the poor and it catered for both sexes, although separate routes for boys and girls were quickly identified. Those who could afford to, for the most part, sent their sons at the age of seven to one of the growing number of fee-paying preparatory schools, which, as their name suggested, prepared younger boys for entry to the private secondary schools and to the public schools. Until the 1944 Education Act, elementary schools and secondary schools remained two completely distinct systems, a key prop of ‘the two nations’ (a phrase first coined by Benjamin Disraeli in 1845). Most of the population attended the elementary schools. The emerging middle class and the elite went to secondary school. During the first half of the twentieth century an increasing number of scholarships, offering free places for able pupils in the secondary schools (most of them were still grammar schools) began to blur the distinctions between the two systems. But the 1944 Education Act transformed everything by making access to secondary education free and universal. It should not be thought, though, that this brought to an end the social class distinctions that had riven education in England. First, the public schools continued to charge fees, as did a number of private secondary schools, setting them apart from the rest of secondary education. Meanwhile, in the years following the Second World War the local education authorities who had to implement the new legislation opted in the main for a tripartite system of secondary schools, so that the pre-existing grammar schools (most of which they now controlled) continued to function and to cater for the growing middle classes. The new technical schools that many local authorities introduced were widely seen as less prestigious than the grammar schools, but preferable (at least in the eyes of almost all of the middle classes) to the new secondary moderns, which catered for the majority. This was all justified on the grounds that there were different kinds of mind, as concluded by the Norwood Committee in 1943,9 and that there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the different types of school and thus between the pupils who attended them. There was a generally accepted belief too that intelligence was determined from birth and was fixed. It was widely believed that the intelligence tests used to select pupils for each type of school guaranteed children entry to the secondary school to which they were most suited, overlooking the fact, which soon became apparent to sociologists, that what was actually being assessed was social and cultural capital as

xviii Introduction much as intelligence. The blatant unfairness of this system soon became apparent to commentators. While 45% of the population ‘passed’ for grammar schools in South Glamorgan, only 9% of the population did so in County Durham. This simply reflected the number of secondary school places that had been available previously, and not regional contrasts in intelligence! Since the Second World War, the percentage of the population attending fee-paying schools has remained fairly constant at around 7%. Although they constitute only a small minority of the population, the alumni of these schools have monopolized the major professions, parliament, the government and the mass media. They have formed the core of what many commentators refer to as ‘the Establishment’, the power grouping that monopolizes public and political life. The ways in which the English education system defines social class may have become subtler, but they remain all-pervasive. Another enduring element in English social class distinctions is the north-south divide. This has been significant throughout the modern period and remains so today, but is rooted in long-term geographical factors. During the first phase of the occupation of Britain, following their invasion in AD 43, the Roman legions paused in their advance to establish communications between their outposts at Exeter and Lincoln by building a road with a defensive ditch on the north-west side, the Fosse Way. It runs, to this day, in a straight line from south-west to north-east, bisecting the country. In doing so they were acknowledging (possibly consciously) the underlying central reality of British geography and marking off the fertile lowland areas in the south-east, which they now controlled, from the more mountainous terrain to the north-west. In the hills to the north and west lay almost all the reserves of iron, lead, copper and coal, as well as the fast-flowing streams that were to be used two millennia later to power the industrial revolution. These were the resources that fuelled industrialization. To the south and east lay the fertile alluvial soil best suited for arable farming. The Romans had an interest in both, but needed to be confident in their control of the areas with which they had been trading for many years before completing their conquest. Since then, for almost two thousand years, this north-south divide has been a recurring thread in English history. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings held most of the north: the Saxons held on to large parts of the south-east. If one looks at the distribution map of patterns of loyalty at the height of the English Civil War (1642–49), it bears an uncanny resemblance to late-twentieth century voting patterns in general elections, and even to voting patterns in the recent referendum on membership of the European Union. Almost all of the significant first-phase industrialization took place in the north. Almost all of the major public schools are in the south. It is a set of contrasts that is heightened by the fact that the capital city, London, is in the south-east corner of the country, looking as much towards Europe and the wider world as towards the north. There are, of course, many local exceptions to these broad generalizations, but it is a divide that, as we will see, has educational ramifications and implications and that it is worth bearing in mind. It is also a divide that retains to this day a deep hold on the British psyche.

Introduction

xix

Significant too is the contrast between rural and urban. The urbanization that began to accelerate at the start of our period has continued unabated, and has generated not simply large towns and cities, but major conurbations such as those of London, the West Midlands and south Lancashire. These urban areas have repeatedly posed new educational challenges, and our narrative is, in part at least, a history of the responses that have been made by politicians and educators. Equally, although social (and thus educational) change had occurred more slowly in the rural areas, the recent appearance of vast ‘overspill’ suburbs, with large populations in semi-rural locations, has posed new challenges for areas and whole regions accustomed to a slower pace of educational change. It is all too easy, perhaps to some degree inevitable, that any history of educational change in modern England becomes in many ways a history of urbanization. Even if that is the case, it is important to bear in mind the complexities of this issue as well as myriad regional variations. Also, the nature of the political settlements around schooling in England have meant that religion has remained, and remains, an important factor. Consequently, the shifting nature of religious affiliations continues to be of importance in any consideration of educational development as it has been since 1760. Initially, it was the fact that the Christian churches became the main providers of elementary schooling during the first industrial revolution that led to fierce interdenominational rivalries and an unwillingness on the part of the state to intervene. Successive Acts of Parliament not only allowed the ‘voluntary schools’ (those schools founded and run by the churches through their voluntary bodies) to continue working, but reinforced them through a grants system, which made them a fully-fledged part of the state provision of education, working alongside schools built and run by the state. Known technically as the ‘dual system’, it is this enduring historical anomaly that has made possible the state backing of ‘faith schools’ in recent years, and this has resulted in the schools reflecting and even sustaining some of the social divisions that can arise in a society in which a range of religions are pursued. Two other prisms through which English society can be viewed are ethnicity and wealth distribution. Both have led to a set of social distinctions that are reflected in the education system. It is a worldwide characteristic that ethnic minorities tend to cluster together in particular regions or suburbs, especially during the earlier stages of settlement but often over a lengthy period. This has certainly been true in England. Whether it is the Jewish community that formed in the East End of London at the close of the nineteenth century, the Belgian refugees who clustered in Soho during the First World War, or the arrival of large numbers of Commonwealth citizens after the Second World War, it has been parts of the urban conurbations that have felt the greatest impact. The significance of this for the education system has been immense. To take but one example, in Birmingham, as I explained in an earlier work, almost all of the second phase comprehensive schools built during the 1960s were in the middle ring of the city, but, as a result of the city’s housing policy, within a few years there was hardly a white face to be seen in these schools, among the student body at any rate. Inadvertently, in a fit of absence of mind, Birmingham had given itself a form of educational apartheid.10

xx

Introduction

This was a process that was mirrored, in one way or another, across England. And this has generated a situation in which, during recent years, the schools have been unable to do much to alleviate a growing toxicity in public statements around race and religion, and have even appeared, at times, as in the ‘Trojan Horse’ case in Birmingham, to be agents of increasing divisiveness rather than of social integration. Wealth distribution is another issue that needs to be kept in mind in this work for it too relates to the educational provision and in particular to the ways it is used by groups of contrasting affluence and power. If we confine our thinking to monetary wealth (although, of course, wealth could be defined in various ways and this is only one of them, if the most used), we need to remember that the first industrial revolution led to a fairly swift increase in disparities of wealth, as those who had invested in the more successful quickly growing enterprises began to form a new aristocracy of what became known to historians as ‘new money’. Whereas, previously, land ownership had been the key to affluence, suddenly the successful new industrialists and merchants began to appear alongside the established landed gentry and to take on their lifestyles. There is nothing new about the division into rich and poor, whether it has been based on the ownership of land, income or capital. But industrialization provided the grounds for its continuation and intensification, a process that was briefly checked by the taxation of landed estates at the start of the twentieth century, the introduction of death duty and the redistributive fiscal policies of the Labour Government after the Second World War, including swingeing rates of tax on high incomes. But more recently, globalization and the coming of the multi-nationals has seen a sharp swing towards more extreme contrasts of income, and massive contrasts between the comfort of the well-off and the growing poverty of increasing numbers of the poor. All of this has impacted massively on both the provision of schooling and on the uses made of it by different social groups. Although I have specified here several distinct markers of social contrasts, it must be borne in mind that they are overlapping: each impacts on and is interrelated with all of the other factors mentioned. So, for example, the north-south divide relates clearly to wealth distribution, to some extent to religious contrasts and to patterns of urbanization. One simple illustration of this is to point out that, over two or three generations, the families of those employed in the professions, and who moved from the north to the south-east for work, tended to ‘do better’ as London became increasingly dominant. Indeed, the expansion of the urban centres, most notably London and the south-east, was only possible as a result of migration, both within England and more widely. Much of this involved a population shift from rural to urban areas. All of these population movements were facilitated by an education system that gave some, but not all, of its products the skills and qualifications that enabled them to move from one area to another. So, although I have categorized these features and classified and separated them out here in the interests of lucid explanation, I am not denying that the changes that took place in English society are anything other than complex and multifaceted. The account that follows will try to unravel something of that complexity.

Introduction

xxi

It is worth pointing out one or two further underlying characteristics of the English education system, which the reader should bear in mind as she or he engages with the more detailed account that follows. The first is the significance of external influences. This has not simply been through a succession of foreign thinkers and writers who have been deeply influential in respect of educational practice; here the names of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Dewey, Binet and Simon, and more recently B. F. Skinner and J. B. Watson come to mind immediately. One could add to this list very quickly. But is important to recognize, also, that almost all aspects of the planning and administration of education in England have been derived, either directly or indirectly, from foreign models and from thinking about education that was taking place elsewhere. The monitorial school was first trialled by Bell in India. The classroom, which was quickly seen as more appropriate than the Victorian schoolroom, was an idea lifted from Prussia. Local systems of educational administration that were set up after the 1870 Education Act were modelled on Horace Mann’s work in Massachusetts. The revolution in the design of school buildings that took place at the start of the twentieth century was merely a small part of an international movement, largely influenced by developments in America and Germany. If one steps back to consider the intellectual origins of more or less any of the major developments that have taken place in education in the last two centuries one does not have to look far to see overseas influences. It becomes clear that the development of education is a worldwide phenomenon, and that at any given moment parallel trends and developments are taking place across the globe. In writing the history of education in any one society, one is simply identifying how that worked out in detail in a particular location. Also, it should be noted that a commitment to what might be called ‘elite learning’ runs through the system and continues to do so. Certain areas of study are seen as being more prestigious than others and certain colleges and universities retain a social cachet, which they have long held. One of the most obvious examples of this is the study of the Classics (or ‘Greats’) at Oxbridge and its persistent linkage over time with entry to a small number of elite professions. It is worth noting at this stage that the prestige of any particular curricular track is not necessarily closely related to its utility, in economic terms, other than its utility in enabling those who have passed through it to join a professional elite and gain entry to powerful and highly paid sectors of the economy. It is important to keep all of these issues in mind while reading this book. In the pages that follow I will try to describe something, however briefly, of the emergence of the modern system of education in a society that is complex and has been constantly changing. In doing so I will seek to show that schools and colleges have been important agents in the confirmation and institutionalization of a social hierarchy. It is a fascinating challenge, and, whatever I make of it, readers will see that in many ways the story of education in England is the story of England itself. How society moulded education and how the schools and colleges of England influenced social development are the twin themes of this book. Through understanding them we can gain a much fuller understanding of the society we live in today.

xxii Introduction

Notes 1 For a full listing of my publications see History of Education, 42, 3, May 2013, pp. 411–18. 2 R. Lowe, ‘Schooling as an impediment to social mobility in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain’, Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series, Vol. 4, ‘Schooling in changing societies: historical and comparative perspectives’, CSHP, Gent, 1998. 3 P. Bourdieu, Reproduction in education, society and culture, Sage, London, 1990. 4 F. Ringer, Education and society in modern Europe, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1979. 5 See also D. Muller, F. Ringer and B. Simon, The rise of the modern educational system: structural change and social reproduction, 1870–1920, CUP, Cambridge, 1987. 6 One version of this argument was initiated in I. Illich, Deschooling society, Marion Boyars Publisher, London, 1971. 7 On this see particularly A. John (ed.), Unequal opportunities: women’s employment in England, 1800–1918, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986 and J. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992. 8 J. Goldthorpe, Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980 and D. Cannadine, Class in Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998. 9 Curriculum and examinations in secondary schools (The Norwood Report), HMSO, London, 1943. 10 R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 90.

1

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

‘The ever-whirling wheel of change’1 In England the 60 years following 1760 witnessed sweeping social changes which posed new and unprecedented challenges for educators. The key developments of this era have been categorized by a generation of historians as ‘the industrial revolution’ although, in reality, it might be better to think in terms of a wider ‘social revolution’ taking place. It is only possible to understand why schooling developed as it did at this time in England if one has some understanding of this social revolution and its implications.2 There were multiple factors at work, which, in combination, generated nothing less than the reconstruction of English society. Prominent among them was the transformation of agriculture.3 The pre-existing methods of arable farming, involving the open field system (effectively little more than subsistence farming) necessitated leaving fields fallow for long periods, were very labour intensive and produced a limited range of cereal crops destined for local consumption. During the eighteenth century, novel crop rotation systems, involving turnips and new nitrogen-fixing crops such as clover, peas and beans, made possible winter sowing and generated much heavier yields. At the same time, the new and improved breeds of cattle introduced by pioneers such as Robert Bakewell and Coke of Holkham transformed both the quantity and quality of edible meat. It suddenly became possible to feed a far greater number of people. These developments coincided with the enclosure movement, which transformed the face of lowland Britain. Between 1760 and 1850 the vast majority of English villages were made subject to their own enclosure acts, which threw the labouring poor off the land, set up working farms with much smaller field boundaries and tenant farmers who took their produce to market instead of simply getting the best price in the local economy. The General Enclosure Act of 1801 marked the high point of this process and made further enclosures much easier to carry through. This transformation of agriculture not only facilitated population growth but also posed new challenges for educators. First, thousands of people were forced off the land and obliged to migrate into the towns. Their growth was phenomenal: Manchester’s population rose from 24,000 in 1773 to 108,000 50 years later and

2 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 there were similar transformations in other urban centres. This provided a source of cheap labour for the new industries that were appearing. One of the needs of this labour force was appropriate and affordable educational facilities for those of their children who were not put to work, even if that added up to little more than child minding. Secondly, the new type of yeoman farmer that developed became the backbone of a developing rural middle class. They found themselves running businesses that generated demand for a range of professional services in the rural areas. This meant that they sought an improved secondary schooling for their sons, especially across the lowland English counties. They made demands of the education system that differed completely from those of the new urban poor and their needs became one of the motors of the ongoing growth of rural secondary schooling during the nineteenth century. Alongside this, a number of developments in medical knowledge and practice, most notably Jenner’s work on vaccination4 and the reduction of scurvy following the work of pioneers such as James Lind5 and the explorer James Cook,6 resulted in an improvement in survival rates. This was another catalyst of population growth, which, once triggered, became self-perpetuating, with further increments that went on well into the twentieth century. So, whereas in 1700 there had been five million inhabitants of the United Kingdom, a century later this had become nine million and by the close of the nineteenth century the figure had almost quadrupled to 32 million. Also underpinning these social transformations was a transport revolution.7 Engineers such as Blind Jack of Knaresborough, James Brindley and Thomas Telford not only established a greatly improved road system but developed a nationwide system of canals, which facilitated the secure transportation of fragile and weighty goods over long distances. When the Birmingham Canal opened in 1772, the price of coal fell in the city by a half. National markets for a wide range of goods were beginning to open up. This meant that individuals could travel more conveniently over longer distances. For the first time it became possible for a school to think in terms of a regional, rather than simply a local, clientele. It was possible for these developments to occur at the same time because they fed off each other, and in combination they facilitated the Industrial Revolution. Across the country the small-scale domestic production of goods gave way to factories, each with its specialist product; notably, during the first phase, silk in Derby, cotton in Lancashire, wool in Yorkshire, ceramics in North Staffordshire, iron in Coalbrookdale, locomotives in Darlington, saddles in Walsall, carpets in Kidderminster, felt hats in Stockport, straw hats in Luton and chains in Cradley. The list is endless and it is a mistake to confine it to the production of textiles and metal goods, even though these were central. Many of these, such as the textile mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire, required in the main an unskilled labour force and this was to have a severely limiting effect on the extent of the schooling that was seen as necessary in these areas. Elsewhere the factory owners themselves went to considerable pains to set up their own specialist schools to teach the skills needed by some of their workers. So, in Stoke-on-Trent, Josiah Wedgwood

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

3

founded a school of art for his employees and in Birmingham a jewellery school appeared. But, overwhelmingly, industrialization meant a low-skilled labour force that needed only a minimal education. For them the focus was far more on sobriety, subordination, orderliness and indoctrination. These were to become the overriding themes of popular education for much of the nineteenth century. A key element of this indoctrination, one that came to define the contest that developed to educate the lower orders, was the attempt to evangelize, and with it to dispense a set of values and behaviours that would mould children towards the roles they were meant to play in adult life.8 During the seventeenth century older dissenting religious sects had appeared, most notably the Baptists and the Quakers, and these went on to become churches in their own right. But the situation was complicated by a popular new ‘Methodist’ movement originating within the Church of England, which quickly became the largest dissenting church with congregations in rural areas and in many of the growing towns. Meanwhile, the proscribed Roman Catholic Church was given a new lease of life in England by successive Relief Acts in 1778 and 1791, which gave it the right to open its own schools. In an authoritative account of the survival of Jesuit education during this period, Maurice Whitehead has shown how the establishment of Stonyhurst in 1795 was, in reality, the repatriation of a school first founded at St. Omer in Flanders in 1593.9 There were similar foundations at this time at Ampleforth, Downside, Heythrop and St. Edmund’s Ware, all originating in schools in mainland Europe. Whitehead has shown how this was depicted by one Anglican bishop as ‘a development which needs to be watched with the utmost vigilance’. What was emerging was little short of a war between these rival denominations for the allegiance of the English poor, both in rural areas and in the growing towns. Their battlefield was to be the schoolroom. It must be added, though, that this account of industrialization and its consequences has been shown to be, at best, partial. Ground-breaking studies of economic transformation by Cain and Hopkins10 have shown that it was the growth of the financial and service sectors of the economy, focused far more on London and the Home Counties, which did as much, if not more, than industrial innovation to define Britain’s world role and to mould its social structure. The ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ that they describe generated its own ‘new aristocracy’ of the south-east of England, a class of comfortably off town dwellers and suburbanites who were, by and large, disdainful of industrial wealth, and who sought an education for their sons, in particular, which would prepare them for their roles within this sector of the economy. Here was born the growing demand for a ‘public school’ education that was to become a dominant feature of nineteenth century English society. This factor alone provides a large part of the explanation as to why the public schools developed, almost exclusively, in the Home Counties of England. Underlying all these developments was the slave trade, which reached its peak during the eighteenth century and generated enormous wealth for those involved.11 In our context, what was really significant was the extent to which the profits of this trade sustained the Anglican Church, either directly or indirectly, reinforcing its power and influence. Many of those who were made wealthy by the

4 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 sugar and cotton trades became major financial supporters of their local churches. In 1833 the compensation that was paid out by Parliament to slave owners to cover their losses after abolition included nearly £9,000 directly to the Church of England and £13,000 to the Bishop of Exeter, enormous sums at that time. The confused attitude of the Anglican Church towards slavery during the late eighteenth century was summed up in the career of George Whitefield, an evangelical Anglican clergyman, who campaigned and preached against the abuse of slaves by their masters, but who kept slaves himself at plantations in South Carolina and Georgia and became one of the leading proponents of the legalization of slavery in Georgia. Slavery provided much of the capital for the acceleration of industrialization in England. It also funded education. Both the Kingston and Southport National Schools were founded by patrons made rich from slavery (Charles Nicholas Pallmer and Ralph Peters).12 They were but two among many who applied wealth gained from the slave trade to sponsor schools or colleges. But, more importantly, in our context, the phenomenon of slavery provided the backdrop for the attitudes to ethnicity and race relations that were to underpin schooling in England for the next two centuries. It is fair to say, too, that without the profits it made through the slave trade, the Anglican Church would have been far less capable of dominating the educational provision in England in the ways it did throughout the nineteenth century and even more recently.

Schooling in the eighteenth century It will be clear immediately that this transformation of society generated a completely new context for schooling. What had existed previously in England was a relatively rudimentary educational provision. For the poor there was little more than the child minding offered by small-scale, uncoordinated dame schools.13 Many of these survived into the nineteenth century. Although they disappeared quickly after the 1876 Education Act, researchers such as Thomas Laqueur14 and Philip Gardner15 have shown that even as late as the mid-nineteenth century between a quarter and a third of all children were still being schooled in this way. Following Thomas Firmin’s establishment of a spinning and weaving factory to be manned by children of five years and over in 1695, industrial schools began to appear.16 These were set up in various parts of the country, and proved more successful in training girls than boys, probably because of the differing nature of the employments they were given. They were seen by the Society for the Bettering of the Condition of the Poor, set up in 1796, as useful in establishing a spirit of self-help and minimizing the need for poor relief. But they died out in the nineteenth century as factory employment came to be seen as far more profitable for the children of the poor than the meagre pittance that could be earned in these schools. During the eighteenth century charity schools began to appear too in some townships.17 Initially, they were founded by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, set up in 1698 to ensure the primacy of the Church of England. Some of these schools were known as ‘catechetical schools’ since the Catechism was central to their curriculum. They catered for pauper children and

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

5

were seen as an effective way of keeping them off the streets. Not all of them were conducted under the auspices of the SPCK, and some added technical subjects to their curricula. By the mid-eighteenth century they educated, according to one estimate, as many as 30,000 children. As the century wore on, it became convenient and cheaper for many parishes to transport their pauper children to apprenticeships in the new factories that were appearing rather than give them a charity school education. There they became little more than child slaves. By the start of the nineteenth century, urbanization was generating a situation in which town children were required to work, not simply to sustain the new enterprises, but also to help keep their families out of poverty. Michael Sanderson has shown, in his study of education and economic change, that literacy levels fell markedly from the 1750s to 1890, particularly during the early years of the nineteenth century.18 One reason for this may well have been this process by which poor children were drawn away from the charity schools into labouring. This meant that the charity schools became more attractive to the growing middle classes as an alternative to a grammar school education, particularly in a situation where the grammar schools had a limited capacity to absorb the large numbers of potential students generated by the growth of the towns. Consequently, those charity schools that did survive were, by the end of the century, already being used by families above the poverty line who could not find a suitable education elsewhere. This was the start of the process by which the school uniforms introduced by the charity schools slowly evolved from being a badge of penury into a marker of social distinction. Precisely when and how the charity schools began to charge fees from individual students rather than relying on the financial support of religious charities such as the SPCK is an important question that deserves much closer scrutiny from historians of education. Apart from the charity schools, the other great survivors from pre-industrial times were the grammar schools. Some had existed from medieval times; but many were founded during the Tudor era, predominantly as a result of the dissolution of the Chantries (medieval religious houses). The 1547 Act of Parliament that implemented this demanded that every chantry, guild and fraternity should continue ‘in succession to a teacher or preacher forever, for and towards the keeping of a grammar school’. It also insisted on ‘better provision for the poor and needy’.19 The Commissioners, whose task it was to implement this legislation, committed the grammar schools, without exception, to the education of at least a number of poor scholars, as well as those paying fees. The time-bomb that was implicit in this condition was to have important implications for the reform of these schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thereafter the grammar schools enjoyed varied fortunes for over two centuries. Schools grew or shrank, and occasionally closed down for a period, depending on the reputation of individual schoolmasters and their assistants, or ‘ushers’ as they were known. We know, for example, that Shrewsbury School, soon to become recognized as a ‘public school’, was down to three students immediately before Samuel Butler became headmaster in 1798. These schools taught Latin and Greek (the ‘grammar’ that had been implied by the legislation) using Lily’s Latin

6 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 grammar, as specified by royal decree in 1540. This was reworked in 1758 as The Eton Latin grammar. 20 Their main function was to introduce pupils to Classical scholarship and thought. The grammar schools also became an important vehicle through which the primacy of the Anglican Church was maintained. Schoolmasters had to have a licence to teach issued by their Anglican bishop and were expressly instructed, in a royal injunction of 1559, to teach the Church’s Catechism. This commitment to a narrow curriculum came increasingly under challenge, but an important legal test case, ‘the Eldon judgement’ in the Court of Chancery in 1805, made it clear that Leeds Grammar School (and by implication all other grammar schools) must be ‘a school in which the learned languages are grammatically taught’, must ‘use its endowments for no other purpose and that it was illegal … to use them in teaching modern languages or commercial subjects’.21 Almost all of the grammar schools survived into the modern period, many seen widely as august institutions. But at the beginning of our period, many were in a desperate state, as Brian Simon revealed in his Studies in the history of education, 1780–1870. He painted a detailed picture of schools that either were not functioning at all or were catering for only a handful of students.22 The most comprehensive account of the state of these schools during the early nineteenth century is contained in the exhaustive survey made by Nicholas Carlisle in 1818. He found it ‘painful to relate that … many numerous and ample endowments have fallen to decay … lost or sunk, embezzled, disgracefully misapplied … impaired by gross dereliction of duty and very great frauds’.23 Despite the shortcomings of these schools, the social changes associated with industrialization were to initiate an ongoing process of renewal and change. This was the moment when a growing number of the urban gentry were seeking a formal education for their sons that would fit them for life in the professions and in commerce in the growing townships. In 1840 the Eldon ruling was rescinded by a Grammar Schools Act that recognized the pressing need for the teaching of modern subjects to the children of the middling classes. With a relatively small tweaking of their curriculum, the grammar schools became the vehicle to meet these changing demands, although this did not happen immediately. Beyond this, by the late eighteenth century, some of the grammar schools had set about attracting the sons of the aristocracy, who were, until then, often still educated at home by a private tutor. These schools offered a residential education and began to attract pupils from a much wider catchment. The most prestigious of them became known as ‘the public schools’, even though at no time were they committed to the education of the wider public. The reform of their curricula under pioneering headmasters such as Butler at Shrewsbury (1798–1836) or Arnold at Rugby (1828–41) confirmed the attractiveness of a boarding school education and in the process also confirmed the pre-eminence of these schools. Those who did not subscribe to the doctrines of the Anglican Church but who followed one of the new Nonconformist sects were excluded from this mainstream education and set about establishing their own schools. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, following the Civil War, there was an attempt to ensure that

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

7

Puritans and Nonconformists were excluded from teaching through a series of laws, which became known collectively as the Clarendon Code. As part of this, the 1665 Five Mile Act specified that clergy who did not conform to the beliefs of the Anglican Church (the very people most likely to found their own school) were forbidden from practicing or even residing within five miles of any borough. The result was simply that ‘dissenting schools’ (or ‘academies’, as they came to be called) were set up in the most unlikely locations. When the Code was relaxed in the early eighteenth century, these schools, which had mostly until then been small single tutor establishments, began to flourish. At their peak in the mid-eighteenth century there were 40 or so of them scattered across England. They were able to teach a much broader curriculum than the grammar schools and offered an attractive education to those going into commerce or technical employment. Logic, mathematics, science, history, geography, French and Italian were all taught in one or other of these schools. The best known were at Mill Hill (where both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Wesley were educated), Newington Green, Sheriffhales in Shropshire, Rathmell in North Yorkshire, and, most notably, those at Warrington and Daventry. Wesley claimed that at Mill Hill there were ‘a laboratory and some not inconsiderable rarities … an air pump, thermometer and all sorts of mathematical instruments’.24 Between 1761 and 1767, when Joseph Priestley (one of the pioneers of modern science) was teaching at Warrington, students could enrol to study, among other things, law, medicine, divinity and commerce. Beyond this, the academies played a large part in legitimizing the teaching of English rather than Latin. Their commitment to ‘reading and speaking English correctly’ meant that Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, published in 1795, had run to 28 editions by 1816.25 These schools offered a real threat to the established system, and their existence goes part way to explain the strength of feeling with which the Anglican control of schooling was defended at the moment of industrialization. At the apex of this provision were the two ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, both collegiate and both, by the mid-eighteenth century, offering a fairly desultory educational experience to most students, who were in the main the sons of the gentry and of the clergy. Edward Gibbon described his 14 months at Magdalen College, Oxford as ‘the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life’. He went on to cite the judgement of Adam Smith that ‘in the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up even the pretence of teaching’.26 One of the enduring puzzles of early modern European history is the question of why, when numerous mainland cities (as well as several Scottish townships) generated their own universities, the great English centres of trade and religion, such as London, Winchester, Norwich and York did not. The outcome was that, by 1760, England could boast only two universities. Beyond this, some members of the aristocracy preferred to send their sons, accompanied by a tutor, on the Grand Tour. For some the advantages of living in France or Italy were thought to be self-evident, fitting a young man for life as a diplomat, or in the army, or else managing an extensive estate. For others, and again Adam Smith was among the critics, this practice simply ran the risk of corrupting the young men involved:

8 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the control of … his parents … every useful habit … instead of being riveted and confirmed, is … either weakened or effaced. Nothing but the discredit into which the universities are allowing themselves to fall, could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice.27 It would be inaccurate to describe this diverse pattern of schooling as anything approaching a system, but it is worth pointing out that some of its characteristics prefigured the more structured provision that was to develop with industrialization. First, initiatives in education were all underpinned by an acute sense of class and were always targeted at a particular social group, more often than not the poor. The sense that particular forms of schooling were only suitable for particular closely defined social groups was one that, if anything, intensified after industrialization. Secondly, the widespread and relatively unquestioned belief that men and women differed in their temperaments and capacities, as well as in their social roles, meant that schooling was gendered. There was virtually no provision for the education of girls, and such as there was targeted their future roles as mothers and housewives. Thirdly, it is worth noting that the almost ubiquitous influence of the Anglican Church meant that much that was offered by the schools was intended to fit its recipients for life in the Church, and had little, if anything, to do with effective involvement in economic life. The more prestigious the institution, the more susceptible it seemed to this observation. Certainly, the failure of the grammar schools to offer more than a Classical education meant that they were marketing the trappings of a gentleman but it also meant that their alumni were ill-fitted to participate in economic life beyond that of the Church. Similarly, any education that involved the transmission of practical skills, such as an apprenticeship, doomed its recipients to a life in the workshop or the engine room. This was a pattern that was well-established by the eighteenth century, but that was, if anything, to intensify after industrialization.

A new context for education Industrialization meant the emergence of new social groups, including an identifiable ‘working class’,28 although this took on slightly different forms in different localities, depending on the structure of the local industrial labour force. This meant as well that new social movements and political groupings began to appear. Power began to rest with successful industrialists and men of commerce as well as with those who inherited land. Overlaying that was the deep fear held by many in the Anglican Church, confronted by the new Dissenting sects and the resurgence of Catholicism, that it was losing its grip on the populace. This sat alongside a deep and widely held fear of revolution. It is hardly surprising that this new social melting pot imposed new pressures and new demands on the education system, and that what emerged, whilst it bore some of the characteristics of what had gone before, was in many ways quite novel. Nonetheless, the advent of industrialization also marked the moment at which the education system began to take on a

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

9

recognizably ‘modern’ structure, performing the social function of segregating the social strata in much the way it continues to do today. It is worth pausing to summarize what drove debate around schooling at this time and what motivated the advocates of education. There were multiple factors at work. First and foremost, there was a fear of revolution, fuelled by the Jacobite threat, confirmed by the American revolution and becoming a frenzy following events in France at the end of the eighteenth century. This was reinforced by the many local food riots of the 1790s, which occurred particularly across the north-west of England, following poor harvests and problems of grain supply from France during the Napoleonic Wars.29 These gave the new rural and urban poor their first experience of coordinated political action, and this frightened those in power. The savagery of the Peterloo massacre in August 1819 (when more than 600 members of a large gathering of demonstrators in Manchester, marching peacefully to demand parliamentary reform, were massacred by hussars and constabulary) serves only to illustrate the paranoia of those in positions of power. Secondly, and linked to this first fear, was the insecurity felt by those in authority, both in the State and within the Anglican Church itself about the primacy of the national religion, threatened as it was by several new Nonconformist belief systems as well as the resurgence of the Catholic religion. The State and the Anglican Church had become so closely enmeshed that a threat to one was a threat to both. It is worth remembering that the monarch was, and remains to this day, the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Beyond this, there was a growing need to teach such skills as were necessary to sustain the economic revolution that was taking place. It must be remembered too that a few lone voices were calling for the education of girls. At the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft had pointed out that ‘the education which women receive scarcely deserves the name’.30 A few years later Sydney Smith commented that ‘it is not easy to imagine that there can be any just cause why a woman of forty should be more ignorant than a boy of twelve years of age’.31 This too, although it was a minority view, threatened the existing order. Finally, the new modes of production that were appearing were dependent on a docile and compliant labour force. Thus the fears of industrialists merged with those of the Church and the State to generate a profound belief that the schoolroom was the place to secure the social order. Richard Johnson summarized this, many years ago, as a drive for ‘social control’ and there is still no good reason to doubt his judgement.32 A glance at some of the debates that took place around schooling will show that these fears led to the educational provision that emerged being no accident but to a considerable degree the outcome of careful planning.

Planning for social stratification It can be no surprise, therefore, that debates on schooling at this time all came to focus on the need to provide appropriate schooling for distinct social groups. These cataclysmic changes inevitably deepened the fear that well-established social distinctions were under threat. The fact that these debates were largely conducted

10 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 by those in positions of power and authority simply added to the inevitability of what emerged. The debate took place in the shadow of long-held reservations about the education of the poor. These had been best summarized by Bernard de Mandeville in his ‘Essay on Charity and Charity Schools’, written in 1723: going to school, in comparison to working, is idleness, and the longer boys continue in this easy sort of life, the more unfit they will be, when grown up, for … labour, both as to strength and inclination … Without vast numbers of people to do the drudgery, no nation can be happy … The knowledge of the working poor should be confined within their occupations … It is requisite that vast numbers of them should be ignorant as well as poor … A servant can have no unfeigned respect for his Master as soon as he has sense enough to find out that he serves a fool.33 Attitudes such as these persisted into our period and still underpinned much early nineteenth century discussion of popular schooling. It was in this spirit that Davies Giddy observed, in the House of Commons debate on education in 1807, that giving education to the labouring poor would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness. It would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments. Instead of teaching them subordination, it would make them fractious and refractory.34 With views such as these in circulation it is entirely understandable that those who advocated some kind of schooling for the poor made it crystal clear that it was intended for a particular social group and for a particular purpose. In 1783 Robert Raikes explained that his Sunday school movement was intended simply to generate ‘a reform among the children of the lower class’.35 A few years later, Hannah More opened her first Sunday school in Cheddar and wrote of her ‘plan for instructing the poor’.36 In a similar vein, Sarah Trimmer emphasized that the ‘children of the poor should not be instructed in such manner as to set them above the occupations of humble life, or to make them uncomfortable among their equals’.37 Even Robert Owen, who might be seen as the educational innovator of this period most strongly committed to social reform, gave evidence to Brougham’s Committee enquiring into the schooling of the lower orders that his was the best means of ‘forming the character and directing the labour of the lower classes’.38 Even as late as 1825 Blackman’s Edinburgh Magazine was opposing Brougham’s support of Mechanics Institutes with the observation that ‘if, in our endeavour to educate the working orders, we give them tastes and habits discordant with their situations in life, we do both them and the Empire a grievous disservice’.39 Accordingly, as they sought to reassure the public that what they were doing posed no threat to the social order, the schooling they proposed was, without

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

11

exception, designed to ensure the gratitude of its recipients. This was made clear from the outset. Sarah Trimmer wrote in The servant’s friend in 1787: ‘for this happy advantage they are indebted to the benevolence of persons in higher stations, and they ought to be grateful for it’.40 But, above all, what was on offer would be strictly limited in scope, and this was spelt out very clearly. Hannah More explained that ‘my plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week days, such coarse words as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor’.41 Another enthusiast for education, Clara Reeve, wrote in 1792 that ‘these paupers are not to be taught to write or read: being rescued from extreme poverty they are to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and to be thankful for their deliverance’.42 Perhaps the bestknown statement of this restrictive approach came from Andrew Bell, writing in The Madras school in 1808: It is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or all of them to be taught to write or cipher. Utopian schemes for the universal diffusion of general knowledge would soon … confound that distinction of ranks and classes of society, on which the general welfare hinges.43 Even Robert Owen stressed that in his school, the boys’ curriculum was restricted to ‘writing expeditiously’, plus ‘facility in the rules of arithmetic’. The girls in his school were taught ‘to sew, cut out, make up useful family garments … plus to learn how to prepare wholesome food and keep a house neat and well-arranged’.44 These views, that the education of the poor should be limited, and that the education of girls was best directed towards domesticity, were at that time almost universally held, and they persisted for the next two centuries. They were never more clearly articulated than at the moment of industrialization.

Evangelicals and the Sunday school movement It is hardly surprising that the fears and concerns resulting from the frenzied pace of technical and social change at this time led to a series of uncoordinated individual attempts at educational reform. Perhaps the most notable of these, and certainly that which came closest to becoming a national movement, was the phenomenon of the Sunday school. The earliest known such school was opened by an Anglican clergyman, Theophilus Lindsey, in his vicarage at Catterick in 1763. The most publicized was the school opened by Robert Raikes, the proprietor of a local newspaper, in Gloucester in 1780. Within a few years he and his associates were operating several such schools. They were intended to deal with the problem of idle and misbehaved children, who were employed in factories for the remainder of the week, by occupying them on Sundays. This involved schooling them throughout the day and using the opportunity to take them to the Anglican Church and to teach them the Catechism. Raikes’ schools taught reading, but not writing, and this became the model that was initially followed by almost all of the Sunday schools that quickly began to appear elsewhere. During

12 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 the 1780s Raikes described what he was doing in his Gloucester Journal, and the publicity this provoked was one key reason for this expansion. By 1831 Sunday schools were educating one and a quarter million children, partly because it was a far simpler matter to find individuals prepared to teach on Sundays (many of them volunteers) than it was to staff the growing number of week-day schools. In the larger towns, such as Leeds and Birmingham, two schools were opened in each district, one for boys and one for girls.45 Even though their main function was evangelical, these schools provoked widely differing reactions. On the one hand, there were many within the Church who feared that they encouraged employment on the Sabbath and, in the frenzied atmosphere provoked by the French Revolution, that they might lead to sedition. On the other hand, there were those who saw nothing but good in this movement. Adam Smith commented enthusiastically that ‘no plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the apostles’. Evangelicalism was about more than simply conforming to the belief system of the Church of England. It was about the acceptance of the social order, of the gradations of society and about conforming to a status quo that favoured the rich and did little, if anything, for the poor. As the nineteenth century wore on this became more and more closely linked with ‘self-help’, the view that it was only through individual effort, hard work and sobriety that the poor could improve their lot. This was captured perfectly in Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn, ‘All things bright and beautiful’, first published in 1848, which articulated what had been a central facet of evangelical thought for a century or more. Its third verse referred to The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate. He made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate. It was a credo that saw the social order as a part of God’s creation and therefore not to be challenged. It is perhaps not insignificant that these words were still being sung regularly in the Sunday school attended by the author in the 1940s and 1950s. This reflected a belief system that was shared by Raikes and those who came after him. It certainly underpinned the educational efforts of Hannah More46 and her sisters. More was a prolific author of evangelical tracts, and the popularity of her work made it possible for her to become a well-known Bluestocking and a recognized figure among the late-eighteenth century London literary elite. However, a growing friendship with William Wilberforce led not only to her adoption of staunch abolitionist views, but also strengthened her determination to do something for the poor. Wilberforce had founded a Society for the Reformation of Manners in 1787. On More’s return to the family home at Cowslip Green, just south of Bristol, she was visited by Wilberforce. Following this visit to the Mendips, during which she took him to see the abject living conditions of the cave dwellers at Cheddar, More began

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

13

setting up her Sunday schools, the first in 1789. Within 25 years, according to one estimate, she and her sisters had become responsible for the schooling of over 20,000 boys and girls in several schools, all within a few miles of the family home. More regularly used the annual treat of these schools to sermonize the pupils and their parents, boasting that ‘I can never omit a short exhortation on the indispensable duty of industry. The Christian will be industrious that he may serve God’. Despite her firm commitment to the Anglican Church and the very limited educational ambitions of her schools, she was soon accused by critics of fomenting revolution and by many within the Church of turning the common people towards Methodism. But, in the context of this book, More’s greatest significance was perhaps not as an educational reformer, but as a polemicist. In 1799 she published, in two volumes, her Strictures on the modern system of female education.47 She pressed the need for differing schooling for boys and girls, and located it firmly within the value system of the Evangelicals. She wrote: The chief end in cultivating the understandings of women is to qualify them for the practical purposes of life. Their knowledge is not … like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition or even in any learned profession: but it is to come out in conduct … to enable her to regulate her own mind and be useful to others … To woman, therefore, I would recommend a prominence of those more sober studies to improve usefulness. Her book went on to spell out in detail what this meant in practice. Beyond this More authored more than half of the widely influential Cheap Repository Tracts that appeared in the years after 1797. These publications, focused on political and religious themes, were her brainwave, intended to divert the poor from any literature that might be seditious. They remained in publication until the 1830s. She became an influential and widely-read figure, and it is difficult to think of anyone who articulated more clearly at the start of the nineteenth century the need for control of what the working poor were thinking, as well as the need for an inferior and more limited education for girls. Raikes and More soon found themselves at the heart of a network of Evangelicals committed to educational reform. Among the more notable were Sarah Trimmer, Mary Martha Sherwood and William Fox. Sarah Trimmer was based in London and, inspired by Raikes, founded her first Sunday school at Old Brentford 1786. She went on to establish several other Sunday and charity schools, but was equally influential through her writing. The oeconomy of charity, which she published in 1787, was a rallying cry to the women of her class to establish schools: ‘do we not want good principled servants?’ she asked her readers.48 She went on to argue that the foundation of schools for the poor was particularly the responsibility of women: ‘surely it is perfectly consistent with the female character for ladies to exert their endeavours’ in setting up schools,49 ending with the stirring call ‘may everyone resolve therefore to do their part!’50 Her advocacy was a significant element in establishing the tradition that middle-class Anglican women became involved in the sponsorship of schools for the poor in their parishes. But

14 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 Trimmer went further than that. Attacked, as was Hannah More, by those who feared that these schools would promote independent (and even revolutionary) thought, Trimmer went on to edit her own journal, The Guardian of Education, which was published regularly from June 1802 for several years. This was the first journal to review books written for children, and for a while it became the standard guide to Anglican parents wishing to ensure that no revolutionary ideas were put in front of their offspring. Sherwood was a prolific author, probably best known for her History of the Fairchild family, published in three volumes, the first in 1818.51 Her obsessive concern with the death of children, and with the fate that would befall those who had not found redemption, coloured much of the way in which the children of the poor were instructed in the nineteenth century. It is difficult for us to sympathize with or even fully understand this aspect of education at that time. In this book she describes in gory detail the death by burning of a child whose tragedy resulted from disobeying her parents, adding: had this poor child been brought up in the fear of God she might now have been living, a blessing to her parents and the delight of their eyes. Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod he shall not die … and thou … shalt deliver his soul from hell. This doctrine, that the child needed to be redeemed through punishment, was one that underpinned much educational practice for much of the nineteenth century and had not entirely died out in the strict chapel schooling that the author received in the period following the Second World War. In 1785 William Fox,52 a London Baptist minister, read Raikes’ reports in the Gloucester Journal and wrote to him to express his admiration of the ‘great and noble design’ of the organization Raikes was now proposing to set up. Raikes was invited to a meeting Fox was planning in the St. Paul’s Tavern, with a view to establishing just such a society to sponsor and promote Sunday schools. Fox explained that he had already approached the Church authorities with a view to setting up ‘a system of universal education’ but that they had been alarmed at the magnitude of the undertaking.53 The outcome was the founding of the Sunday School Society, which, within a few years, was setting out the rules for the conduct of these schools, providing textbooks (many of them Hannah More’s Repository Tracts) and funding as many as 4,000 schools. John Wesley, the itinerant preacher, commented that ‘I find these schools springing up wherever I go’. The stated objects of the Society were ‘to prevent vice, to encourage industry and virtue, to dispel darkness and ignorance, to diffuse the light of knowledge, to bring men cheerfully to submit to their stations … to endeavour to prepare them for a glorious eternity’.54 Its committee of 24 was pointedly ecumenical, containing both Anglicans and Dissenters. But the interdenominational goodwill was brittle at best. In 1798, at the moment of their formal break from the Anglican Church, Methodists began to take control of their own Sunday schools. By 1832 they were educating almost

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

15

350,000 children in over 3,000 Sunday schools. In 1801 the Sunday School Union was set up, and in 1833 the Unitarian Sunday School Association began work.55 On the face of it, therefore, it appears that the Sunday school movement was the arena in which the fierce interdenominational rivalries of the nineteenth century first began to appear, as different branches of the Christian Church fought to establish their own grip on the growing numbers of the new urban poor. But Thomas Laqueur, whose work on this topic remains the most detailed and authoritative account available, saw it differently. Not only did he underline the extent to which both the Sunday School Society and the Union were ‘expressly ecumenical’,56 but he also emphasized two quite different issues, which he considered to be the movement’s greatest historical significance. First, he showed that although the Evangelicals were the originators of the Sunday schools, they quickly became ‘indigenous institutions of the working class’57 in which ‘predominantly working class students were taught by working class teachers in schools largely financed and also run by working class men and women’.58 They became in brief the place where the lower orders learned to organize and act collectively. Secondly, Laqueur called them ‘the biggest single agency which disseminated a growing acceptance that it was now necessary for some external agent, not just the parents, to educate the child’.59 Perhaps the most enduring legacy of these schools was a recognition of the need for schooling. In his view, ‘1780 to 1850 witnessed the birth of a working class culture that was deeply rooted in the ethic of education, religion and respectability’.60 In Laqueur’s view this was largely attributable to the Sunday school.

The beginnings of systematization: the monitorial schools Among those who saw the Sunday schools as the mechanism that might ensure the continuing dominance of the Anglican Church were a growing number who sought to extend this movement to the day schools for the poor. The man who articulated their ideas was Andrew Bell. Bell was an Anglican clergyman who had spent nine years in India, returning to England in 1795. In Madras he had become superintendent of the Male Military Asylum, a boarding school for the sons of the British soldiers garrisoned there. Horrified by the inefficiency of the teaching staff he inherited in the school, he had dismissed them and begun using senior pupils as teachers in their own right. Realizing that his scheme of using pupils as ‘monitors’ might have wider application, he published a pamphlet in October 1797, The Madras school or an experiment in education. This proved enormously popular and was expanded and modified repeatedly. Its fourth edition, published in 1813 under the title Instructions for conducting a school through the agency of the scholars themselves, summarized neatly the evangelical view of what was required by way of an efficient and affordable schooling for the poor. Bell was in no doubt that ‘to render simple, easy, pleasant and economical, the acquisition of the rudiments of letters, and of morality and religion are the leading objects of elementary education’. He stressed that ‘its ultimate object, or end of all education, is to make good subjects, good men and good Christians’.61 At the heart of his ideas were efficiency and cost saving. He went on to argue that

16 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 by the ready, expeditious and cheap means which it furnishes, of training up the inferior orders of society, in moral and religious principles, and in habits of useful industry, it is fitted to raise them above the mean and low vices which besot and debase the ignorant vulgar, above savage and barbarous crimes … and by forming through a Christian education, an intelligent, industrious and virtuous people, to give the empire new strength, stability and glory.62 For Bell, the continuing primacy of the Anglican Church was a prerequisite for social stability at a time of rapid change. By placing religion, and in particular the interests of the Anglican Church, at the heart of elementary schooling, Bell was laying down the bases of a division that plagues schooling in England down to the present. Bell’s text worked systematically, chapter by chapter, though every part of the limited curriculum he thought appropriate for an elementary school. All learning was to be broken down into a series of simple steps, which were taught first to monitors and then to the less able pupils. In each class there were to be as many monitors as learners, and all were to be seated in the order of their current success in either transmitting or receiving knowledge. At either end of each class promotion or relegation to the class above or below was frequently used, so that there was no grouping by age, but strictly by ability. Bell saw no need for punishment, believing the incentives to succeed in this system were sufficient. These were the guiding principles of the monitorial system, and they quickly became widely employed. Meanwhile, in 1798, a Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, opened an elementary school in London at Borough Road. Two years later he came across Bell’s tract and found that Bell’s ideas were remarkably close to his own. By 1803, he was sufficiently confident to publicize his own activities in his book, Improvements in education, as it respects the industrious classes of the community.63 In it, he stressed his indebtedness to Bell: ‘I ought not to close my account without acknowledging the obligation I lie under to Dr. Bell … I have been endeavouring to walk in his footsteps’.64 Lancaster’s work was more polemical than Bell’s, and, before moving on to his account of the organization of a school, Lancaster made a powerful pitch for the establishment of a society to oversee their development and to raise funds, clearly modelled on the organizations that had made the Sunday school movement so successful. But, in one key respect, which was spelt out in the introduction, Lancaster was at odds with Bell: Alas! My brethren and fellow Christians, of every denomination, you have been contending whose influence should be greatest in society, while a national benefit has been lost … Above all things, education should not be made subservient to the propagation of the peculiar tenets of any sect. He returned to this theme in the main text with a plea for a society ‘founded on general Christian principles … let the friends of youth, among every denomination

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

17

of Christians, exalt the standard of education, and rally round it … laying aside all religious differences in opinion’.65 Lancaster’s problem proved to be that the more successful he became, the less likely he was to realize his dream. Lancaster quickly enlisted the support of many leading members of the aristocracy, and was even invited to meet King George III in Weymouth in 1805, when the king gave him money to develop his work. Lancaster visited Bell at his home in Weymouth, and the meeting was cordial. But the tone was changed by a letter from Sarah Trimmer to Bell in the autumn of 1805. She wrote: From the time, sir, that I read Mr Joseph Lancaster’s Improvements in education … I conceived an idea that there was something in his plan that was inimical to the interests of the Established Church … I plainly perceived that he had been building on your foundations … Engaged as I have long been in striving to promote the interests of the Church … I cannot see this ‘Goliath of Schismatics’ bearing down all before him … without attempting to give him a little check.66 That check was a pamphlet of her own, which ran to 152 pages.67 In it she praised his system repeatedly and expressed admiration for what he was doing. ‘Much as the mechanical parts of Mr. L’s plan must be approved’,68 argued Trimmer, the only acceptable solution was that his methods should be developed under the aegis of the Church of England. Surely then, that Church, which is one of the pillars of the constitution, as well as the glory of the Nation, may justly claim the privilege of educating her own members69 … I have no personal prejudice against Mr Lancaster as a separatist; I highly respect his talents … but his plan, in its full extent, cannot stand on national ground together with the system of education founded at the Reformation.70 Thus began a sectarian contest for the control of education that lasted for over a century, and that determined the ways in which elementary education would be provided in England. Initially, Lancaster’s success was such that, in 1808, a Society for Promoting the Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor was established. This provoked the Church party to persuade Bell to return to London from Dorset to head up its own organization. Accordingly, in October 1811 the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church was founded. In response, to remove any doubts about its objectives, Lancaster’s was renamed in 1814 the British and Foreign School Society for the Education of the Labouring and Manufacturing Classes of Society of Every Religious Persuasion. Soon the contest between them was vicious. As the Bishop of London put it in 1816: ‘every populous village, unprovided with a National school, must be regarded as a stronghold abandoned to the occupation of the enemy’.71 The two competing organizations went on to dominate elementary schooling and teacher training in England for much of the nineteenth century. Both have survived to the present.

18 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 It is worth pausing, in the context of my central argument, to reflect on what the monitorial system meant in practice for the poor people of England. Lancaster boasted that it was possible to teach up to 1,000 children at the same time using his methods. This resulted in significant numbers being taught in a single school. It meant too that children found themselves in large schoolrooms and not in classrooms such as we know today. Even as late as 1861 the Newcastle Commission, reporting on elementary education, described the single schoolroom as ‘the only arrangement sufficiently general to require distinct notice’.72 It meant too that many pupils found themselves acting as teachers, and this was to evolve, as the century wore on, into the pupil-teacher system. In combination, these two factors worked towards a tacit acceptance that the children of the poor needed fewer teachers and could be taught in larger groups than the children of the rich. The consequent contrasts in class size have persisted down to the present time, although they are of course less marked nowadays than was the case in the nineteenth century. Another implication was that another of the great social class divides of English society was confirmed and institutionalized. Whilst the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful were without exception educated separately, those of the poor were educated together. Initially Lancaster had established separate schools for boys and girls. By 1806 he was running a girls’ school of 200 pupils. But as his system proliferated there were simply not the resources to sustain separate schools, or even teaching that catered for the perceived needs of girls. Although it went unquestioned that males and females were headed for differing roles in society, there was remarkably little curricular differentiation until the later years of the nineteenth century. This meant that the educational experience of the children of the poor was radically different from that of those who were more privileged. Finally, since the Anglican Church was able to call on far greater financial resources than the Dissenters, by mid-century roughly nine out of every ten elementary school pupils found themselves in National schools run by the Church of England. For them the Catechism loomed large as the Anglican Church tightened its grip on popular education and established a general acceptance that it was appropriate for education to be its responsibility, rather than that of the State. It seems likely that this also meant that there were distinctions of social class between those in the National schools and those in the British schools run by the Lancasterian society, but this issue is so complex that it deserves much closer scrutiny by historians and can only be raised here as a possibility.

Socialists, utopians and education As the Christian churches came to dominate popular education there remained numerous individuals who were aware of more progressive ideas on childhood and schooling that were beginning to percolate into English intellectual life. In several of the growing towns Literary and Philosophical Societies had begun to appear. Here new industrial wealth met up with doctors, lawyers and the urban gentry to explore the intellectual challenges raised by industrialization. The Birmingham

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

19

Lunar Society was perhaps the most notable, though it was not alone. However, for radicals, organizations such as the London Corresponding Society, founded in 1792, were a more natural home. This was mirrored in the industrial towns by a growing number of Constitutional Societies committed to political reform. These recruited from the new class of urban skilled workers and quickly committed themselves to pamphleteering for political and social reform. Through them, the radical thinking reflected by works such as Thomas Paine’s Rights of man, as well as the ideas of reformers in mainland Europe such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Diderot, began to take root. During the 1790s, one member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society was Robert Owen. Born in Newtown, and apprenticed in Lincolnshire, Owen was establishing himself as a young entrepreneur in the cotton industry, first in a mill at Piccadilly (Manchester) and then as partner and manager of the Twist Mill at Chorlton-on-Medlock. He joined the Literary and Philosophical Society in 1792, and it was there that his crusade for social regeneration took off. But it was at New Lanark in Scotland that his work blossomed. Having met and married the daughter of David Dale, a Scottish mill owner, Owen purchased the family mill in 1799 and set about running a community that soon became seen as a model by philanthropists. Of the 2,000 inhabitants of New Lanark, 500 were children, most of them recruited from poorhouses and charities in Glasgow and Edinburgh. He immediately banned their employment in the factory below the age of ten, and set about building a schoolroom. He established an outdoor crèche where children could play under supervision, and a separate infant school as well as the main schoolroom in which he placed a great reliance on visual aids. Boys were encouraged to master reading, to learn to ‘write expeditiously’ and to gain ‘facility with the rules of arithmetic’. In contrast, girls were taught to sew, cut out and make up useful family garments as well as how to ‘prepare wholesome food, and keep a house neat and well-managed’. The school soon became a magnet for visitors, and became even better known when, in 1813, he published four essays (initially anonymously) as A new view of society. The first, on ‘The formation of character’ spelt out the central principle on which his school was run. His claim that ‘any character, from the best to the worst, may be given to any community by applying certain means’73 posed a massive challenge to existing educational practice. He stressed that in the conduct of his school ‘all their instruction is rendered a pleasure and a delight’.74 Owen had initially been a supporter of the monitorial system, but now he attacked schools ‘conducted on the narrow principle of debasing man to a mere irrational military machine’,75 adding that children could be educated under the systems of Bell and Lancaster ‘and yet acquire the worst habits, and have their minds rendered irrational for life’.76 Significant as it was, Owen’s educational experiment did provoke some critical comment. The best first-hand account of the conduct of the school was probably that of his son, Robert Dale Owen, who, in 1824, published his Outline of the system of education at New Lanark. Although this did confirm that ‘the children are governed, not by severity, but by kindness’ and that ‘what the children have to learn is conveyed to them in as pleasant and agreeable manner as can be

20 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 devised’,77 it also pointed out that, given the size of the schoolroom, the teachers were obliged to use the Lancasterian method. Dale Owen also regretted the fact that the design of the schoolroom made it impossible to arrange teaching in smaller groups for the older pupils. But perhaps the most scathing comment came from an unlikely source. Among Owen’s admirers was the engineer Thomas Telford. On a tour of Scotland, Telford took his friend, the poet Robert Southey, to visit New Lanark. Owen proudly paraded the schoolchildren in front of his guests. Southey was shocked, commenting afterwards that ‘Owen in reality deceives himself … he is part-owner and sole Director of a large establishment, differing more in accident than in essence from a plantation: the persons under him happen to be white’.78 Although Owen’s school was in Scotland, I refer to it in this work because his activities became widely known and influenced many English educational reformers in the years that followed. Another significant educational pioneer was Thomas Wright Hill, whose school at Hill Top in Birmingham (soon to be transferred to Hazelwood and later to Bruce Castle in London) was founded at the start of the nineteenth century.79 The school was used to educate Hill’s own children (all destined for significant careers) as well as those of the Birmingham industrial elite. Arthur Hill went on to become principal of his father’s school at Bruce Castle, and in 1833 wrote a book detailing the family’s educational work.80 These schools illustrate important elements in contemporary thinking on schooling. They were run on Utilitarian lines, with a strictly controlled timetable and a surprisingly diverse range of activities. Each activity in the schools was chosen ‘for its effect on the welfare and happiness of the individual pursuing it, and of society at large’.81 Although Thomas Wright Hill claimed he had no direct knowledge of Bentham’s work when he established his first school, he was a close friend of Priestley and was in touch with the thinking of members of the Lunar Society. Hazelwood was largely run by and for its pupils. Monitors rang a bell regularly to signal changes of activity. It had its own currency and a school court was conducted by pupils to enforce discipline. But most notable was its curriculum, designed to produce ‘men of business’.82 This was unashamedly modern rather than Classical and included French, gymnastics, drawing and science as well as wide-ranging mathematics, parsing, elocution, penmanship and spelling. Arthur Hill claimed that the plan had ‘all the advantages which a master and workman both obtain, in the man’s being employed in piece rather than day work’.83 This illustrates precisely an important characteristic of schooling in England that was to persist throughout our period. Unfailingly, as the modes of industrial and commercial employment changed, so did schooling evolve to match and mirror what was going on in factories and offices. At the moment of industrialization, the schoolroom itself began to take on the appearance of a factory. Beyond that, the mechanistic teaching practices that developed were modelled, consciously or unconsciously, on those of the cotton shop. As we will see later in the book, the classrooms that developed at the close of the nineteenth century bore an uncanny resemblance to the new offices that were appearing to house the clerical and secretarial teams that were increasingly a feature of the workplace.

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

21

Similarly, after 1945, the open plan office was matched by the appearance of open plan classrooms. In recent years the coming of the digital age has precipitated another revolution in the organization of teaching. It is not clear whether this stems from a conscious or unconscious intention to prepare the students for life in employment, but the parallels are too strong to argue that this is some kind of historical accident.

The first stirrings of the State It is important to make clear at the outset that the State, in its modern form, did not exist at the start of the period we are covering. Our modern systems of local and national government, and the administrative apparatus that goes with them, have all developed beyond recognition from the embryonic institutions that comprised the government at the moment of industrialization. It was the crises that emerged from the swift transformation of society (particularly, initially, in the fields of health and education) that forced responses from the government, and these in turn necessitated the establishment of new governmental departments, intended at first to be temporary, but soon becoming permanent. Throughout our period, the changing demands of the education system have involved refinement and evolution of its administrative oversight. So, in studying the development of education, we are necessarily studying and critiquing the development of the State itself. What we can observe happening between 1760 and 1830 is a series of ill-coordinated and uncertain responses by those involved in politics to the threat of disorder posed by industrialization and the French Revolution. In respect of schooling, the outcome was to be one of the first governmental departments dealing with an aspect of domestic policy. As we will see, this was not universally welcomed. It is interesting to note that all of the first attempts to legislate for the provision of popular education were, in fact, simply a small part of parliamentary efforts to deal with broader social issues. Thus, for example, the 1802, 1819 and 1833 Factory Acts all contained clauses demanding that industrialists establish some form of schooling for their workers, although it was not until 1833 that any form of enforcement was set up to ensure compliance. The 1802 legislation, the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, stipulated a daily maximum of 12 hours’ labour and went on to demand that ‘every such apprentice shall be instructed in some part of each working day … in reading, writing and arithmetic … by some discreet and proper person, to be provided or paid by the master or mistress of such apprentice’. The failure to devise any system of inspection or enforcement meant that this was in reality no more than a statement of intent. The Act was, in fact, a small element in what soon became an ongoing campaign by the reforming faction in the Whig Party, to devise ways to alleviate the social crisis resulting from industrialization. Notable within this group was Samuel Whitbread, whose wealth, based on the family’s brewing business and astute investment in land and property around London, made it possible for him to devote his time to national politics. He, more than any other individual, slowly hauled the question of popular schooling into view as an appropriate issue for political debate.

22 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 It was Whitbread who made sure that one element in the 1807 Bill for the reform of the Poor Laws was schooling. Thanks to digitization, it is now a simple matter to follow the proceedings of Parliament online, and the three debates in the House of Commons on that Bill make for interesting reading.84 The close alliance of Whitbread with other leading radicals, such as William Wilberforce, becomes apparent, as does the tetchiness and hostility towards those less warm to his ideas, including his own brother-in-law, Charles Grey (himself remembered as one of England’s most notable parliamentary reformers), which probably goes some way to explain the ultimate failure to get the Bill on the statute book. Introducing the first reading, on 13 June, Whitbread summarized the situation succinctly. He explained to the House that, as he saw it, ‘all arguments for postponement are futile in the highest degree’. He saw the key issue as that of principle, whether or not ‘it was proper that education be diffused among the lower classes’. This needed to be settled once and for all, and he was convinced that ‘the principle was sound’, adding that ‘whether the country is ripe for it is another question’. He went on to explain to the House some of the advantages of popular schooling as he saw it. At St. Giles there is an education. Children are taught to pick pockets, and to go on from one degree of dexterity in wickedness to another, till they come to the gallows … most of the unhappy creatures who perish there are unable to read or write. He denied that the people, if better educated, would be averse to working at the plough. ‘On the contrary, the ground would be better tilled’.85 On 21 July, at the second reading, Whitbread showed himself to be aligned with the Evangelicals, stressing ‘the benefits which would result from the diffusion of the truths of the Gospel’. He emphasized too that what he was proposing was not compulsory: ‘it does not compel a single child to attend’. He also anticipated a situation in which the Church might be supported by the State in providing education, rather than supplanted: ‘If, in a large parish, 6,000 were educated by charitable contributions and 10,000 not educated at all, this Bill, passing over the former, would apply only to the latter’.86 It seems that something along the lines of the Dual System that developed later in the century was already in the minds of Churchmen and women at the moment they began to contemplate State involvement in education. Objections came in from all sides. Spencer Stanhope claimed to be representing the magistrates of a large northern city when he argued that it was simply impossible to find enough teachers to implement Whitbread’s proposals. Davies Giddy’s ‘total objection’ was founded on his belief that ‘it could never be just or reasonable for the labour of the industrious man to support the idle vagrant’. Thomas Turton thought the whole scheme frivolous when voluntary education was doing so well and ‘everywhere establishing itself so extensively’.87 Despite these reservations, Whitbread’s Bill passed through the Commons, only to be defeated in the House of Lords.

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

23

Although this was a setback, it was becoming clear that there was growing public support for some kind of State involvement in education. The Whigs, who had seen Whitbread as their champion but now saw his health failing (he committed suicide in 1815), turned increasingly to Lord Brougham who was also campaigning for educational reform and soon put his own stamp on the movement. The group around him soon became known popularly as the ‘education mad party’. A better understanding of the extent of the problems involved in providing schooling was required. It was provided by the meticulous work from 1816 of Brougham’s Select Committee to Investigate the Education of the Lower Orders of the Metropolis. Having set it up, Brougham quickly began to dominate the committee’s proceedings. At many of its meetings only two or three people attended, allowing him to put his personal stamp on ‘the education question’. In reality, Brougham was as interested in higher education and workers’ education as he was in the schooling of the poor (his book on Practical observations on the education of the people, published in 1825,88 contained not a single word on elementary schools). His close association with Birkbeck led to the establishment of the first Mechanics’ Institute in 1824, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826 (soon parodied by Thomas Love Peacock as ‘the Steam Intellect Society’) and a few years later the founding of the University of London. So when, in 1818, Brougham extended the brief of his Select Committee nationwide, it was hardly surprising that he used it to conduct a detailed survey of the work of educational charities, most of whom were concerned not with elementary but with the grammar schools. But it did also expose glaring deficiencies in the availability of popular education, particularly in thinly populated areas, and reported a ‘growing, near universal demand’ for some kind of educational provision. Brougham proceeded to bring forward his own Parish Schools Bill in 1820. It went beyond Whitbread’s proposals by seeking to set up a national system of elementary schooling, supplementing the existing voluntary provision with new schools funded by the State by monies raised from the levy of a local school rate. But it left much of the oversight to the local Anglican clergy and, hardly surprisingly, ran into opposition from the Dissenters, whose support Brougham had taken for granted. He withdrew the Bill and reintroduced it a year later as two separate pieces of legislation, the first to provide education for the poor, the second to ensure tighter regulation of the charities. When both failed, Brougham complained bitterly that ‘I was prevented from carrying by the absurd and growing prejudice of the Dissenters’.89 Brougham lived on for many years, and was to promote further Education Bills in 1835, 1837 and 1838. So, although the State was kept at arm’s length in the period before 1830, the implications of Whitbread and Brougham’s proposals were massive in the longer term. No longer was there any thought of a State-run system of popular education, which would be secular and would exclude the churches, along the lines of what had been done in France. Their proposals were to be the template for the Dual System, which emerged in 1870. The remaining issue (although this was to go unrecognized by those involved in the debates) was not so much whether, or even how, but when the State would assume responsibility for the provision of popular education. It was a question that was to hang over English society for another 50 years.

24 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

Embedding inequalities In sum, the educational developments that came with industrialization did nothing to alleviate pre-existing social inequalities. Rather, they worked to redefine them for an industrialized society. As schooling became more systematic it became a key agency in ensuring that inequalities, of various kinds, were made a permanent feature of English society. Between 1760 and 1830 a template was laid down, a pattern of educational provision, which has shown enormous durability, and has, in many ways, endured little changed down to the present. This pattern was to have an impact on virtually every aspect of English society. This is particularly true of gender relations. Despite the claims of powerful minority voices, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book, A vindication of the rights of woman, 90 made a powerful plea for women’s education, there was a near universal assumption that women were born to an inferior role and that schooling should be moulded to prepare both them and their male counterparts for their differing roles in society. It was an assumption that worked out differently for differing social groups. For the daughters of the rich and powerful (and this quickly came to mean those of the new industrial and commercial elite), ‘accomplishments’ remained an important objective, with marriageability (particularly marriageability into landed wealth) being a strong impulse. The prevalence of this belief system was deftly captured in the novels of Jane Austen, many of whose heroines judged their suitors on the size of their inheritance. A successful match would secure the social position of any children and enable a relatively leisured lifestyle. For the daughters of the new urban poor, it meant a focus on domesticity and housewifery. Men were to be the breadwinners in this new industrial world. It was the lot of the vast majority of women to bear and raise children and run the household. For them a life of drudgery beckoned. The role of the school was to be the confirmation and preservation of this social order, not its reconstruction. Inequalities that had endured for 1,000 years were being reworked for an industrial society and schooling was to be the catalyst. Secondly, it is crystal clear from this account of educational change at the moment of industrialization that the central role of religion in almost every form of schooling was made secure. In particular, the Church of England was confirmed as a major player. This became possible, partly because of its new found wealth (together with that of many of its leading figures) from the abolition of slavery, and partly because the Church was one of the most effective agencies available to those in positions of power to dictate social policy. If we were seeking the most significant single factor in explaining why the State’s approach to schooling was hesitant and partial we need look no further than the Church of England. The swift growth of the industrial townships meant that the contrasts between rural and urban became starker, as thousands relocated from rural areas to find work in the new industries. The patterns of schooling that developed reflected these contrasts and did much to sustain them. Increasingly, as the nineteenth century wore on, the educational crisis identified by commentators proved to be increasingly an urban crisis. If the Anglican Church was to find it increasingly

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

25

difficult to sustain its grip on the rural areas, it began to find it almost impossible to meet the educational demands of the townships. It was up to the State to fill the gaps. Consequently, much of the government’s concern with education can be seen in retrospect as an attempt to meet the problems posed by industrialization and urbanization. The solutions adopted meant that schooling itself became a factor that sustained the contrasts between rural and urban. An important element in this was the growing distinctiveness of London. The coming of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ had promoted the position of London within the economy as a whole. Now the new wealth generated in industry and commerce found it difficult to buy into the great landed estates in rural areas, but was able to acquire land and build family homes (many of them second homes) in and around the capital. What was developing at this time was a new aristocracy whose demesne was the Home Counties. This group was to make particular demands of private and secondary schooling, and its existence goes a long way to explain the public school phenomenon (most of the public schools were located in the Home Counties), which took off in the 1830s, as well as many characteristics of the metropolitan secondary schools, which began to look slightly different from those of the Midlands and North (later in the century, the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (GPDST), founded in 1872, was perhaps the most striking illustration of this phenomenon). In a nutshell, the educational provision was to become part of the cement that sustained the distinctiveness of London. But perhaps most significantly, the early years of industrialization were those that confirmed that the State’s approach to schooling was to be hesitant, conciliatory and never absolute. As we have seen, the dominance of the Evangelicals at this time resulted in a general acceptance that the churches, and in particular the Church of England, had a major role still to play in the education arena. The saving of souls was seen as being as important as the transmission of skills. This was one key factor. But analyses of England’s belated approach to State education have gone farther than this and have varied over time. For Brian Simon it was a clear question of the forces of conservatism (one of which was the Anglican Church) ranged against radicals and a nascent socialist movement. In his essentially optimistic conclusion, Simon argues that schooling was the site of a class struggle that, ultimately, the working classes were destined to win.91 Andy Green, in his insightful book on Education and state formation, 92 offers an elegant critique of the work of Anderson,93 Thompson,94 Johnson,95 Wiener96 and Nairn,97 which is too complex to be reduced to a brief summary. On the basis of this, Green goes on to argue that a key factor was the speedy growth of the City of London’s financial sector (the profits of the City rose from 30% of the total value of exports in 1820 to 50% by 1880). The essentially conservative alliance this new power group formed with landed wealth, claims Green, generated ‘a Victorian ruling elite [which] reflected the material basis of class power’.98 Although, as Green points out, the Education Department was ‘heavily influenced by Benthamite expertise’, it was answerable to a government that remained essentially conservative in outlook and in hock to the Anglican Church. As the century progressed, ‘urban local

26 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 government became increasingly the province of shopkeepers and tradesmen’.99 But those involved in local government were in no position to shift the Nation State decisively towards complete control of the education provision, even had they desired it. However one seeks to argue it, it does seem that a coming together of the interests of landed wealth, the new industrial elite and those of the City of London, goes a long way towards explaining England’s unreadiness to allow the State to take full control of a system of schooling that was already evolving in ways that suited their interests. Ironically, it seems that the fact that industrialization took off despite the absence of an education system devoted to transmitting practical and technical skills may have led to long-term complacency about the need for technical education, and faith in a ‘Classical education’ (however that was construed), which was to serve England badly as it came to confront the demands of the second Industrial Revolution towards the end of the century and the even more complex social changes of the twentieth century. In conclusion, it is worth adding that this critique may appear to suggest, or at least imply, that some better (or some other) outcome might have been possible. But it is important to clarify that it is not the role of the historian to pursue the ‘ifs’ of history, nor to speculate on what might have been. What we can do is conclude that the particular concatenation of circumstances that applied between 1760 and 1830 makes the outcomes, in terms of schooling and education, appear comprehensible and perhaps inevitable. It meant that the schools of England were to continue to generate and sustain social distinctions in a society that was being transformed by industrialization.

Notes 1 E. Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Book VI, c, v, i. 2 H. Perkin, The origins of modern English society, 1780–1880, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969. 3 M. Overton, The agricultural revolution in England, 1500–1850, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 4 R. B. Fisher, Edward Jenner, 1749–1823, Andre Deutsch, London, 1991. 5 S. R. Fisher, Scurvy: how a surgeon, a mariner and a gentleman solved the greatest medical mystery of the age of sail, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003. 6 B. W. Richardson, Longitude and Empire: how Captain Cook’s voyages changed the world, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2006. 7 P. Bagwell, The transport revolution, 1770–1985, second edition, Routledge, London, 2015. 8 D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicals in modern Britain: a history from the 1780s to the 1980s, Unwin, London, 1989. 9 M. Whitehead, English Jesuit education, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013. 10 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British imperialism: innovation and expansion, 1688–1914, Longman, London, 1993 and Cain and Hopkins, British imperialism: crisis and deconstruction, 1914–1990, Longman, London, 1993. 11 J. Walvin, A short history of slavery, Penguin Books, London, 2007 also M. Parker, The sugar barons, Hutchinson Radius, London, 2001 and R. A. Milwood, British churches enslaved and murdered black African slaves, Authorhouse, Bloomington, 2014.

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

27

12 University College London, Legacies of British slavery, research project, https.//www. ucl/ac.uk/cultural. 13 D. Simonton, ‘Schooling the poor: gender and class in eighteenth-century England’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 23, 2, September 2000, pp. 182–202. 14 T. W. Laqueur, Religion and respectability, 1780–1850, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1976. 15 P. Gardner, The lost elementary schools of Victorian England, Routledge, London, 1984. 16 F. Smith, A history of elementary education in England, 1760–1902, University of London, London, 1931, pp. 43–7. 17 G. Clark, ‘The Charity Commission as a source in English economic history’ (www. econ.ucdavis.edufaculty/gclark/papers). 18 M. Sanderson, Education, economic change and society in England, 1780–1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 7. 19 D. W. Sylvester, Educational documents, 800–1816, Methuen, London, 1970, pp. 83–90. 20 Ibid., pp. 94–5. 21 J. W. Adamson, A short history of education, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922, p. 225. 22 B. Simon, Studies in the history of education, 1780–1870, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1960, pp. 94–101. 23 N. Carlisle, A concise description of the endowed grammar schools in England, Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, London, 1818, p. xxxv. 24 T. L. Jarman, Landmarks in the history of education, John Murray, London, 1963, p. 192. 25 J. W. Adamson, A short history of education, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922, p. 231. 26 Sylvester, op. cit., pp. 210–13. 27 Adam Smith, An enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, Book V, part III, article II, London, 1776. 28 E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class, Penguin Books, London, 1963. 29 J. Stevenson, Popular disturbances in England, 1700–1832, Routledge, London, second edition, 1991 and A. Booth, ‘Food riots in the north-west of England’, Past and Present, 77, November 1977, pp. 84–107. 30 S. Fletcher, Feminists and bureaucrats: a study of girls’ education in the nineteenth century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, p. 12. 31 S. Smith, ‘Female education’, Edinburgh Review, January 1810, pp. 299–300. 32 R. Johnson, ‘Educational policy and social control in early Victorian England’, Past and Present, 49, November 1970, pp. 96–119. 33 From B. de Mandeville, ‘An essay on Charity Schools’ added as an appendix to The fable of the bees: or private vices, publick benefite, London, 1723. 34 H. Silver, The concept of popular education: a study of ideas and social movements in the early nineteenth century, Macgibbon and Kee, London, 1963, p. 23. 35 Gloucester Journal, 3 November 1783. 36 Sylvester, op. cit., p. 263. 37 S. Trimmer, Reflections upon the education of children in charity schools, T. Longman and F. R. Rivington, London, 1792. 38 J. S. Maclure, Educational documents: England and Wales, 1816–1967, Methuen, London, 1965, p. 26. 39 H. Silver, The concept of popular education, Macgibbon and Kee, London, 1965, p. 17. 40 S. Trimmer, The servant’s friend, London, 1787, p. 11. 41 Silver, op. cit., p. 38. 42 C. Reeve, Plans of education: with remarks on the systems of other writers, London, 1792, pp. 84–5. 43 A. Bell, The Madras school, London, 1808, p. 292.

28 An age of revolutions, 1760–1830 44 W. Boyd, The history of western education, Adam and Charles Black, London, 1966, pp. 369–73. 45 E. Halevy, England in 1815 (vol. 1 of Halevy’s History of the English people in the nineteenth century), revised edition, Ernest Benn, London, 1961, p. 529. 46 On More see J. McLeish, Evangelical religion and popular education, Methuen, London, 1969, pp. 48–53 and 84–95. 47 H. More, Strictures on the modern system of female education (2 vols.), printed for Cadell and Davies, Strand, London, 1799. The quotations that follow are from vol. 2, pp. 1–2. 48 S. Trimmer, The oeconomy of charity, Densley, London, 1787, p. 27. 49 Ibid., p. 4. 50 Ibid., p. 125. 51 M. Sherwood, The history of the Fairchild family, Hatchard, London, 1818, pp. 156–64. 52 Not to be confused with his contemporary of the same name who was a well-known London bookseller. 53 J. C. Power, The rise and progress of Sunday schools: a biography of Robert Raikes and William Fox, Sheldon, New York, 1863. 54 ‘William Fox’, Dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. 55 A. G. Wardle, ‘The History of the Sunday school movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church’, Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1918. 56 Laqueur, op. cit., p. 39. 57 Ibid., p. 61. 58 Ibid., p. 94. 59 Ibid., p. 19. 60 Ibid., p. 245. 61 A. Bell, Instructions for conducting a school through the agency of the scholars themselves, John Murray, London, 1813, p. 3. 62 Ibid., p. 8. 63 J. Lancaster, Improvements in education, as it respects the industrious classes of the community, Darton and Harvey, Piccadilly, London, 1803. 64 Ibid., p. 64. 65 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 66 M. Sturt, The education of the people, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1967, p. 23. 67 S. Trimmer, A comparative view of the new plan of education promulgated by Mr Joseph Lancaster, T. Bensley, London, 1805. 68 Ibid., p. 6. 69 Ibid., p. 150. 70 Ibid., p. 152. 71 H. Silver, The concept of popular education, MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1965, p. 43. 72 Newcastle Commission, Report on the state of popular education in England, HMSO, London, 1861, p. 39. 73 R. Owen, A new view of society, Taylor, London, 1813, p. 16. (N. B. The first edition of these essays in 1813 was published anonymously. It was only in the second edition, published in 1816, that he claimed authorship.) 74 Ibid., p. 56. 75 Ibid., p. 78. 76 Ibid., p. 74. 77 R. D. Owen, An outline of the system of education at New Lanark, Wardlaw and Cunningham, Glasgow, 1824, pp. 5 and 25. 78 J. Glover, Man of iron: Thomas Telford and the building of Britain, Bloomsbury, London, 2017, p. 245. 79 For detail see W. A. C. Stewart, Progressives and radicals in English education, 1750–1970, Macmillan, London, 1972.

An age of revolutions, 1760–1830

29

80 A. Hill, Sketch of the system of education, moral and intellectual, in practice at the schools of Bruce Castle, Tottenham and Hazelwood, near Birmingham, London, 1833. 81 Ibid., p. 3. 82 W. A. C. Stewart, op. cit., p. 57. 83 Hill, op. cit., p. 5. 84 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1807/parochial-schools-bill. 85 Ibid., 13 June 1807. 86 Ibid., 21 July 1807. 87 Ibid., 13 June and 21 July 1807. 88 H. Brougham, Practical observations on the education of the people, Richard Taylor, London, 1825. 89 M. Washington, ‘Pressure groups and Government policy on education, 1800–1839’, Ph.D., Sheffield, 1988, p. 167. 90 M. Wollstonecraft, A vindication of the rights of woman, Peter Edee for Thomas and Andrews, Boston, 1792. 91 Simon, op. cit., p. 367. 92 A. Green, Education and state formation: the rise of education systems in England, France and the USA, Macmillan, London, 1990. 93 P. Anderson, ‘The origins of the present crisis’, New Left Review, 23, January/February, 1964. 94 E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class, Pelican, London, 1968. 95 Johnson, op. cit. 96 M. J. Wiener, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, 1850–1980, Penguin, London, 1985. 97 T. Nairn, The break-up of Britain, Verso, London, 1981. 98 Green, op. cit., p. 221. 99 Ibid., p. 227.

2

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

‘In a progressive country change is constant’1 It is impossible to write a meaningful account of the development of schooling during the nineteenth century without first pausing to reflect on the massive reconstruction of society that was underway. Between 1830 and 1895 the demands that were being made of the English education system were transformed. The continuing growth of the population fuelled even faster urbanization. By 1850 over half of the populace were living in towns and by 1890 this had risen to over 80%. This trend was linked with and fuelled by myriad technological and social transformations. New staple crops became common, most notably potatoes, which Engels claimed were as important as iron in facilitating the industrial revolution. Farming was also made more productive by the introduction of mechanization. The application of steam power meant that from the 1850s traction engines and steam ploughs were widely used on the land. By 1870 almost half of all ploughing in lowland England was done by steam plough. But it also needs to be remembered that during the second half of the nineteenth century arable production in England went into a relative decline as the ability to ship corn over enormous distances grew and its world price collapsed. The resulting switch to pasture for the production of beef and lamb further revolutionized agriculture, forcing thousands off the land and into more reliable and better paid employment in the growing towns, deepening the contrasts between rural and urban. The increased volume of farm produce was able to reach wider markets partly as a result of ongoing improvements in the state of the roads. Telford was able to take on a contract to build a road from London to Holyhead in the 1820s only because he had hit on an improved method of road laying which generated a smoother surface than had those of the eighteenth century road builders. This was taken further by Macadam who, from the 1850s, began applying tar to the process of road building. From the 1860s steam rollers were being manufactured in quantity by Aveling and Porter at their Rochester works to generate what was effectively the road surface we know today. Parallel trends in marine technology facilitated not only much wider trade links, but also the development of the British Empire, which by the end of the century had become a defining part of English society. Two innovations were critical. First,

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

31

in 1838, Brunel’s SS Great Western became the world’s first ocean-going steamship. In 1835 Francis Pettit Smith took out the first patent for a screw propeller to replace the ponderous paddle wheels then in use. In combination these two innovations transformed ocean travel, making it quicker and safer. It suddenly became far more feasible to travel between continents. By mid-century steam was becoming ubiquitous as the railway system was quickly expanded to serve all corners of the country. The railway mania reached its apogee in 1846, during which year 272 separate Acts of Parliament were passed commissioning new lines and companies. From mid-century it became relatively easy and cheap to travel to any corner of the kingdom by rail and a new mode of transporting goods to market was in place. It goes without saying that each of these innovations generated a new industry. But these were only a small part of the technological transformation which occurred at this time. A chemical industry began to develop. By 1870 England was producing 200,000 tons annually of soda, more than the output of the rest of the world combined. From 1885 the factory established by William Hesketh Lever at Port Sunlight made soap a commodity available to all. In 1845 Guest and Chrimes took out a patent for a screw-down water tap which they were manufacturing at their factory in Rotherham. It soon became a universal feature of the new piped water systems. Following the ‘great stink’ of the summer of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to build over 450 miles of sewers for London. Sewerage systems, together with the flush toilets which George Jennings had been marketing since the 1840s, made massive urban conurbations both feasible and endurable for the first time. In 1832 the British Crown Glass company began to produce plate glass. The opportunity to show off their wares in the Crystal Palace built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition meant not only a revolution in domestic design, but also the introduction of greenhouses, generating another enhancement of agricultural production. Crops such as tomatoes and cucumber, which were already known, suddenly became available to a much wider public. From the end of the 1850s the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of steel. Its qualities were so far superior to wrought iron that a second industrial revolution became possible. The bicycle became widely available from the 1850s, but two apparently innocuous refinements were to transform the pattern of marriage in England. The first was the patent for the vulcanization of rubber, taken out by Thomas Hancock in 1843; the second was for the pneumatic tyre, and this was taken out by Robert William Thompson in 1847. In combination, these two innovations made it possible for young people to travel far greater distances by bicycle. For many this meant the first opportunity to form relationships beyond their own village or beyond the next street. The list is almost endless. In 1812, Peter Durand, borrowing from pioneering research in France, took out a patent for the canning of food. As the century progressed this was to enable a revolution in the people’s diet. In 1865 Abram Lyle opened a sugar refinery in Greenock. Four years later a rival factory was set up by Henry Tate in Liverpool. A century later their companies amalgamated, but not before they too had made a massive contribution to revolutionizing the food

32 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 intake of the common people. In 1877 James McCallan purchased a site in Peterborough for the manufacture of bricks. This soon became the London Brick Company, utilizing the railways to provide building materials for the growth of London. Similar enterprises at Accrington and Baggeridge fuelled the growth of towns in Lancashire and the Midlands. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars many local gas companies were set up, and by 1825 no town of any size was without street lighting; gas remained the major power source, for cooking, heating and lighting throughout the century. But its dominance was to be only temporary. In 1847 William Alexander Armstrong established a factory at Elswick, Newcastle, to manufacture hydraulic machinery. This soon became Britain’s main producer of heavy armaments. He used his new wealth to build Cragside in Northumberland. Here, in 1870, he fitted a Siemens dynamo to one of the reservoirs he had created there to establish the world’s first hydro-electric power station. Six years later he used this to generate lighting for the house, which became the world’s first electrically lit building. Thus, by the end of the century electrical power was beginning to threaten the ascendancy of gas. This may read as a litany of progress and untrammelled development. But it is also worth remembering that at the very moment of its apogee, the English economy carried within it the seeds of its own decline. Around the globe, other economies, unhindered by the retarding effects of the first industrial revolution, were also taking advantage of these innovations. Japan, the USA and Germany, in particular, were themselves beginning a process of economic transformation. Very soon, Britain was but one of a number of industrializing nations. So, to take but one example, while British steel production grew apace, its global significance diminished. In 1870 Britain produced 70% of the world’s steel: by 1910, only 10%. This led to a growing sense, particularly within the industrial lobby, that the education system was failing to generate a workforce attuned to the demands of a modern economy. This view has persisted, and has coloured the debate on schooling from that day to this. It is fair to say that the very existence of these ideas is one major source of what has been called the ‘cultural critique’ of English education. This is the view, articulated in its extreme form by authors such as Martin Weiner,2 that, particularly during the Victorian period, the main function of elite institutions, particularly the public schools and ancient universities, was to socialize the sons of industrialists by introducing them to a ‘gentrified bourgeois culture, particularly the rooting of pseudo-aristocratic values and attitudes’,3 and in so doing, preparing them for a life in public service, rather than in industry. Meanwhile, London and the Home Counties steadily became even more central to the economy. This stemmed from two interlinked phenomena. One was the growth of the British Empire: the other was the rise of the service sector, focused particularly on London. One small but telling exemplar of this is the rise of Lloyds of London during the nineteenth century to a position of world dominance in marine insurance (backed by legislation which gave them monopolistic powers). This was but a small element in the process by which London came to dominate global financial markets. The rise of the joint stock bank was part of this

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

33

story. The process has been thoroughly researched and documented by H. C. Lee,4 Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins5 and W. D. Rubinstein.6 By the start of the twentieth century 85% of employment in the Home Counties was in either service industries or the production and sale of consumer goods, and by this time it had lost almost all of its old productive industries to the provinces. During the nineteenth century the proportion of the population living in London rose from 12% to 20%. This was neatly summarized by Cain and Hopkins: ‘between 1750 and 1850 the economic tide had run in favour of the industrial provinces … it swung decisively back again, to the traditional centre of wealth and power, in the Victorian and Edwardian epoch’.7 The implications of this for schooling in the southeast of England could not have been greater. In the words of Cain and Hopkins, in order to meet these needs the leading public schools and the ancient universities became manufactories for the creation of public servants and professionals, who blended the aristocratic ideal of leadership and service with the new administrative abilities and techniques demanded by a complex urban society.8 This, in a nutshell, is why almost all of the public schools are situated in the southeast of England, and why Oxford and Cambridge were able at this time to strengthen their position as the two major universities, despite the appearance of rival institutions elsewhere in England. It is one key reason why education became more, rather than less, divisive during the nineteenth century. It also offers a counter-argument to the Weiner thesis, by arguing that the form which elite education in the south-east took was a direct response to the particular demands of the developing economy of that part of England. Some of the broader implications of these changes were also particularly resonant for the education system. First, it must be noted that this pattern of economic development resulted in different products being made in different parts of the country. Each of the many growing industrial townships was associated with a particular product; Sheffield with steel, Swindon with railway engines, Kidderminster with carpets, and so on. The West Riding region was associated with wool, but each township had its own specialism; worsted in Huddersfield, shoddy in Dewsbury. Similarly, in the metalworking townships of the West Midlands, chains were made in Cradley and watches in Wednesbury. Local specialisms such as these could be found the length and breadth of the country. This had several implications for schooling. This meant that each town grew to make its own particular demands of the education system in respect of the skills needed in its local workforce, beyond the need for basic literacy and numeracy. At the same time, almost all of these workplaces became gendered, with each job being seen as appropriate for only one or other sex, and, almost without exception, the higher skilled and heavier labouring tasks being universally thought of as the domain of males. In many parts of the country there was no alternative to domesticity for the vast majority of women. The consequence for schooling was that these transformations gave little or no incentive to even consider breaking down the gender stereotyping which was already seen as a matter of course both in society at large and within the education system.

34 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 Secondly, and equally significant for the development of a divisive education system, the growing townships fostered the need for a small but increasingly significant service sector of the economy. For much of the nineteenth century in middling sized townships this meant a growing number of banks, building societies and schools. The skills needed to work in this sector were different from and more specialized than those of the industrial worker. Furthermore, they were transferable between regions. This was one basis for the growing demand from a minority of the population for a secondary schooling which would lead to secure employment and respectability. It was a social context that ensured that the wellestablished template of an education system that provided one kind of schooling for the well-off and another for the poor continued to be seen as appropriate for Victorian society. Thirdly, urbanization led inexorably to the rise of local government, as the medieval quarterly assizes and the ancient boroughs recognized by royal charter proved increasingly dysfunctional. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act created 174 new borough councils and in 1888 County Councils were set up to administer those areas not covered by existing provision. These were quickly seen as the agents for the local delivery of social policy, particularly in fields such as health, local transport and, increasingly, education. Throughout the nineteenth century, before the rise of organized labour, these councils became the preserve of local business and professional interests, and the forum where aspiring national politicians cut their teeth. In a situation where the Established Church was struggling to retain its grip on the urban areas, it is easy to see why the significant Nonconformist representation on these town councils was seen by many as a threat, particularly some of the larger municipalities, such as Birmingham, which, under its ambitious young mayor Joseph Chamberlain, seemed to be pursuing what came to be seen as a kind of ‘municipal socialism’.9 The ambitious plans for local systems of schooling implemented by these borough councils during this period help explain the deepening of another key rift in the educational provision, between rural and urban (and this meant, largely, the growing contrast between Anglican schools, which predominated in rural areas, and State schools, which were far more the preserve of the towns). A fourth, and major, implication of these social transformations stemmed from another invention not so far mentioned: the typewriter. Typewriters were marketed from 1874 and were common in offices by the mid-1880s. Also, evening schools and correspondence courses were beginning to appear to teach Isaac Pitman’s new system of shorthand. Previously, the function of office management had always been seen as the role of males; very quickly secretaryship was redefined and became almost exclusively a job for females.10 At a stroke, a fast-growing area of employment was becoming more hierarchical and, at the same time, it became gendered. This too was to have major implications for schooling. But underpinning all of this was the simple fact that this second industrial revolution generated a massive need for technical education. The new industrial enterprises required technicians, engineers, draughtsmen, chemists and a host of other specialized workers if they were to succeed. It was a demand that the

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

35

existing education system was ill-fitted to meet. Much of the technical training which did become available during this period was part-time, effectively a compensatory education for young adults in night schools. Almost all of it was widely perceived as being of lower status than the Classical education offered by the existing elite routes through the education system. Even worse, the ‘academic drift’,11 which saw institutions set up to meet the demand for technical education quickly offering pale imitations of a liberal education, became apparent by the end of the nineteenth century. It has characterized education in England from that day to this. In the process, the contrasts between technical and liberal education in England came to constitute another rift which reflected a wider social divide.

‘Governing as little as they could’: schooling the poor in Victorian England Any sense that the limited schooling which was made available to the poor needed to be extended and diversified in this quickly-changing situation came a poor second to the overwhelming demand for a vastly increased educational provision which stemmed from population growth and urbanization. The overriding issue of the supply of education, and who should pay for it, made any serious consideration of the aims, content or nature of what went on in the elementary schools appear almost an irrelevance. The first phase of industrialization had made the voluntary societies the main agents of provision. They represented conflicting interests and were loath to lose ground to opponents or to allow the State to take over their functions, lest schooling become completely secularized. As the century progressed, ever-present fears of public disorder, fuelled by first Luddism, then by Chartism and repeatedly by nascent socialist movements and the first stirrings of organized workers’ activism, kept these considerations to the fore. The outcome was a protracted power struggle for control of the elementary school system and, through it, of the working poor themselves. Two developments brought the issue of governmental intervention to a head. First, the 1832 Reform Act gave a voice in Parliament to the urban industrial lobby which was far more in touch with radical ideas and the needs of the towns than the landed interests who had previously dominated British politics. The second was a series of unprecedented crises. The first of these was the cholera epidemic of 1830, which forced government action. This took the form of a temporary Board of Health, which oversaw the crisis but was dissolved as soon as the immediate threat had passed. It lasted only 12 months from November 1831. To many this seemed an appropriate model to deal with the other looming crisis of the day, which was the lack of any form of schooling for a quickly growing population and for the towns it was generating. Accordingly, when Parliament was eventually forced into action on this issue, the establishment of a temporary body to oversee and inspect the situation seemed the natural response. If a reticence to increase taxes was one driver of the Government’s reluctance to take direct control of education, another was a fear of replicating what had happened in France. In a debate in the Commons, on 30 July 1833, this concern was summarized by Robert Peel:

36 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 A compulsory system of education seems to me to touch upon religious opinion … if we were once to establish in this country an officer with the power to superintend the education of children of all sects and religions, with power to select their books … we should create jealousy in every part of the country. Would the French system do here?12 Daniel O’Connell put it more strongly, claiming that ‘the object in France … is to de-Christianize the country’. Despite the protests of Roebuck, who had initiated the debate and had argued that both France and Prussia offered sound models that might be followed, the mood of the House was captured by O’Connell, who commented that ‘one of the best resolutions they could come to, was to govern as little as they could’.13 He had summarized, in a nutshell, what was to be the approach of government to education for much of the nineteenth century. Roebuck was well aware of this opposition to both his proposal of a national system of education and to his far broader concept of what elementary education might mean in practice. His plea for a schooling that went well beyond reading, writing and arithmetic (which he described as merely the tools by which an education might be acquired) went largely ignored. But he made two concessions, which were to become central to government policy. First, he spelt out that ‘although the State determine that every child should receive instruction, it does not thereby declare that the instruction to all should be alike’. This was the concession that made the idea of supporting the voluntary societies one which was acceptable to both sides of the debate. But this concession led to a second point that was to prove equally significant. He added: ‘The first distinction that suggests itself is that of sex. Men and women have very different offices to perform in life, and therefore require very different sorts of knowledge’.14 He went on to propose that girls should be taught domestic management and boys given trade skills, at a stroke cementing an already well-established distinction as one of the ‘givens’ of popular education for the next century. One final point that is evident from these debates is that there remained a few ‘backwoodsmen’ who were implacably hostile to any form of popular education. One of these was William Cobbett. He commented: ‘Education has been more and more spread, but what did it all tend to? Nothing but to increase the number of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses – that new race of idlers. Crime too goes on increasing’.15 In the light of these House of Commons debates it is much easier to understand why events developed as they did in the years that followed. Accordingly, an annual grant of £20,000 for elementary schools was instituted at this time, but it was to be administered by the voluntary societies rather than the Government itself. These funds were available solely for the building of schoolrooms. To facilitate this, the National Society, which quickly became the main recipient of these grants, was issuing instructions to parishes in its Annual Reports on how to spend this money, with the advice that, for a schoolroom ‘a barn furnishes no bad model, and a good one may easily be made into a school’.16 In 1839, in response to the growing number of applications, a Committee of Council for Education was set up to superintend the disbursement of these funds

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

37

and it immediately announced the appointment of school inspectors to oversee this process. The instructions to inspectors issued in 1840 included the strong advice that they must ensure that ‘intellectual instruction’ was subordinated to ‘the doctrines and precepts of revealed religion’ in the schools they visited.17 Even so, it remained the case that, inexorably and unwittingly, the State was getting sucked into what it had been determined not to do. In 1846 the role of government was extended through the introduction of a pupil-teacher scheme based on Kay Shuttleworth’s use of pupil-teachers in his Poor Law School at Norwood. By this selected elementary school pupils could be apprenticed to the head teacher for up to five years, boys to be paid £10 per annum, girls about two-thirds of this amount. This tweaking of the monitorial school system quickly became the predominant model for teacher education for the rest of the nineteenth century, although the government also began to support the establishment of training colleges for elementary school teachers. By 1850, 25 had been set up by the Anglican Church, as well as two by the Congregational Church and three by the British and Foreign Society. During the years that followed it became steadily clearer that the problem confronting society was urgent, and was growing. Yet a succession of attempts at legislation was blocked by one or other of the voluntary societies, some by both. On 28 February 1843, Lord Ashley warned the House of Commons of ‘a fearful multitude of untutored savages’ who were roaming the streets of the growing towns. He estimated the number of children in need of some kind of schooling at almost two million, and this was increasing quickly. The Anglican elementary schools were catering for roughly 750,000, and those of the Dissenters for 95,000, which left over a million idle, at severe risk of destitution and falling into crime.18 Yet despite this evidence, Graham’s Factory Bill, which would have introduced compulsory schooling in factories, with teachers to be appointed by the bishops, was blocked by Dissenters, appalled at seeing a Conservative Home Secretary using educational legislation to give unprecedented powers to the Anglican Church. A succession of Education Bills, one in 1847, three in 1855 and one in 1857, suffered a similar fate. As the problems continued to grow, it is best to see what followed as nothing more than a rearguard action to avoid as far as possible the State assuming direct responsibility for education, while at the same time seeking to ensure that it had some kind of effective oversight and control. But the Committee of Council on Education found itself obliged to issue a detailed Code of Practice to enable the schools inspectors to do their job, and in 1855 an Education Department was established to administer this. What had been intended as a temporary measure was becoming permanent. The 1861 Newcastle Commission Report on popular education was to prove the catalyst. Following an exhaustive three-year enquiry, this Royal Commission laid bare the patchiness and inadequacy of what passed for elementary education at the same time as spelling out an extremely limited vision of what should be done. James Fraser, soon to become Bishop of Manchester, worked as an assistant commissioner and painted a stark picture of popular education in his contribution to the Report.

38 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 Even if it were desirable, I doubt it would be possible, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy [sic], to keep him at school till he was 14 years of age … We must make up our minds to see the last of him at 10 or 11 … It is quite possible to teach a child … all that is necessary … by the time he is ten years old … He shall be able to spell correctly; he shall read a common narrative … if he goes to live at a distance from home he shall write his mother a letter that is both legible and intelligible; he knows enough of ciphering to test the correctness of a common shop bill; he has some notions of the parts of the globe in which [foreign countries] lie; and underlying all … he has acquaintance enough with the Holy Scriptures to follow the allusions of a common sermon, and a sufficient recollection of the truths taught him in his catechism to know the duties required of him to his maker and his fellow man. He concluded gloomily: ‘I have no brighter view of the possibilities of an English elementary education floating before my eyes than this. If I had ever dreamt more sanguine dreams … what I have seen in the last six months has dissipated them forever’.19 Accordingly, the Commission’s Report confirmed that the voluntary societies would remain central to the provision of education, that compulsion was not necessary, but that a stronger inspection regime would be used to ensure that schooling provided a ‘thorough grounding’ in the ‘simplest but most essential parts of instruction’ and was neither too ambitious, nor too superficial.20 The Government’s response was immediate. Robert Lowe, the Vice President of the Committee of Council and de facto head of the Education Department set about revisions to the Code, reassuring the House of Commons that ‘if it is not cheap it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient it shall be cheap’.21 Now the schools inspectorate was instructed to use annual visits to test the pupils of elementary schools in reading, writing and arithmetic. For this the pupils were to be presented in six standards. This had two consequences: first, it encouraged a drift towards teaching children in separate groups rather than in a single schoolroom. By 1880 class teaching was almost universal, and this was being reflected in the design of the larger, new urban elementary schools, in which central halls surrounded by separate classrooms were becoming the norm. Secondly, relationships between teachers and the school inspectors were transformed, since each teacher’s income was now made dependent on the performance of her or his students. The sense of threat felt at inspectorial visits is something that has never entirely disappeared. It soon became apparent that these provisions were not enough to fill the gaps, and the extension of the franchise through the 1867 Reform Act convinced Parliamentarians of ‘the absolute necessity to compel our future masters to learn their letters’, as Robert Lowe put it in the Commons.22 By this time the leading Dissenters of Birmingham, a lobby of Quaker and Unitarian industrialists, had become the spearhead of the movement for educational reform and the Bill which W. E. Forster brought to the Commons in 1870 was largely the product of their National Education League. Yet even now the State stopped short of assuming direct responsibility for the provision of education to the poor. The churches were

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

39

given a six-month window to fill the gaps, and where they failed to do this provision was made for election of local school boards which could draw funding from the rates. The compromise which enabled this (the famous Cowper-Temple clause) stipulated that in any school opened using local rate support ‘no catechism or religious formulary … distinctive of any particular denomination shall be taught’.23 This Dual System (which has survived, if only in skeletal form) to the present, was to shift the power balance in elementary schooling semi-permanently. The slow drift towards the secularization of society had already begun and the Church of England was finding itself increasingly stretched to meet its obligations, which had suddenly become greater because of the significant number of schools it founded immediately after the Act. In the last six months of 1870 the National Society made 3,003 applications to build new schools. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Act reduced the funding available to voluntary schools. Meanwhile, the new Board Schools, in many of which the Nonconformist influence was far greater, drew off a steadily growing tax bill, even though the promise had been given in 1870 that this would never exceed a halfpenny in the pound. By 1890 in most towns this had grown sevenfold. The outcome was that by the end of the century, the Anglican schools were struggling to operate, while the impressive, architecturally designed, Board Schools of the large cities were offering a schooling which was far superior to that available in the schools run by the churches. Thus one long-term outcome of the 1870 Education Act was not to end the denominational dispute, but to reshape it for the new England that was developing. Nonetheless, the Act did precipitate a drift towards universal schooling. It was supplemented by further legislation in 1880, which obliged the school boards and voluntary societies to enforce attendance and regulated the well-established and widespread practice of factory children attending school half-time. In 1888 the Report of the Cross Commission offered a smug summary of the situation, commenting that ‘the vast increase in the school population receiving regular instruction … is a result of our educational legislation, which may be considered most satisfactory’.24 The Report’s recommendations read as a vindication of the status quo, and reflected no desire in government circles for a State system of education. Gender distinctions were important and should be encouraged: since girls needed to be taught needlework the requirements of the Code should be modified to facilitate this by reducing the time they spent on mathematics. While ‘misery in the great towns’ remained a serious issue, the growing practice of providing school breakfasts was also a problem, since it ‘diminished the self-supporting efforts which give the greatest protection of the poor against their permanent depression’.25 Its criticism of the school boards was that they had been intended to supplement the voluntary system but were now supplanting it. Perhaps most significantly, the Report argued that, while it was necessary to teach children ‘secular subjects in harmony with their future role’, ‘we are unanimous that their religious and moral training is a matter of still higher importance’.26 If we are to fully understand why, towards the end of this traumatic century, successive governments remained unprepared to introduce a State run, secular system of elementary

40 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 education, the thinking revealed by the recommendations of the Cross Commission offers valuable insights. School fees were abolished by the 1891 Education Act, and further legislation in 1893 raised the minimum leaving age to 11. Thus, during the 1890s, it was under the Dual System, whose impact was to preserve rather than diminish social contrasts, that universal attendance at elementary school, for at least a few years of a child’s life, was finally achieved. Looking back, the efforts to school the poor at this time highlight the extent to which Victorian England was a divided society. Pamela Horn painted a sombre picture of the extent to which schooling in the rural areas lagged behind that in the towns. She noted that in the 1870s much teaching in rural areas was still being conducted in ‘cottages, halls, barns or even the church itself’.27 It proved so difficult to prevent country children absenteeing and working on the land that, in 1873, the Agricultural Children Act was passed, forbidding employment below the age of eight.28 Similarly, Philip Gardner’s research showed that dame schools and private schools, offering some kind of rudimentary child-minding facilities for the poorest, survived for far longer than was previously recognized. He showed that in 1861 well over half a million children were being educated in 26,000 such schools.29 Nor did the 1870 Act transform this situation. He estimates that in Bristol as late as 1874, over 4,000 children (roughly 25% of the total school population) were still being educated in this way.30 Many of the new school boards attempted to meet the glaring need for technical education by encouraging a number of pupils to transfer to a more specialized school for two years at the end of their normal schooling. But these higher grade schools which were established in the larger towns and cities towards the end of the century were only frequented by the children of the ‘respectable’ working classes, those financially secure enough to be able to defer their children’s entry to employment. Thus, these schools offered a technical education to older pupils but, in the process, generated further stratification of the working poor. In each of these contexts the gulf between what was offered to girls as against boys served merely to deepen gender contrasts. Several of the Higher Grade Schools in London were single sex, with differing curricula for boys and girls. In the years following the 1870 Act, the better Board Schools became increasingly attractive to aspirant parents, who often tried to relocate so that their children could attend. The more this happened, the more the schools came to define their suburb, making it a more attractive place to live and impacting on rents and property prices. Widespread perceptions of which were the better schools meant that schooling was becoming a permanent factor in the stratification of English society. Concern for the education of their children, and a determination to get them into a good school, became one of the markers of the respectable working class. But it was one which only those with financial clout in a competitive housing and renting market could aspire to. Above all, the religious indoctrination offered by the voluntary schools offered an enduring token of respectability, which itself deepened social contrasts. It is impossible to conclude other than that the schooling of the poor during the nineteenth century worked both to confirm the disadvantages under which they suffered and also to generate new social stratifications within the working

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

41

classes. Any perusal of the debates within the English establishment which took place around education at this time leads only to the conclusion that this was not entirely an accident, but fitted well with the vested interests of those in positions of power and influence. Although no one actually advocated that the poor should be disadvantaged when schooling was under discussion, the views expressed on the limitation and direction of their education, and the amounts that should be spent on it, reflected a near-universal underlying assumption that these distinctions were a natural part of the social order.

Systematizing superiority: the education of a new elite It is not overstating the case to say that, during the nineteenth century, the cultivation of superiority became systematized through the reform of elite education. The transformation of society which was taking place had massive implications for those in positions of power and authority. The established ‘landed’ elite found itself under threat from various forms of ‘new wealth’, which were making their own claims to be involved in government. The developing professions and the growing financial sector, based particularly in London, demanded an ever-growing labour force, as did the administrative requirements of the growing British Empire. A prototypical form of elite education was already in existence in the better-known grammar schools, whose income was increasingly dependent on fee paying boarders. But many of the other grammar schools were in a precarious state, their fortunes (and size) fluctuating wildly, depending on the reputations of successive headmasters. Some kind of redress was an urgent necessity and it came through the reforms of Thomas Arnold at Rugby, whose work as headmaster signalled the emergence of a new model of elite education. This quickly became systematized, as a growing number of schools set about generating a new class of English gentlemen that came to dominate both government and the upper echelons of the growing professions. It was soon to be a model for elite schooling around the globe. It is important in the context of this book to understand the implications of this development. First, although rarely commented on, the reform of the secondary sector31 was just another aspect of a dogged fight by the Anglican Church to ensure it retained control of elite education and access to the governing ‘establishment’ for a relatively small coterie of sons of the gentry and the newly wealthy middle class. Until relatively late in the nineteenth century, it was usual for the headships of secondary schools to be held by Anglican clerics. Across England the living of many parishes was frugal, and the income from the local grammar school was used to supplement stipends. As the Evangelical movement took hold, many came to see a school headship as an appropriate way to proselytize. Soon school headships became a recognized and well-trodden route to a bishopric. The sermons of leading headmasters were often printed and published. Until the 1890s all heads of the major schools were ordained. But these headmasters all carried with them an understanding of the contemporary threats to the Anglican Church and their reforms are only fully comprehensible in that light.

42 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 For the small number of schools that had become recognized as ‘public schools’, because of their heavy dependence on boarding pupils, the problems were particularly acute. Most of them were in a parlous state. Henry Fielding remarked famously that ‘the public schools are the nurseries of all vice’. His remark remained pertinent well into the nineteenth century, since the delegation of authority to the older boys continued to result in near anarchy in more than one school. Rebellions and strikes were frequent, and fagging and bullying went hand in hand. Drunkenness and sexual promiscuity went unchallenged. These abuses survived simply because those who had survived them and gone on to positions of authority saw them as a part of the necessary toughening of future leaders, and partly because many landed families were choosing to educate their oldest sons privately at home, sending only younger sons, who would not inherit the estate, away from home to be schooled. It was in this spirit that the Duke of Wellington, returning to his old school, Eton, to watch a cricket match, observed that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won here’, a remark often misquoted. By the 1830s Westminster School had developed a particular reputation for anarchy,32 but it was by no means unique. It was a situation crying out for reform, particularly in view of the quickly rising demand for some kind of residential schooling coming from the growing towns. The urban environment was seen by many as increasingly unsuitable for their children, being squalid, dangerous and prone to frequent epidemics. Schools within easy reach of London, which quickly became able to benefit from the railway system, began to offer an obvious solution, but only after the worst abuses had been tackled. The task of achieving this fell to a number of Evangelical headmasters whose determination to promote the schools as centres of religious reform fitted the moment precisely. The best-known of these was probably Thomas Arnold, who became Headmaster of Rugby in 1827, but other significant figures included Samuel Butler (Shrewsbury), Henry Montagu Butler (Harrow), George Moberley (Winchester), Henry Liddell (Westminster), Edward Thring (Uppingham) and John Percival (Clifton). Each of these, in one way or another, put his own stamp on the school. Notably, in our context, they were all Classicists, on their way to a bishopric or a senior position at Oxbridge. The network they formed made them able to play a central role in dictating the main recommendations of the mid-century Royal Commissions on the reform of the public schools and of the two major universities. In 1869 this network was formalized when Edward Thring convened the first meeting of what was to become the Headmasters’ Conference. Its origins lay in the attempts to coordinate the responses of the major schools to demands for the reform of secondary education made by the Taunton Commission. Over time this powerful network was to play a key role in ensuring that elite education was to be distinctive and exclusive, male dominated, and open to only a small segment of society. At the same time, the reforms they introduced ensured that the Anglican Church remained at the heart of the Establishment. As Percival put it in one of his sermons to the boys at Clifton College, he was striving for ‘intense patriotism, steeped in religious feeling’. At Rugby, Arnold used several ploys to generate the

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

43

Christian gentlemen he wished his pupils to become. He sought teachers who could offer a model, of behaviour and lifestyle, which the boys could emulate. In the process he initiated the emergence of a teaching profession. He used the new sixth form that he set up as a way of completely reforming relations between older and younger boys. Significantly, he downgraded and discouraged the lower school so that he could establish an entry age of at least 12 based exclusively on boarding pupils. As John Honey put it, ‘he systematically sabotaged the lower school … the sole means by which local boys … for whom the school was mainly founded, could hope to enter the main school’.33 He was one of the first heads to actively promote academic standards, claiming in a sermon in 1831 that ‘never was competition so active’.34 And he confirmed Classics as the core of the school curriculum. It was so successful a model that it was to be emulated far more widely than Arnold might ever have dreamed. Arnold’s ideas were soon being implemented by other heads. But so great was the demand for a public school education that by the end of the century several new schools had appeared. A leading Anglican, Nathaniel Woodard, set up a Foundation, opened Lancing College in 1854, and soon after further schools at Hurstpierpoint and Ardingly, both intended for lower echelons of the middle class.35 Soon there was a raft of others; Cheltenham, Marlborough, Radley, Wellington, Clifton, Haileybury and Malvern all appeared by the end of the century, and were soon recognized as being part of the public school system. Some were founded by setting up joint stock companies, some through the establishment of a foundation. But in all cases they were able to afford the best architects to create an imposing pile in the then popular Victorian Gothic style. Lancing’s 1862 chapel, designed by R. H. Carpenter, is probably the outstanding example.36 There were several elements to the potent mix that was to make the English public school so successful during the nineteenth century. The emphasis on Classics became if anything more rather than less marked as the century progressed, despite the increasingly strong claims of modern subjects. The 1864 Clarendon Report on the major public schools stressed that the languages and literature of Greece and Rome remained ‘the best materials available’ because of their ‘powerful effect in moulding and animating the statesmanship and political life of England’.37 Another was the promotion of team games. The Reverend Robert Singleton, founder of Radley College, noted in his diary in 1848 that he was determined to introduce ‘manly and muscular diversions’ to occupy the boys.38 He spoke for his generation of headmasters, whose schools competed to excel in cricket or in one or other of the two codes of football. From the 1850s onwards, annual fixtures between the major schools became an important part of the social calendar. At Winchester, George Moberley commented, ‘give me a boy who plays cricket and I can do something with him’.39 Games were seen as important not simply for their role in defining masculinity, but also because they promoted a particular kind of patriotic militarism which became an increasingly dominant ideology as Britain’s acquisition of an Empire led inexorably to military confrontation. One historian who has explored this aspect of the public schools is J. A. Mangan. He has examined the ways in which a

44 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 complex web of internal discipline, team games, exhortation through preaching, together with schoolboy novels, inculcated the militaristic jingoism which enabled the public schools to provide the officer class of an increasingly powerful army. Mangan identified the ‘prose, poetry and painting that enveloped the public schoolboy’ as ‘highly influential agents of indoctrination’.40 Years later, this was all neatly summarized by Henry Newbolt, who wrote, in The new Elizabethans, ‘the most important element in war is the moral … and for that there is nothing like the English school tradition, which makes so much use of the hard, exhilarating discipline of team games’.41 Two factors were important in enabling the products of the public schools to dominate positions of power and influence in later life. The first was the emergence of a ‘public school accent’ during the nineteenth century. Its origins are unclear, but it was increasingly the case that, by suppressing local speech patterns and encouraging what came to be known as received pronunciation (first classified at the start of the twentieth century as ‘public school pronunciation’), these schools made it possible for their products to feel that they were part of an elite and able to recognize immediately others from the same background. The second was the fostering of clubs, first within the school and later when the boys entered public life. Membership of London clubs rose exponentially during the nineteenth century (from just over 1,000 to 200,000: during this period over 100 new clubs were founded42) and they became almost exclusively the domain of ex-public schoolboys. It goes without saying that part of the social function of these male bastions, whether intended or not, was to close off positions of power and influence to women. One such organization was of particular significance in securing the dominance of the public schools. It was the Masonic movement. By the close of the century almost every public school had its own Masonic Lodge, and several of the bestknown met in London, mingling current pupils with old boys near the seats of power. In 1909 these established a standing committee, which was formally constituted as the Public School Lodges Council in 1936.43 At the time of writing there are 35 schools listed as being in membership. Several use the Freemasons’ Hall in Queen Street, Westminster, for their meetings; others have their own premises. Although it is difficult to obtain any detailed information on the workings of these lodges and the networks they exist to service, there can be little doubt of the major part they play in securing the arrival of alumni of these schools in some of the most powerful and influential positions in the public sphere. The school stories and accounts of public school life that began to appear in popular novels and boys’ comics during the second half of the nineteenth century were an important agent in ‘normalizing’ a general acceptance and even glorification of the public schools. By 1857, when Tom Brown’s school days was published, many accounts of fictionalized school life had been released, but it was this book which brought the genre into prominence. With the foundation of the Boys’ Own Paper in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, authors such as Talbot Baines Reed, G. A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne had a platform from which they could preach an ideology of imperialism which had the public school at its heart. Henry

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

45

Newbolt’s most famous work, the brief poem Vitai Lampada, was published in 1892. It is readily available online, and it encapsulates exactly the glorification of the values transmitted by the schools as a vital agency in building a militaristic state. It was the literature of an exclusively male world, and came to be matched towards the end of the century by novels of life in the growing number of schools for girls. L. T. Meade was the author who encapsulated this best. By the 1890s her work was as popular in girls’ schools as was the jingoistic fare available to boys. The genre continued to prosper in the twentieth century, with Gunby Hadath and Elinor Brent Dyer being arguably the best-known protagonists of a gendered literature which has remained influential down to the present. Two questions remain. Who went to the public schools in the nineteenth century and what can we tell of the impact of these schools on social class formation? The most exhaustive research on access to the public schools during the nineteenth century remains that of W. D. Rubinstein, who demonstrated that, contrary to popular conceptions, these schools remained relatively closed to the sons of businessmen, but did provide what was becoming the education of choice for ‘the professional middle classes of vicars, civil servants, physicians and lawyers and professional army officers’.44 He showed too that boys who went to public school tended to follow in their fathers’ career footsteps. In brief, there is little evidence for the claim that these schools played any role in promoting the deindustrialization of Britain by turning the sons of industrialists towards careers away from manufacturing.45 Further, Rubinstein showed that, even within the public school sector, there were gradations of social class. The sons of landed wealth were far more evident at Eton and Harrow than elsewhere. In the other major schools, ‘bona fide landowners were remarkable for their rareness’.46 But the impact of the nineteenth century public schools on English society was subtler, and even more pervasive. They offered a means by which landed wealth and the newly expanded professional classes could pull up the drawbridge behind them, ensuring that their sons retained a firm grip on the levers of power and influence. In the process, they made it far harder for those from other social groups to penetrate the new nexus of power of which they were a key part. Whereas, before the nineteenth century, intergenerational movement between social classes and modes of employment had been relatively fluid, the public schools ensured that society was to remain stratified for the foreseeable future, and that their products were able to monopolize government, the most powerful posts in the administration of an increasingly complex State machine, and the running of the world’s largest empire.

Creating a new middle class: the reform of the endowed schools The social and economic changes of this period generated a steadily growing number of people, in both towns and rural areas, who wanted a schooling for their sons that went beyond what was on offer in the elementary sector, but that was more accessible and less expensive than were the public schools. The reform of the grammar schools that resulted was to make these schools one of the key elements

46 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 that defined the gradations of this new middle class. Attendance at a grammar school became a confirmation of ‘respectability’, and precisely which grammar school one had attended became a key determinant of where within this emergent middle class an individual belonged and what were the most likely available career routes. As we will see, this did not happen entirely by accident, nor did it happen without a major political struggle. The reason for this was that the grammar schools proved to be a melting pot for several interlinked issues. First, since they had all been founded originally as charitable schools with significant income from their endowments, their reform necessarily kick-started the question of the reform of charities more generally; an important issue which I deal with more exhaustively in Chapter 3. Since almost all of them were to all intents and purposes under the control of the Anglican Church, many clergy benefiting personally from the misuse of endowments, there was a perceived need to challenge the Church’s grip on this sector. This coincided with the new urban middle class flexing their political muscles and seeking reforms which met their needs and expectations, emboldened by the power given to them by the reform of Parliament. Finally, as with the elementary schools, there was the vexed question of how the State could control the development of the grammar schools without actually taking direct control of the system and its provision, which would have been seen as anathema by many wedded to Victorian ideals of ‘laissez faire’. Each of these issues requires a little elaboration. As the nineteenth century progressed, there was a growing awareness both of the ways in which the medieval and early modern endowments that provided the funding source of the grammar schools were being abused, and of the limitations of a Classical curriculum, which the original statutes insisted on. The muddled situation in which almost all the grammar schools found themselves was highlighted by a series of parliamentary investigations of the misuse of charities. The first was initiated by Brougham in 1818. By 1837 there had been 18 enquiries and reports and every charity in the land had come under scrutiny. What emerged was confirmation that the grammar schools were bound by the terms of their foundation to teach Classical grammar to poor scholars from their locality, but were being forced to supplement their income by attracting residential students from greater distances to sustain the teaching of Greek and Latin. Meanwhile, they were meeting the demand from the local business community (who were unprepared to put their sons through the new elementary system that was appearing) for elementary education in mathematics and the basics of literacy by offering these subjects in their lower schools to pupils who mostly stayed for only two or three years. Graham and Phythian’s history of Manchester Grammar School47 explains cogently how this issue dominated the politics of the school throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and was endemic in the other major growing cities. This was all compounded by the simple fact that the grammar schools were controlled, almost without exception, by leading Anglicans whose supported the Tory party politically, while the local businessmen who were coming to dominate local politics were largely Nonconformist in religious affiliation. Thus, although less overt than the disputes which raged over elementary

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

47

education, the battle for reform of the grammar schools was, in reality, a struggle to wrest control of these schools from the grip of the Anglican Church, which in many parishes was being propped up by endowment funds which had originally been intended for the education of poor scholars. This is the key factor that helps us understand why it took until the 1860s for Victorian society to get a grip on this problem and come up with a viable compromise. The 1840 Grammar Schools Act, introduced to the Commons by Eardley Wilmot, was an attempt to ‘confirm and improve the schools’ without in any way infringing on their original statutes. Although widely welcomed (in the House of Lords the Bishop of Salisbury expressed his ‘deep gratitude at the remedy of existing evils of a very serious nature’48), the compromise needed to get it on the statute book, namely that no endowment’s terms could be modified, rendered it useless. Another Bill, in 1859, led to the establishment of the Church Defence Institution, which fed off the fears by Anglicans of a loss of control and of the grammar schools becoming more open to the sons of Dissenters.49 In this case, too, it proved impossible to get effective legislation on the statute book. In the following years the problems only became more acute, as this left the grammar schools still constrained in what they could teach but under steadily increasing pressure to provide a schooling which was appropriate for a quickly growing middle class. The outcome was the familiar Victorian response of a Royal Commission, the Taunton Enquiry, whose 1868 Report highlighted the acute sense of social class that ran through the English establishment and which was now dictating educational policy. It called for three grades of secondary education ‘to correspond roughly with the gradations of society’. First grade schooling, to the age of 18 or 19, was to be for the sons of ‘men with considerable incomes independent of their own exertions, or professional men and men in business’. It was a class which had ‘no wish to displace the Classics from their present position in the forefront of English education’, although there was a strong desire to add other subjects. A slightly lower social class was identified as ‘the army, all but the highest branches of the medical and legal professions, civil engineering and some others’. For this group, the Commission laid down what was to become the template for an English grammar school curriculum down to the present. Latin was to be retained as an important element, although this group would ‘hardly give Greek any place at all’. So, Latin, together with ‘English, arithmetic, the rudiments of mathematics beyond arithmetic … natural science … and a modern language’ should form the core of the school curriculum. The requirement was for ‘subjects which can be turned to practical use in business’. In these schools, education was to end at 16 years of age. The Report concluded smugly that these two grades of schooling ‘seem to meet all the demands of the wealthier parts of the community’. Turning to ‘a social class distinctly lower in the scale’ (‘tenant farmers, small tradesmen, superior artisans’), the Report specified the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic to the age of 14, adding dismissively that they did not care for any more than this. The Report called this ‘a clerk’s education’.50

48 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 Following the 1867 Reform Act, which gave more power to the urban middle class, and the return of a Liberal government, effective action became possible for the first time. When a Bill was presented to Parliament, only one speaker, Lord Robert Montagu, opposed the gradation of schools. He commented that ‘these grades are really another name for “labour claims” … the education of boys is essentially the same in whatever grade of life they may happen to be born’.51 But this was a lone voice. More significant was the filibustering from leading Anglicans in the Lords,52 concerned that legislation would finally give Dissenters equal access to a grammar school education. But the political tide was turning, and the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 gave teeth to the Taunton proposals by appointing Schools Commissioners with the power to completely restructure the secondary sector. They set about their task with a will. By the end of the century almost 1,000 schools had been reconstituted in the spirit of the Taunton proposals. Many of those designated second class simply continued to teach Latin, and in some cases Greek, to paying pupils out of school hours. But shaking off the perception that theirs was a second-grade school was less easy. By avoiding direct control of the secondary sector (which several educational reformers, including W. E. Forster, had advocated), Gladstone’s government ducked a key stumbling block to effective action, and gave itself the ability to completely restructure the secondary schools with none of the opprobrium which would have attached to direct involvement by the Government. This restructuring had several key components. First, numerous schools used the enhanced funds suddenly available to relocate away from the insalubrious urban centres to more spacious suburban sites. Charterhouse was an early example, moving to Godalming in 1872. Shrewsbury moved across the river in 1882. St. Paul’s moved upriver in London, but many other schools quickly followed suit; Wolverhampton, Blackburn and a host of others.53 This enabled some schools to confirm their status as major public schools; for the grammar schools it was a sure sign of their place in the pecking order. Beyond this, the schools competed to employ the best-known architects. The development of a ‘collegiate’ style of architecture reached its zenith at Christ’s Hospital when it relocated to Horsham in 1894, to a building designed by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell. In the attempt to conform with the Taunton proposals, many schools copied Eton by opening a ‘modern’ side to be taught separately from the Classical school. Elsewhere, foundations were reorganized by the Commissioners to operate two schools, the new school to be a second-tier school. Hence, at Rugby the Lawrence Sherriff School, in Tonbridge the Judd Commercial School and at Harrow the John Lyon School, all designed to offer a modern (‘second grade’) curriculum. These ‘second grade’ schools were intended to educate the sons of the townspeople, leaving the ‘first grade’ schools to develop untrammelled as public schools, with no need to account for local needs. Some of the better-known grammar schools also opened new schools to syphon off local demand for a modern education. The King Edward’s Foundation in Birmingham opened three schools, in what were then the outer suburbs of Camp Hill, Aston and Five Ways. Elsewhere, the Commissioners worked regionally, designating schools in the larger towns as

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

49

‘first grade’ and those in nearby satellite townships as ‘second grade’ with appropriate curricula. For example, Frederick Temple wrote personally to the mayor of Exeter, pointing out that Exeter School must become a county school, but that Hele’s Grammar School was to be ‘second grade’.54 All this marks the moment when the symbiosis of ‘good school’ and ‘desirable suburb’ took off in England. In some cases, such as at Bedford in 1891, the building of a prestigious and architecturally impressive school was consciously planned to encourage suburban development in nearby Burnaby Road; ‘a new quarter is being laid out in expectation of people flocking to Bedford for its schools, as indeed they are beginning to do’.55 These reformed grammar schools imitated the major schools in several other ways. Notably, out of school clubs and team games became an important part of their appeal. During this period, as in the public schools, Masonic Lodges began to appear in the grammar schools, usually for old boys. These collaborated to set up the Union of School Masonic Lodges in 1945 (now the Federation). This is quite separate from the Public School Federation (although several of its member schools are public schools) and, at the time of writing, it has 174 affiliated schools in England, most of them grammar schools. Given that almost all of these schools have thriving Old Boys’ Associations, it is difficult to see any motive for establishing a school Masonic Lodge beyond gaining access to networking that would otherwise be unavailable. Since the nineteenth century this covert ‘Old Boy’ network has helped ensure that the products of these schools are supported in ways that, whether intended or not, ensure their grip on key aspects of professional life. Thus, this reformed system of schools became a more powerful weapon in shoring up and making permanent the power of the new middle class that was emerging in Victorian England. Schooling became one of the key levers by which individuals and families located themselves within a middle class that was itself becoming increasingly hierarchical. One key weapon was the teaching of the Classical languages, of little practical value in themselves, but enormously important in confirming membership of an elite club: this led what were thought of as the best grammar schools to offer a curriculum not entirely dissimilar to that of the major public schools. The developing economy outlined at the start of this chapter required a vastly enlarged labour force of doctors, lawyers, bank managers and other professionals. Many of these were drawn from non-professional backgrounds. It was in this climate that the myth of the self-made man and of social mobility was born. The changes that took place in the secondary system of education ensured that for future generations it was as hard to fall out of this social class as to get in, since the kind of secondary schooling a boy received came to depend largely on his parents’ wealth and aspirations. It was only to be during periods of economic expansion that significant numbers were able to break into the upper echelons of society for the first time. But this was all too often at the cost of the expanding professions themselves becoming hierarchical in terms of career progression. Senior posts and management positions were to remain largely the preserve of males, and in particular of ex-public schoolboys. It was a world that excluded women almost entirely.

50 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 The schools became very effective in promoting economic change, but this was at the cost of their retarding social mobility. Looking at the work of the Endowed Schools Commission in particular (whose 11 members were drawn almost exclusively from the aristocracy), it is difficult to interpret this as an accidental sideeffect. Rather, it was the planned intention of an elite which felt itself threatened by the swift changes taking place around it and which saw education as a useful tool to stave off and placate forces which might otherwise have swept them away.

Rebuilding the ivory tower It remains one of the unsolved mysteries of education that none of the major cathedral cities of the Middle Ages, and none of the great centres of trade, such as London, Bristol, Winchester and Norwich, generated universities (as was the case elsewhere in Europe). At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were still only two in England, at Oxford and Cambridge. Both had their origins in monastic institutions. The early nineteenth-century universities remained unreformed, offered little systematic teaching and had become little more than finishing schools for the sons of the nobility, with as much time spent on hunting, socializing, drinking and womanizing as on serious pursuits, according to many commentators. Such instruction as did take place was usually given by private tutors. Cambridge had a well-established Mathematics tripos and in 1824 a Classical tripos was introduced. In 1845, William Christie, MP for Weymouth, presented a petition to the Commons demanding an enquiry into the ancient universities. It was voted down, despite the fact that his lengthy speech chronicled many abuses, not least the fact that, although Oxford and Cambridge had the exclusive rights to appoint Ecclesiastical and Admiralty judges, and received generous endowments for this purpose, there were no lectures and no examinations. ‘The universities also had the power of confirming the right to practice medicine … Yet in Oxford they did not even profess to give medical education’.56 As late as 1851, students at King’s College, Cambridge were still able to graduate without having taken any university examinations or having followed any course of teaching. But the universities remained ‘useful instruments of an established Church, an oligarchic government and a hierarchical society’.57 Almost all of the betterknown schools had closed scholarships to one or other college. Since tutors were required to be celibate, many able graduates were drawn away to pursue careers as Anglican priests. ‘Oxbridge’ remained a world closed to the vast mass of society and to any serious prospect of modernization. In the words of Robert Anderson, ‘In England, the landed and Anglican establishment was too powerful … Early attempts to open up Oxford failed’.58 When Benthamites and Utilitarians founded University College in London in 1828, the Anglican response was to set up King’s College nearby. Similarly, a university foundation that was set up in Durham in 1833 was firmly under the control of the Cathedral. Despite growing evidence of their dysfunctionality, there was little prospect of serious attempts at reform of the universities before the midcentury Royal Commissions.

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

51

When, in 1849, a petition from a small group of tutors who were also Fellows of the Royal Society did lead to an enquiry, Oxford refused initially to cooperate, arguing through its Chancellor, Lord Wellington, that the extensive reforms carried out in 1636 were quite enough since at that time ‘the University had revised the whole body of its statutes’.59 Cambridge, where mathematics and the physical sciences were already being taught to some students, was more open to modernization. The Report on Oxford highlighted ‘sensual vice, gambling … and extravagant expenditure’. It drew attention also to an issue that was beyond its remit: this was the fact that ‘a large class of the community is excluded, not by poverty’, but comprised ‘those who are unwilling to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England’.60 When legislation to reform Oxford was tabled, the true state of the University was laid bare in the parliamentary debates. At the Second Reading on 7 April 1854, John Blackett, MP for Newcastle-on-Tyne, an Old Boy of Harrow School and a graduate of Christ’s College, began his speech by apologizing to the Nonconformists present, ‘ashamed to invite them to discuss the reform of an institution from which they were so studiously excluded’. He then went on to lambast his alma mater. Every liberal science has been sacrificed to the pursuit of Theology, with the one object of educating clergymen … some colleges, notwithstanding their splendid endowments, did not even attempt to give instruction in the rudiments of mathematics … physical science was a totally neglected issue as was medicine. He concluded that ‘Oxford has more and more divorced itself from the progressive march of English thought and science’.61 It should be remembered that Oxford’s resistance to reform was probably strengthened at this time by the fact that the whole University was in the grip of the Oxford Movement and, for many in Oxford, the fight to determine how sympathetic those of its graduates who entered the clergy would be towards the Catholic Church seemed far more important. This issue helps explain the foundation of the Anglo-Catholic Keble College in 1870 and of Selwyn College at Cambridge in 1878. But serious reform of the two ancient universities was eventually initiated by legislation in 1854 and 1856, which modified their government (among other things, the requirement that Oxford’s Senate must conduct its discussions in Latin was dropped), but left them to oversee much of their own modernization with the threat of statutory commissions should this not happen. For the first time Dissenters were allowed to graduate, but not to participate in the governance of either university. This arrangement made it possible for the Anglican establishment, who controlled Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to identify elite routes through education which offered no threat to their dominance into the foreseeable future. This was achieved by introducing the concept of ‘merit’ through the increased use of examinations. But they were to be examinations which rewarded what was already being taught in the major public schools.

52 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 It meant too that, as teaching became more systematic in a wider range of subjects, the ancient universities were able to respond to the growing demand from the products of the reformed secondary schools through expansion. College endowments were applied to hire the best-known architects to add new quadrangles and buildings in the fashionable and prestigious neo-Gothic style. Between 1860 and 1901 the student cohort at Oxbridge grew from roughly 2,500 to almost 6,000.62 But the study of Classics, mathematics, philosophy and history continued to dominate. In 1874 Edwin Guest, Master of Gonville and Caius College, giving evidence to the Devonshire Commission, stressed the need for prudence: ‘precipitate action might do more harm than good. It would be a sad thing if, in becoming Physicists, we were to lose the character of our university’.63 Others took a different view. In 1870, John Percival, Headmaster of Clifton College, used an address to the National Association for the Promotion of Science to put his finger on the ongoing problem, commenting: ‘Who can fail to lament the want of real living connection between our old universities and the great commercial and industrial centres’.64 The University Extension movement, which from 1867 saw Oxbridge tutors travelling around the country to give public lectures and offer some kind of highway towards higher education, was made possible by young evangelizing tutors (many of them Christian Socialists) who sought to redress this problem. But it was never more than a marginal solution, although it did lead to a major movement, and, ultimately, to the foundation of the Workers’ Educational Association. This still left a gap which was to be filled by other agencies. The key was to be the introduction of nationwide examinations which moulded the growing Victorian obsession with ‘merit’ into a form which did not in any way threaten the primacy of the ancient universities, but instead worked to reinforce it. The more systematic examination of students within the universities was matched by the introduction of Oxford and Cambridge local examinations made available to the schools. These were eventually to become the main route into the major professions and Oxbridge, but only after, as John Roach showed,65 a determined effort to ensure that they corresponded with the new Civil Service examinations (which were themselves arranged in different grades). The first examinations, held in 1858 at 11 centres, attracted very few candidates in scientific and practical subjects. By the end of the century, the ‘elite’ subjects (the Classics and the liberal arts), had been established as the main route into the major professions. It was a system which enabled the universities, the public schools and the newly defined first grade secondary schools, which drew largely from the upper echelons of the growing middle classes, to hold the keys to the professionalization of society. All of this left a yawning gap in the fast-growing towns, where there was a growing demand for some kind of advanced technical and scientific training for the thousands of technicians and craftsmen required by the new industries. Since the universities appeared initially incapable of responding to this, it fell to a small number of enthusiasts, most notable among them Henry Cole, backed by Prince Albert, to campaign for the establishment of Schools of Art and Design in the industrial centres. The profits of the Great Exhibition were used to set up, in

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

53

1853, a Department of Science and Art, which within a few years was overseeing the teaching and examining of technology, practical sciences and art and design the length and breadth of the country. What the universities would not, or could not, do, the State was being forced to find ways to fund. In 1899 this Department of Science and Art was merged into the newly expanded Education Department. By then it had become the largest single examining body in the country. It is significant for our narrative since it marked the establishment, during the second half of the nineteenth century, of a distinct route for the sons of a particular cadre of the growing middle class into skilled employment in industry. Higher education was becoming segmented, with differing social class affiliations to different kinds of institution. This new examining body, together with the University of London, which was established in 1837 (initially to award degrees to the students of its two constituent colleges), were to be the catalysts of new forms of post-school education. In 1858 the University of London was given the power to award external degrees, and from 1878 female students were recognized. It was soon being used as an examining body in several regional centres, enabling diverse and varied forms of higher education to spring up across the country. This coincided with the aspirations of many industrialists to put their stamp on technological training. In Manchester, Owens College opened its doors in 1851. In Leeds, the Yorkshire College of Science began work in 1874 as an attempt to ‘to provide instruction in such sciences and arts as are applicable to the manufacturing, mining, engineering and agricultural industries of Yorkshire’.66 For Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, a leading supporter of the Mason Science College, it was the aspiration to ‘place a university in the middle of a great industrial and manufacturing population … to do something to leaven the whole mass with higher aims and higher intellectual ambitions’.67 These two contrasting aims do much to explain the way in which across the country local colleges evolved into major universities, determined to differ from the older universities, but at the same time wishing to appear as much like Oxford and Cambridge as possible to ensure their own place in an emerging status hierarchy. By the late nineteenth century most of the major industrial towns had a university college funded in large part by local entrepreneurs, but increasingly from local rates. From 1889 they became eligible for government grants, and their recognition as chartered universities at the end of the century confirmed their arrival in the developing hierarchy of higher education institutions. All appointed well-known college architects (Waterhouse in Leeds and Manchester; Aston Webb in Birmingham), mostly modelling their designs on Oxbridge Gothic, to ensure that their buildings were a reflection of their new-found status.68 Although they all experienced ‘academic drift’, since the aspiration to be fully recognized as universities in their own right led to the speedy development of Arts Faculties which mirrored those of Oxford and Cambridge, the fact that they continued to recruit regionally rather than nationally (until at least the Second World War) and that they drew almost exclusively from the newly established urban middle classes rather than the ‘old elite’, was to mean that they never competed on level terms with Oxbridge.

54 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 Nonetheless, as Michael Sanderson showed in his magisterial study,69 they made a massive contribution to technological and scientific training which was only matched belatedly in the older universities. Thus, by the close of the nineteenth century, a system of higher education was beginning to emerge whose structure both reflected and reinforced the stratification of the emerging middle classes.

‘Places of moral rather than intellectual training’:70 the schooling of middle-class girls It is an open question whether the development of secondary and higher schooling for girls at this time did anything to resolve the greatest social distinction of all, that between males and females. It did, however, reinforce the contrasts between social classes, as steadily growing numbers of middle-class girls were given the chance to enter professional life, almost always in positions of subservience that offered little or no threat to male dominance, but which made their lot in life increasingly distinctive from that of the daughters of the poor. The appearance during the nineteenth century of schools for middle-class girls stemmed from a variety of motives. For some, it was a need to ensure that the mothers of the emerging middle classes would be competent and civilizing homemakers. For others, it was the realization that the transformation of the economy was generating demands for a skilled female labour force. Some witnesses argued to the Taunton Commission that the demands of Empire involved the emigration of males who left behind females for whom there were simply not enough husbands and who must, therefore, make their own way in the world. From about 1850 to the end of the century the nascent feminist movement drew on these conflicting considerations to agitate for the establishment of girls’ secondary schools. In the process, they added another component to the emergent education system that was to do much to define the role of women in English society down to the present time. However, it is difficult to overstate the persistence, until recent times, of the view that the woman’s sphere was the home. This was to remain, into the twentieth century, a major determinant of the form that girls’ education took. In 1839, Sarah Lewis, author of Woman’s mission, argued that female energy was at its best ‘if allowed to flow in its natural channels, viz … the domestic sphere’.71 In 1859, in Self help, Samuel Smiles questioned whether a woman should be working in a factory in the first place, claiming that ‘the performance of the domestic duties is her proper office in civilised life’.72 In 1865, the influential writer Elizabeth Sewell took this argument further, claiming that to put girls in large schools was a mistake. Since they were destined for home life, ‘to educate girls in crowds is to educate them wrongly’.73 It was in this spirit that the Association of Headmistresses resolved in 1892 that ‘if Technical Education is introduced into girls’ schools, it should be for the sake of its educational value, and in no way as a direct preparation for any art or trade’.74 And this was the spirit in which Sarah Burstall, headmistress of Manchester High School, told her staff that ‘science for women, especially biological science, must be the foundation of their work for the family, for hygiene and for housecraft’.75

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

55

It was against this background that a growing number of feminists (Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies were leading figures) campaigned and lobbied, through agencies such as the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (founded in 1857), for secondary schooling for girls. Some of them acquiesced in the view that girls’ education should be at best marginal. Others saw schooling as one weapon in the fight for equality. The Taunton Commission, for example, commented on the ‘cruel injustice’ of excluding girls from benefiting from the endowments it was reforming. A year later, in the Commons, Henry Winterbotham argued eloquently for the schooling of boys and girls to be mixed (something that was not achieved for another 100 years). His proposal that the phrase ‘equally with boys’ should be added to the legislation being drawn up was rejected.76 Winterbotham was already by this time a leading campaigner for equality for women, and it was only his tragic early death a few years later which left him a little-known figure in the fight for schooling for girls. In the attempt to reconcile the views of those who wanted equality with the far more limited ambitions of some other reformers, the system of secondary schools for girls which emerged managed to satisfy neither, although, in fairness, by the end of the century it did help to establish the concept of ‘the new woman’ in the public sphere. In retrospect, the late 1860s can be seen as a turning point in the schooling of girls. Before then, as James Bryce pointed out in his evidence to the Schools Enquiry Commission, most of the daughters of the professional and middle classes were taught at home by private governesses. The Commission had been set up to investigate the secondary schooling of boys, but as a result of the campaign led by Emily Davies, it did incorporate a chapter on girls’ education. Earlier in the century, several private schools for girls had been established, mostly small and focusing on ‘accomplishments’. These were complemented by a few fashionable boarding schools in locations such as Brighton, Clifton and Bath. Their function has been summarized as the production of ‘cultured Christian homemakers’.77 But a new wave of feminism in the 1860s, and the impact of the Taunton Report, were to change everything. By the end of the century there were over 90 girls’ grammar schools that had been set up by the Schools’ Commissioners, another 40 schools affiliated to the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, set up in 1867, and a further 33 schools under the aegis of the Church Schools Company (1883). A few schools had appeared which were modelled on the boys’ public schools; notably Cheltenham (1854), Roedean (1885) and Wycombe Abbey (1896). The Commissioners who dealt with the girls’ grammar schools were anxious to grade them, in much the same way that they were grading boys’ schools. At Bedford, for example, in 1882 the architect Basil Champneys was instructed to design the Bedford High School as two completely separate schools within a single building; the first to be a Classical first grade school, the other second grade, catering for a lower social class and offering a modern curriculum.78 As was the case with the education of boys, schooling for girls was becoming systematized. It was a systematization which involved gradations of social class. Inevitably, these schools were to generate a pool of talented young females with aspirations to pursue some kind of higher education. Early in the nineteenth

56 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 century, many Literary and Philosophical Societies and Mechanics’ Institutes excluded females, or permitted them to attend only as the wives of members. Twin routes into higher education were to open up for significant numbers of middle-class girls, and they carried with them their own implications for social class. The first was the learned societies and organizations offering evening lectures, which steadily became more accessible to females. A significant impetus was generated by the North of England Council for the Promotion of Higher Education for Women, founded in 1867 by Anne Clough, which persuaded James Stuart to give the first-ever University Extension lecture to a women’s meeting in Crewe in that year. By 1888–9 over two-thirds of the attendees at Oxford University Extension lectures were female. A second channel appeared through the opening up of public examinations to females. The College of Preceptors was founded in 1846, and began to accept female candidates for its examinations in 1851. Within a few years the Society for Arts and Oxford and Cambridge Universities were allowing girls to enter for their examinations, although there was ongoing dispute about whether or not they should compete on equal terms and on the same papers as boys. For a small elite, a few women’s colleges were set up, the first Bedford College in London (1849), founded by Elizabeth Jesser Reid. Alarmed at the educational levels of the first entrants, within a few years the executive committee had opened its own secondary school for girls to generate qualified entrants in sufficient numbers to ensure the survival of the college. Hitchin College (1869) relocated four years after its foundation to Girton, on the outskirts of Cambridge, where it survives as a constituent college of the University. In 1876 Newnham College was established on its present site. In 1893 St Hilda’s Hall, Oxford, the brainchild of Dorothea Beale, headmistress of Cheltenham, began work with the intention of allowing trainee female teachers a year of study in a university environment. Painfully slowly, the means of permitting the most privileged females access to some kind of higher education was developing, although it took many years and bitter campaigning for them to be accepted for full degrees in the ancient universities. In contrast, London was awarding degrees to females from 1878, and Owens College, Manchester, was open to women on equal terms from its inception, as were most of the civic universities. It is clear, even from this cursory account, that these developments were of major significance for the development and stabilization of the new middle and working classes. The women who passed through this system were moving, not up into the next class, but into the new social groupings that were generated by the economic transformations that were taking place. Many of the GPDST schools (all day schools) were located in greater London. Not infrequently, the students were the daughters of industrialists who had established a town house in London and who preferred their daughters to grow up in that environment, rather than in or near the increasingly squalid towns in which their enterprises were situated. For the most part they were daughters of the Metropolitan professional classes who sent their sons to public schools and on to Oxbridge, the Civil Service or Sandhurst. During their metropolitan girlhood and schooling these young women were

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

57

‘trainee matriarchs’, being readied to play a major part in both the social and political arenas. This judgement may be a little loaded, but captures the reality of the developing situation in the Home Counties. Meanwhile, a new social group was forming. This was the growing army of unmarried women who spent their lives in school-teaching. Here again the new gradations were clear. By the end of the century, those who taught in the secondary sector had, for the most part, passed through the universities. Having been born into the middle classes, their career trajectories were playing a part in reconstructing it. It was increasingly usual for the teachers in the boarding schools and the GPDST schools to have studied at one or other of the higher education colleges for women. Around the country, the staffrooms of the new girls’ grammar schools that were appearing in the industrial towns were far more (although not exclusively) the preserve of the products of the new civic colleges of the industrial towns, which were to become universities at the end of the century. At the same time, the large labour force (mostly female) who staffed the elementary schools were themselves the products of the elementary sector and had trained either through the pupil-teacher system and day training colleges or the residential colleges opened by the denominations. Their careers offered them a secure place in the ‘respectable’ working class whose natural home was the growing suburbs of terraced housing on the outskirts of the industrial cities. In all cases, it was understood (with relatively few exceptions) that marriage meant the ending of one career and the start of another as a housewife. This is a rough typology, and needs much more detailed research on origins and destinations to provide the qualifications and interpretations that such a broad claim involves. But I believe that the patterns of employment of females who received a secondary education during the nineteenth century provide an almost perfect illustration of the stratification of English society at this time, and of the myriad ways it was adapting to changing circumstances of ongoing industrialization.

Notes 1 B. Disraeli, speech given in Edinburgh, 29 October 1867. 2 M. Weiner, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, 1850–1980, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981. 3 W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain, 1750–1990, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 22. 4 H. C. Lee, The British economy since 1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986. 5 P. G. Cain and A. J. Hopkins, British imperialism: innovation and expansion, 1688–1914, Longman, London, 1993. 6 Rubinstein, op. cit. 7 Cain and Hopkins, op. cit., p. 116. 8 Cain and Hopkins, op. cit., p. 122. 9 R. Ward, City, state and nation: Birmingham’s political history, 1830–1940, Phillimore, Chichester, 2005, p. 77. 10 G. Anderson (ed.), The white blouse revolution: female office workers since 1870, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. 21.

58 Workshop of the world, 1830–1895 11 D. K. Muller, F. Ringer and B. Simon (eds.), The rise of the modern educational system: structural change and social reproduction, 1870–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 236, n. 4. 12 Ibid., 30 July 1833. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 17 August 1833. 16 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, 1370–1870, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1971, p. 140. 17 Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, 1840–41, pp. 1–11, cited in J. S. Maclure, Educational documents: England and Wales, 1816–1967, Methuen, London, 1965, p. 49. 18 https.//api.parliament/historic-hansard/index, 28 February 1843. 19 Report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into the state of popular education in England (Newcastle Report), HMSO, London, 1861, vol. 1, p. 243. 20 Ibid., p. 293–6. 21 https.//api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/index.html, 11 July 1862. 22 See Robert Lowe’s statement to the House of Commons on 28 February 1867. 23 J. S. Maclure, op. cit., p. 98. 24 Report of the Royal Commission on the Elementary Education Acts (The Cross Report), HMSO, London, 1888, p. 212. 25 Ibid., p. 325. 26 Ibid., p. 213. 27 P. Horn, Education in rural England, 1800–1914, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1978, p. 122. 28 Ibid., p. 136. 29 P. Gardner, The lost elementary schools of Victorian England, Croom Helm, London, 1984, p. 51. 30 Ibid., p. 76. 31 For a full treatment of this issue see J. Roach, A history of secondary education in England, 1800–1870, Longman, Harlow, 1986 and also his Secondary education in England, 1870–1902: public activity and private enterprise, Routledge, London, 1991. 32 J. Chandos, Boys together: English public schools, 1800–1864, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1984, pp. 84–5 and 324–5. 33 J. Honey, Tom Brown’s universe: the development of the public school in the nineteenth century, Millington, London, 1977, p. 15. 34 Op. cit., p. 14. 35 T. May, The Victorian public school, Shire, Oxford, 2009, p. 27. See also L. and E. Cowie, That one idea: Nathaniel Woodard and his schools, The Woodard Corporation, Ellesmere, 1991. 36 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, 1870–1970, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, pp. 45–6. 37 J. S. Maclure, op. cit., pp. 84–5. 38 T. Money, Manly and muscular diversions: public schools and the nineteenth century sporting revival, Duckworth, London, 1997, p. 67. 39 J. Gathorne Hardy, The public school phenomenon, Penguin, London, 1979, p. 159. 40 J. A. Mangan, Tribal identities, Cass, London, 1990, p. 172. See also M. Tozer, ‘Manliness: the evolution of a Victorian ideal’, Ph.D. thesis, Leicester, 1978. 41 See R. Lowe (ed.), History of Education: major themes, Routledge, London, 2000, vol. 2, p. 551. 42 P. J. Rich, Chains of Empire: English public schools, Masonic Cabalism, historical causality and imperial clubdom, Regency Press, London, 1991, p. 145. 43 Public Schools Lodges Council, www.pslc.org.uk.

Workshop of the world, 1830–1895

59

44 W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain, 1750–1990, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 119. 45 See Weiner, op. cit. 46 Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 119. 47 J. A. Graham and B. A. Phythian, The Manchester Grammar School, 1515–1965, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1965, p. 32–43. 48 House of Lords proceedings, 16 July 1840 (https://api.parliament.uk/historichansard). 49 D. Allsobrook, Schools for the shires: the reform of middle-class education in mid-Victorian Britain, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986, p. 194. 50 See Maclure, op. cit., pp. 89–97. 51 House of Commons Proceedings, 18 February 1869 (https:api.parliament.uk/histor ichansard). 52 House of Lords Proceedings, 8 August 1869 (https:api.parliament.uk/historichansard). 53 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, chap. 3. 54 Op. cit., p. 48. 55 Seaborne and Lowe, op. cit., p. 54. 56 https://api.parliament.uk/historichansard/index, 10 April 1845. 57 S. Rothblatt, The revolution of the dons: Cambridge and society in Victorian England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, pp. 17–18. 58 R. D. Anderson, Universities and elites in Britain since 1800, Macmillan, London, 1992, pp. 12–13. 59 Maclure, op. cit., pp. 65–7. 60 Ibid. 61 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/index, 7 April 1854. 62 R. Lowe, ‘The expansion of higher education in England’ in K. Jarausch, The transformation of higher learning, 1860–1930, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1982, p. 45. 63 Evidence given on 30 June 1874: see Scientific instruction, HMSO, London, 1875. 64 Transactions of the National Association for Social Science, 1860, pp. 311–16. 65 J. Roach, Public examinations in England, 1850–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, pp. 75–188. 66 M. Sanderson, The universities and British industry, 1850–1970, RKP, London, 1972, p. 66. 67 University Review, 21, 4, January 1907, p. 146. 68 R. Lowe and R. Knight, ‘Building the ivory tower: the social functions of late-nineteenth century collegiate architecture’, Studies in Higher Education, vol. 1, no. 2, 1982, pp. 81–91. 69 Sanderson, op. cit. 70 Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission (The Taunton Report), HMSO, London, 1868, vol. 1, p. 547. 71 J. Purvis, A history of women’s education in England, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1991, p. 3. 72 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 73 Ibid., p. 65. 74 Ibid., p. 83. 75 Ibid., pp. 82–4. 76 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/index, 14 June 1869. 77 Purvis, op. cit., p. 72. 78 Seaborne and Lowe, op. cit., pp. 55–7.

3

Embedding privilege The charitable status of elite schools

One development during the nineteenth century was central to the establishment of an education system that had the permanent effect of separating sheep and goats. This was the ‘reform’ of the charities, which needs detailed explanation in its own right. This chapter deals, therefore, with the neglected topic of the origins of the charitable status of elite schools in England. It reconstructs the debate on the funding of schools which led to the establishment of the Charity Commission in 1853 and argues that it was the obdurate refusal of the Anglican Church to surrender its control of secondary education which first delayed reform and then forced the compromise which resulted in the major public schools remaining outside the direct control of the new Commission. In conclusion, it argues that decisions which were taken in the mid-nineteenth century continue to resonate today, allowing elite schools, catering for some of the richest families in the land, to continue to operate as registered charities and benefit from significant financial support from the State, even though these charities were initially intended to benefit the poorest. This development was central to the establishment of a permanently divided system at that time and is worthy of separate treatment alongside the main narrative.

A neglected issue Although the private sector, and the public schools in particular, have been for many years of interest to historians of education, and much has been written, the question of exactly how charitable status evolved into a shield against the taxman for the most privileged in the land has never been pursued. When historians have touched on the charities, they have stopped short of this issue. Yet a host of issues relating to the public schools have been explored. A quick glance at the extant literature makes clear this lacuna. The only book to address this question at all is R. S. Tompson’s The Charity Commission and the age of reform. 1 This dismisses completely, without much evidence, the links between earlier investigations and the setting up of a permanent body in 1853 (which I seek to establish here as being central), and misses completely the question of the exceptionalism of elite schools, which was the main concession enabling the establishment of a permanent Charity Commission. His

Embedding privilege

61 2

other work, better known to historians of education, Classics or charity, is focused on an earlier period. Beyond this, the legion of outstanding scholars who have written on the public schools have all seen this issue as irrelevant, or not worthy of comment. Among the most important, Newsome,3 Bamford,4 Honey,5 Mangan,6 Heward7 and Gathorne-Hardy8 all made significant statements on one aspect or another of the public school phenomenon, but remained silent on the subject of their charitable status. There is also a long tradition of historical accounts which eulogize these schools, often in the form of reminiscences. The most recent example is Martin Stephen’s The English public school: an irreverent history. 9 Hardly surprisingly, this genre fails completely to touch on the charitable status of these schools, although it has furnished much useful material on their working. In brief, the precise question of exactly how the private sector of education came to benefit massively from its charitable status remains until now a neglected issue.

Charitable status: the realities There are roughly 2,300 private schools in the United Kingdom. Of these, over 1,300 are registered charities.10 For many commentators, this is seen by many as an unjustifiable tax break that the State gives to schools that educate some of the most privileged young people in Britain. Yet the questions around how this situation arose, how it has survived and how it has been justified over time have all been neglected by historians of education, even those most critical of the ways in which the State has operated in the educational arena. This chapter is an attempt to open a much-needed discussion and to encourage further explorations by historians of the unique way this phenomenon evolved in Britain. The use of a pejorative term like ‘tax break’ makes it necessary to specify at the outset what those benefits are. Under the terms of the 1988 Taxes Act (section 505), registered charities do not pay income tax on investment income, provided their functions are exclusively charitable. Secondly, they are entitled to relief of 80% on the business rates payable on the buildings they use. Further, under the terms of the 1992 Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act (clause 256) they are not required to pay Capital Gains Tax on the disposal of assets. However, they are subject to Value Added Tax on the same terms as everyone else. Even so, these are not inconsiderable benefits.

The origins of charitable status A significant number of grammar schools (possibly as many as 300) had been established during the Middle Ages. They were, without exception, founded as the result of a charitable bequest, either by an individual or by one of the medieval trade guilds. Thus, from the outset, these schools were seen as charities, whose function was to provide schooling for the poor. This convention was reinforced by the dissolution of the Chantries under Edward VI in 1547. Although the Chantries did not have the wealth of the recently suppressed monasteries, they were

62 Embedding privilege widespread and their closure was not only a critical step in the process of divorcing England from Rome, but did also generate considerable sources of income across the country which had to be redeployed. The 1547 Chantries Act identified the ways in which the funding must be used. These were ‘to assign monies to the poor’ and ‘to appoint lands for the support of grammar school masters’.11 These funds were to be devoted ‘in succession to teacher or preacher forever, for and toward the keeping of grammar schools’.12 The legislation went on to specify that two Commissioners would be appointed to oversee this, and they began work in July 1548 with the brief to instruct the parish priest to oversee the establishment of a school in the parishes they investigated. The foundation of many new schools at this time was to make the grammar schools a familiar part of the communal life of towns and villages, and ensured that they remained under the control of the Church of England. It meant, too, that their function was seen as being charitable, the provision of a Classical education to poor scholars. From the outset, at the moment it first took on the characteristics of a system, schooling was being construed as a charitable act rather than the responsibility of the State. In this lie the origins of our present controversies. This was confirmed and regularized by the 1601 Charitable Uses Act, which was to determine what constituted charitable activity until it was superseded by the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act of 1888. But, significantly, that Victorian legislation confirmed that the preamble to the 1601 legislation still stood, and it was in this preamble that what constituted charitable activity was first defined. The list included ‘schools of learning’, ‘free schools and schools in universities’ and ‘the education and preferment of orphans’. It specified too that for any institution to be recognized as a charity it ‘must exist for the benefit of the public’ and ‘must be exclusively charitable’.13 This had gone unchallenged, without clarification, for 200 years, until in an important test case in 1805, which still holds some sway (Morice v. the Bishop of Durham), Sir Samuel Romilly established that ‘the advancement of learning’ was one of the sufficient definitions of what constitutes charitable activity. A further test case in 1891 (Commissioners of Income Tax v. Pemsel) confirmed Romilly’s definition. This involved a vagueness and generality that has served well those working in the education system who wish to shelter behind legal precedent. The appearance of charity schools for the poor during the eighteenth century, many of them funded by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, had the effect of universalizing the concept of education as a charity and certainly did nothing to undermine it. These schools were ‘charitable’ under the third definition laid down in 1601, in that they catered, initially at any rate, for ‘the education and preferment of orphans’. As the Evangelical Movement took hold in the Anglican Church at the end of the Century and ‘good works’ came to rank high among the Christian virtues, it became very fashionable to get involved in one way or another in this kind of activity. It is probably to this period that we can look for the deep embedding in the British psyche of the view that involvement in popular education and schools for the poor was essentially a charitable activity. It is the persistence of this world view which goes a long way to explain why the existing arrangements have met with so little public challenge.

Embedding privilege

63

The check to this thinking in the early nineteenth century was provided by Thomas Malthus, whose ideas (in particular the perceived threat of over-population) were to lead Victorians towards the concept of ‘the deserving poor’. As it has been summed up by Dan Ritschel: ‘The great Malthusian dread was that “indiscriminate charity” would lead to exponential growth in the population in poverty, increased charges to the public purse to support this growing army of the dependent, and, eventually, the catastrophe of national bankruptcy’.14 In this lay the origins of the 1869 Charity Organisation Society, whose commitment was towards far better-targeted charitable works. Most of its members saw fecklessness and the absence of self-restraint as the prime causes of poverty.15 But during the early nineteenth century this was never more than a minority view. Far more representative was the strong case made to the House of Commons in 1807 by Sturges Bourne, Lord of the Treasury, who argued that it was only through the vigorous encouragement of charitable activity that the State could avoid becoming the main funder of a quickly growing education system: ‘I disprove entirely of compulsion. It might considerably check the spontaneous charity of many individuals … It was teaching the persons relieved to look on as a right that which they ought to regard as a favour’.16 This was echoed by the rather complacent view of Richard Ellison, MP for Lincoln, who was convinced that ‘the operation of the poor laws and the public charitable schools already in existence were fully adequate to ameliorate the condition of the poor’.17

The need for change But, as the pressure for more widespread popular education grew during the nineteenth century, it became increasingly clear that all was not well. The book that did most to publicize the ways in which the educational charities were being abused was the very comprehensive review of the endowed schools of England and Wales made by Nicholas Carlisle in 1818.18 Whilst he made it clear that, in many of the better-known schools such as Christ’s Hospital and Shrewsbury, the application of the endowments was exemplary, in many other schools he identified shocking abuses. In Taunton, for example, he found it ‘extraordinary that in so large and opulent a town … this once celebrated school should have been suffered to go to decay, for many years past there have been no scholars’.19 In this case he did not specify what use was being made of the charitable endowment, but we do know that in many parishes the Anglican vicar, who had control of the school, was using it to supplement his own stipend. At Brewood, in Staffordshire (which happens to be the school the author attended), Carlisle publicized the Bill of Complaint made in 1638 against the Gifford family of Chillington (the local squires) who had ‘received great sums of money for the use of the said school’ but had ‘concealed the original deeds and all other evidences’ to use the charitable trust for their own family.20 Similar cases were exposed elsewhere. His work deserves to be better known and provides a full and well-documented account of abuses of this nature taking place, both historically and at the time he wrote, across the country. Carlisle was well-placed to uncover these abuses. From the

64 Embedding privilege outset he had worked part-time as secretary to Brougham’s early enquiries, being known already as an antiquarian and the under-librarian of the King’s Library (soon to be merged into the British Museum).21 Interestingly, Carlisle also went on to write an authoritative account of the origins and working of Brougham’s enquiries into the charities, which has recently been reprinted.22 Lord Henry Brougham of Vaux was a well-known Whig reformer, closely involved in the 1832 Reform Act and the abolition of slavery. In Scotland, as a young man, he had founded the Edinburgh Review. On moving to London he worked to establish the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as well as University College London. It was during his second stint in the Commons, from 1816, that he turned his attention in earnest to education. It was his Reports into the education of the lower orders in the metropolis and beyond that first brought the abuse of charities to Parliament’s attention. In his first report, in 1816, he called for an enquiry into ‘the mismanagement of the charitable donations … for the instruction of the poor in this country’. Two years later, he underlined the point, emphasizing that it was not simply ‘ignorance, carelessness and mismanagement’ which caused the problem since ‘misappropriation’ was a more significant factor.23 In 1818 Brougham broadened his initiative by introducing a Bill to establish a Charitable Trusts Commission, to investigate first the educational charities, and afterwards the charities generally. Although this was intended to function for only two years, it was repeatedly renewed, and by 1837 had compiled 32 reports and investigated all of the charities in the country. Significantly, in our context, six schools were excluded from Brougham’s investigations from the outset: Eton, Westminster and Winchester (all three Anglican foundations), Harrow, Rugby and Charterhouse. Already the paradoxical term ‘public school’ (a term that continues to puzzle international researchers) was being used to categorize them, and the view was taken that, as institutions of national significance, they should not be made subject to whatever might follow from Brougham’s investigations.24 Two important points emerge. First, although charitable activity covered a range of activities (such as the administration of the Poor Laws and the running of almshouses), it was the condition of the educational charities that led to demands for proper supervision at the national level (the Charities Commission was established in 1853 as a direct result of Brougham’s findings). Secondly, a fascinating exchange between Robert Peel and Henry Brougham in the Commons on 23 June 1819 raises the possibility that, from the outset, the national bodies which oversaw the administration of charities were dominated by members sympathetic to the best schools and the ancient universities. Brougham began with an excoriating attack on the educational charities: he described ‘the almost universal abuse of the free grammar schools, which the masters generally regard as a perfect sinecure. Good houses, gardens and glebe lands, and often ample salaries, are enjoyed by masters who teach no free scholars’. Peel intervened, accusing Brougham of extending his enquiries beyond their brief by investigating national institutions such as Eton, Westminster and the universities. He then solemnly began to read out a list of the names of the 18 nominated commissioners. Peel identified three groups of nominees; most of them he listed as friends of Brougham who would

Embedding privilege

65

back his every move. Only three, he claimed, had any interest in the ancient universities, and none of these were likely to argue for the strong support the universities needed against an interfering State (he did not use these words, but that was the import of his argument). Brougham responded angrily, accusing Peel of sarcasm.25 The debate was a lengthy one, but the compromise which emerged was to be of enormous significance because, in a nutshell, the major schools (Eton, Westminster and Christ’s Hospital were all mentioned in the debate) were permitted to continue operating as charities; but it was made crystal clear that too close an oversight of how they operated would result in howls of protest from the Tory establishment (who were the very people whose sons attended those institutions). To this end, the question of precisely who would have oversight of the operation of the charities was to become a major issue.

Moves towards reform It was, though, the impact of the 1832 Reform Act that led, ultimately, to the State assuming regulatory powers over the charities, rather than being limited to the ability to enquire and recommend. The householder franchise resulted in the election of a new kind of Member of Parliament representing the larger towns. For the most part they were Dissenters and representatives of the newly developed urban elites. Whig in affiliation, they pressed a new kind of radical politics. Among the most influential were the businessmen and industrialists who attended the Cross Street Unitarian chapel in Manchester. Several of them became MPs for some of the new south Lancashire constituencies (the 1832 Act had created 132 new seats). The Bill they introduced in 1833 was to have a direct impact on the development of policy, even though it was unsuccessful. Although they have been largely ignored by previous historians, the four brief discussions on education which this group initiated deserve close attention, because the views put forward at this time, and the attitudes to which they gave voice, go a long way towards explaining not only how elementary education was to be governed throughout the rest of the century, but also why legal oversight of the charities became a real prospect at this time.26 The first took place on 15 February 1833, when Richard Potter presented a petition on behalf of the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester calling for a national system of education. Potter was already an influential figure. He had been a founding member of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. The ‘Little Voice’ movement, which had been a prime mover in the lobbying which led to the 1832 Reform Act, met originally in his premises in Manchester. Now, newly elected as Wigan’s first MP and speaking for the new urban elite, his argument went to the heart of the discontent about the conduct of the educational charities. Reflecting deep-seated and widespread suspicions about the advisability of direct governmental involvement in the provision of schooling, he argued that there was already ample funding available to establish a national system of education if only it were properly deployed. The device he used to illustrate this was a swingeing attack on the Manchester Grammar School. He said:

66 Embedding privilege Many charitable foundations are much mismanaged, to say the least … Rich private charities are misdirecting funds which, in equity, are available towards the education of the labouring classes. I would mention the Manchester Free Grammar School, the income of which is upwards of £4,400 yet only 150 boys are educated, many of them not on the foundation, but paying for their tuition. If the bequest were properly managed at least 3,000 might be taught.27 His close friend and fellow worshipper at Cross Street, Joseph Brotherton, newly elected to represent Salford, stepped up to second him. He pressed the need for ‘an extensive system of education as means of suppressing crime’. But it was not to be done through taxation: ‘Taxes produce poverty, and poverty produces crime’. He pointed out that across the country the revenue of the Endowed Schools was upwards of three million pounds annually. If this were properly applied, ‘ample means of education might be provided without additional taxation’.28 By focusing on the reform of the charitable endowments, this newly powerful local pressure group had brought into the public domain an issue to which Parliament was to return. Reticence about direct State funding of education was, therefore, another key driver of the moves towards regulatory control of the charities. This, then, was the context in which lobbying developed to establish proper State supervision of the charities. It originated in concerns about the funding of schools for the poor and the misuse of charities which had been set up with precisely that intention. But the outcomes were to be far from the aspirations of those who fought for the establishment of a Charity Commission. How then did what emerged come to work for quite different ends from those of the planners? Why was it that the rich, rather than the poor, came to be the beneficiaries of public charity? The answer to this conundrum is to be found in the particular historic context in which the reform of the charities was undertaken.

‘A great concession’: the establishment of the Charity Commission The first of a succession of Bills which were intended to establish proper oversight of the educational charities was presented to Parliament in 1835. From the outset the underlying issue was clear: whilst the largely Dissenting Whig element in the Commons was determined to right a historic wrong, the Anglican establishment, which dominated the Tory Party, was equally determined to minimize any measure which might weaken their control of the charities, and thus the control of schools. Accordingly, in the Commons, on 11 June 1835, Daniel Harvey, the radical founder of the Sunday Times and Member of Parliament for Southwark, called for a Select Committee, to ‘report their opinion by what means the Charity funds may be most efficiently, promptly, and economically managed’.29 He went on to mount a vitriolic attack on the House of Lords, which he claimed had crippled Brougham’s enquiries from the outset: It suited the wisdom of the hereditary council of the nation [the House of Lords] to restrict the enquiry to those charities which only made reference to

Embedding privilege

67

the education of the poor – taking especial care to exclude from investigation all those institutions and endowments, whose profligate perversion and mismanagement, criminal in some and censurable in most, originally suggested and justified the enquiry. The 1818 legislation was, he claimed, ‘crippled, in the other House of Parliament, by the introduction of a clause forbidding all enquiry into the universities and public schools’.30 Harvey had put his finger on the issue which has hung over the administration of the educational charities down to the present; namely that the institutions which educated the most powerful in the land were to continue to be seen as charities and were to be treated lightly by the State. It was certainly this issue which explains why Bills in 1835 and 1836, as well those brought forward by Lord John Russell in 1844, 1845, and 1846, all foundered, as did those presented by Lord Cottenham in 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850 and 1852. This catalogue serves only to illustrate the determination of the Radicals and the obduracy of the Anglican interest on this issue. It was only in 1853 that a compromise was reached that enabled the establishment of the Charity Commission. The Parliamentary debates laid bare the essentials of the problem. As early as 1835, the Tory Party had conceded that reform of some kind was necessary (the case established by Brougham was incontrovertible). But they managed to mitigate what might have been for them the most damaging impact of this particular Whig reform by making the question of who precisely should oversee the educational charities their sticking point. So it was that, on 19 July 1836, Sir Robert Peel made it crystal clear that he was firmly against the suggestion that the new Municipal Corporations, introduced in 1835 as a central element in the Whig reform programme, should be given control and oversight of the Charities, as the Whigs were now proposing.31 Peel was, in reality, employing a variant of the argument he had first put before the Commons in 1819 when he was attacking Brougham’s proposals. It enabled the Tories to delay reform for a further 17 years, and, when that reform became irresistible in 1853, to determine the form it was to take. Underlying the obduracy of the Anglican interest was not only a fear of losing control of the educational charities, but also that their powers might be subsumed by the emerging civic elites which were being generated by social and economic change. It was in this spirit that Peel argued that popularly elected bodies were unfit to assume such heavy responsibilities: ‘if they once vested these reversionary interests in a popular body … they would be making an arrangement to place them practically beyond the means of control’. He claimed that ‘placing the management of the charitable estates in the hands of individuals chosen by popular election afforded no check to practices all must condemn’.32 The Whigs were quick to seize on this as evidence that Peel and those around him had not understood the implications of the 1832 reforms. Sir James Graham responded that Peel was defending the ‘abuse of charities for Tory purposes’.33 When, at the second reading, Peel proposed that only the Freemen of the new Boroughs should

68 Embedding privilege oversee the charities, Lord John Russell was quick to step in and rule out any such provision. On 29 July 1836 several Tories reverted to delaying measures, proposing a six-month postponement. Among them was Arthur Trevor, who argued that the reform of the educational charities ‘would inevitably tend to injure the interests of the Established Church’.34 A few days later the battle switched to the House of Lords. There, Charles Pepys (Lord Cottenham), the Whig Lord Chancellor, pointed out that a considerable portion of the charitable funds available in Exeter, Truro, Cambridge, Ipswich and Winchester was ‘devoted to purposes of bribery and corruption in elections’, rather than their intended purposes, which were mostly educational.35 But even such strong advocacy as this, from one of the nation’s most experienced and respected lawyers, was not enough to silence the Tories. Immediately, Lord Falmouth countered that in his constituency there was ‘no comparison between the late corporation and that which had been called into existence by the new law’. The old one, he claimed, ‘had property, education and the qualifications for good government’, all of which he clearly thought were lacking in the newly elected council. The Marquess of Lansdowne commented glumly that the Bill, as it stood, did nothing more nor less than ‘vest the rights and patronage of the Church of England in Dissenters’.36 But these exchanges did slowly wear down the Anglican resistance and it was under the Peelite Aberdeen government that the Charity Commission was eventually established. The key compromise was suggested in 1846 by a leading Tory, John Copley, Baron Lyndhurst, during his third term as Lord Chancellor. On 18 May, after recounting the recent history of this issue, he declared himself ‘disposed to make great concessions’.37 But the compromise he came up with was to have enormous implications for the education system down to the present. His suggestion was, simply, that some institutions were of such size and significance that they should be treated as exceptions by the new Commission that was to be appointed. After naming some of the major London Companies he went on to list the other group of institutions that he thought appropriate for special treatment: ‘In that schedule I except the universities, the great colleges, the schools of royal foundation, and extensive establishments of that description’.38 In a nutshell, what he was suggesting (and soon to become reality under the new Commission) was that the major public schools (the very schools that were attended by the sons of the English power elite) were to be treated with a very light brush by the Charity Commission. In brief, they were to be allowed to continue operating as charities but their financial governance would be exempt from direct oversight by the State. The argument that was deployed to justify this was that the larger charities could afford to use the Court of Chancery (whose costs were beyond the means of smaller charities). It was the smaller charities which needed protection through a body to oversee them. The justification may have sounded generous, but its consequences were far from beneficent. The route to this ‘great concession’ was the appointment in 1849 of a Special Commission by Royal warrant, which went so far as to draft potential legislation. This, too, was initially rejected by Parliament, but a diluted version of its proposals was eventually enacted in 1853 following a change of government.39

Embedding privilege

69

The formative years of the Charity Commission It was probably the rapprochement between the Peelites and the Whigs following the repeal of the Corn Laws that made a resolution of this long-standing controversy over the charities possible. Even so, Aberdeen’s Peelite Government, which in 1853 presided over the establishment of a permanent Charity Commission, manoeuvred to ensure that it had only limited powers in order to minimize the damage it could do to Anglican control of the secondary schools. The number of Commissioners was to be strictly limited (only three were to be paid and a degree of control was established by specifying that the fourth was to be a Member of Parliament). Dissenters were not to be allowed to serve as Commissioners, and, most significantly in our context, it was made clear that Eton and Winchester were given ‘special status’, meaning that they were exempt from scrutiny by the new Commission. When the Whigs returned to office in 1855 they immediately introduced an Amendment Act which increased the number of Commissioners and regularized their pay, but the clause exempting the major public schools was left unchanged and Oxford and Cambridge universities were given similar exemption. As Palmerston explained to the House of Commons, ‘with regard to Eton, Winchester, and other public schools of that description, it rested entirely with the masters and the governors to determine that … improvements should be made’.40 Thus, from the outset, it was deemed appropriate that educational institutions which were of national significance (i.e. those which educated the sons of the most powerful Tory Anglican families) were to be treated with a light brush. This proved to be no mere transient quirk. For example, when, over 50 years later, on 30 September 1909, the Socialist MP Philip Snowden asked for a root and branch enquiry into the sources of funding of all schools which came under the Charitable Trusts Act, he mentioned particularly Eton and Winchester. Walter Runciman, the then President of the Board of Education, told him solemnly, and without apology, that ‘Eton and Winchester are, by section 49 of the Charitable Trusts Amendment Act of 1855, outside the jurisdiction of the Board, and are also exempt under section 8(i) of the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. Thus, no return is possible for them’.41 The legislation of the 1850s and 1860s has cast a long shadow. Runciman’s reference to the 1869 legislation draws our attention to the developments which ensured that the major schools were to be treated differently from the rest in perpetuity. Whether this happened by accident or design is for others to judge, but the events are incontrovertible and illustrate neatly the ongoing struggle by the Anglican Church to maintain control of what it saw as its schools. In a nutshell, when it was decided to use the increasingly fashionable device of a Royal Commission to help determine the future direction of policy towards the secondary schools, a distinction was immediately made between the public schools, which were seen as the first concern, and the rest. Accordingly, the Clarendon Commission, after a contretemps on precisely which schools should be included, reported on nine in 1864 (St. Paul’s, Merchant Taylor’s and Shrewsbury

70 Embedding privilege were now added to the list). The Public Schools Act which followed from this in 1868 commanded the establishment of reformed governing bodies and then went on to give these bodies unprecedented powers: ‘The new Governing Body of any School to which this Act applies may, by Statute, consolidate and amend any existing Statutes or Regulations relating to such School’.42 The Act took these schools out of any direct control by the Crown, the Established Church or the government, giving the governors complete independence over their administration. In other words, they would continue to benefit from their charitable endowments without having to justify to the State how that was being done. In fairness, several of them chose to establish a ‘subordinate school’, as the Rugby governors phrased it in 1878 when they were founding the Lawrence Sherriff school to provide schooling for town boys, but they were not being obliged to do this by government. In contrast, the other schools (classified as the ‘endowed schools’) were subject to their own Royal Commission and this had a quite different outcome. The 1868 Taunton Report called for a root and branch restructuring of secondary education in three tiers: first, second and third grade. The Endowed Schools Act that resulted a year later had two central clauses that were to determine the administration of educational charities down to the present. First, it specified clearly (clause 8) that ‘nothing in this Act shall apply to any school mentioned in section 3 of the Public Schools act 1868’. This was the clause, as we will see below, that Runciman was to refer to in 1909 when the issue was to come up again in Parliament. The Act went on to exclude the Anglican choir schools too. It then enacted, as Taunton had recommended, that commissioners were to be appointed with draconian powers. ‘They shall have power, in such manner as may render any educational endowment most conducive to the education of boys and girls, to alter, add to any existing, and to make new directions and provisions’, including the ability to ‘alter the constitution, rights and powers of any governing body’. In brief, they were given the right to oversee and control how the charitable funds of the grammar schools were distributed across the length and breadth of the land. And, as has been shown by a succession of historians,43 that is precisely what they went on to do. So, in the late 1860s, much of the obfuscation and filibustering of the Anglican establishment, which had been going on for 50 years, paid off in a settlement that meant ultimately that the charities of the common schools were brought under State control, and those of the best-known schools were allowed to continue without let or hindrance. There was one further detail that meant that, perhaps unwittingly, the Endowed Schools Commissioners cemented this anomaly by the way they dealt with the smaller endowments of many of the grammar schools. Their policy became one of redeploying these funds to provide scholarships and free places, initially for poor pupils, but, increasingly, under the pressure of examinations and parental ambitions, for the academically outstanding. Thus the schools themselves became, by a steady process of evolution, part of the State system of schooling, and effectively no longer charities, whilst their charitable funds were deployed for purposes which could be construed as being in the spirit of the original donors. Meanwhile, by contrast, the major schools found themselves under no such constraint.

Embedding privilege

71

It was in the House of Commons, too, that a further twist to this narrative was anticipated by Wingfield Baker, on 15 March 1869. He pointed out that there were many schools which were now gradually rising – schools that were almost equal to the excepted schools, both in the character of the education they imparted and the number of scholars they educated; and considering the admirable management under which those schools were placed; he could not see why the Legislature should violently interpose its interference. He would first refer to one of those schools of which he had particular knowledge, as he was one of its governing body – he meant the King’s School at Sherborne. That school had attracted the attention of the Commissioners, who stated that the character of the education there was as good as that at any Public School, and they also spoke highly of the school discipline, arrangements, and nature of the building. The school promised to become one of the great Public Schools of the country. There were many other schools which he might include in the same category, including Uppingham, Bromsgrove, Highgate, Tonbridge, Ipswich, Leeds, and Manchester.44 In brief, what he was suggesting was that the advantages that Parliament had bestowed on the seven major public schools should be more widely shared among a much larger group of elite schools. He was, of course, only anticipating what actually happened during the succeeding century. The benign judgement on all this might be that the charitable status of the elite schools emerged from a series of historical accidents and coincidences. The more severe judgement would be that many of those in positions of power and privilege, particularly within the Anglican Church, fought tooth and nail to ensure that the advantages they gained from educational charities were not dissipated. The evidence points more towards the second conclusion.

Long-term implications What makes these mid-nineteenth century developments so significant today is that the outcomes which resulted, and the assumptions underlying the advantageous treatment by the State of elite schools, have never been seriously challenged. Calls for reform have always been channelled into schemes to alleviate one or other consequence of this system, rather than its complete abandonment. The details of those debates also deserve far closer scrutiny by historians of education than they have received so far. There have been, particularly in recent years, a succession of Acts of Parliament seeking to reform the charities; in 1960, 1992, 1993, 2006, 2011 and 2016. But none has addressed the central issue. Instead, the public schools continue to enjoy massive advantages as a direct consequence of State involvement. The business firm CVS was reported recently as saying that

72 Embedding privilege our analysis of government data suggested that on properties classified as private schools there would be a business rates bill of around £1.16bn over the next five years. Extrapolating from the data received from councils, £634m would be paid, with £522m saved through the schools’ charitable status. Among the beneficiaries are Eton, whose bill for business rates would have been in excess of four million pounds, but is, in fact, only £821,000. Dulwich College and Leeds Grammar School (now, like many of the better-known schools, outside the State system and registered as a charity) are among those who enjoy similar benefits.45 At the apex of the system is Eton, which retains its excepted status and now has over 20 recognized charities, including its Fives club. In 1999 it was, for the first time, listed by Charity Finance and Barclays Bank among the top 100 charities in the United Kingdom, with an annual turnover in that year of almost 30 million pounds per annum, most of it drawn from fees and grants. It pays no Corporation Tax. Charitable Gift Aid legislation adds a further 28% to parental donations. The school claims that, in this way, a fifth of its pupils receive a discount on fees. It has been commented that this is merely ‘window dressing’ for the Charity Commissioners. Thus, in return for a limited number of free bursaries for less privileged students, the State is subsidizing each parent to the tune of almost £7,000 per annum.46 This is an extreme example, but it illustrates how decisions made a century ago continue to resonate today. Attempts to bring the independent schools into line have frequently been challenged successfully in the courts. For example, when, the 2006 Charity Act demanded that these schools would be obliged to demonstrate ‘public benefit’ to continue working as charities, the Charity Commission set about explaining the kind of bursary schemes it would accept. When this was challenged by the independent schools, the High Court judgement, in 2011, was that the Charity Commission was being too prescriptive. Instead, the schools were to be required to ‘generate a meaningful amount of public benefit’, but it was to be left to individual schools to determine how they set about doing this.47 If anything, the current trend is towards the reinforcement of the charitable status of schools. In 2010 it was announced that the new academies that were being opened as part of the Government’s educational initiatives, since they were being made ‘independent’ of local control, would have the right to register as charities. Many have taken advantage of this. Unsurprisingly, this has met with resistance from within the established private sector. When Neil McIntosh delivered his leaving speech after 22 years as chief executive of the education charity CfBT (the Education Development Trust) in 2017, he used the occasion to highlight his concerns about the charitable status of academy schools. McIntosh, who had worked in management roles in the charity sector for more than 30 years, argued that, as charities, the academies potentially compromised ‘the essential distinctiveness of the third sector’.48 He argued that they were set apart from the voluntary sector since they had been set up by the public sector, were totally funded by the government and were subject to a regulatory regime with

Embedding privilege

73

political oversight. He contended that academies ‘are, at their weakest, agencies that are independent in name only. And perhaps not even in that’.49 It was an argument which found some traction among supporters of the private sector, echoing a defensiveness which has persisted over centuries. In a blistering attack on the charitable status of elite education, the author David Kynaston wrote recently: the private schools … enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and … they have no qualms about using all possible firepower … to block anything they find threatening.50 Given the evidence deployed here, it is a judgement which might have been made at any point in the most recent two centuries.

Notes 1 R. S. Tompson, The Charity Commission and the age of reform, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979. 2 R. S. Tompson, Classics or charity: the dilemma of the eighteenth century grammar school, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1971. 3 D. Newsome, Godliness and good learning, John Murray, London, 1961. 4 T. W. Bamford, Thomas Arnold, Cresset Press, London, 1960. 5 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian public school: the emergence and consolidation of an educational ideology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981 and The games ethic and imperialism: aspects of the dissemination of an ideal, Viking Penguin, New York, 1986. 6 J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s universe: the development of the public school in the nineteenth century, Millington, London, 1977. 7 C. Heward, Making a man of him: parents and their sons’ education at an English public school 1929–50, Routledge, 1988. 8 J. Gathorne-Hardy, The public school phenomenon, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977. 9 M. Stephen, The English public school: an irreverent history, Metro Publishing, London, 2018. 10 The charitable status of independent schools, House of Commons briefing paper 05222, 19 September 2017, p. 7. 11 A. Kreider, English charities: the road to dissolution, Harvard University Press, Harvard, Massachusetts, 1978, p. 198. 12 D. Sylvester, Educational documents, 800–1816, Methuen, London, 1970, pp. 83–90. 13 N. Malik, ‘Defining charity and charitable purposes in the United Kingdom’, International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 11, 1, November 2008 (www.icnl.org/research/ journal/vol11iss1/special_2htm). 14 D. Ritschel, ‘Outcast London and the late-Victorian discovery of poverty’, https:// www.//umbc.edu/history/che. 15 R. Rees, Poverty and public health, 1815–1949, Heinemann, London, 2001. 16 House of Commons Proceedings, 21 July 1807. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-ha nsard. 17 Ibid. 18 N. Carlisle, A concise description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, Baldwin, Cradock and Hoy, London, 1818.

74 Embedding privilege 19 Ibid., p. 432. 20 Ibid., p. 472. 21 R. Tompson, The Charity Commission and the age of reform, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979, p. 120. 22 N. Carlisle, An historical account of the Commission appointed to enquire concerning charities in England and Wales, Ulan Press, London, 2012. 23 J. S. Maclure, Educational documents, England and Wales, 1816–1967, Methuen, London, 1968, pp. 18–22. 24 J. Roach, A history of secondary education in England, 1800–1870, Longman, London, 1986, p. 212. 25 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard, 23 June 1819. 26 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard. 27 Ibid., 15 February 1833. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 11 June 1835. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 19 July 1836. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 29 July 1836. 35 Ibid., 4 August 1836. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 18 May 1846. 38 Ibid. 39 P. R. Elson, ‘The origin of the species: why charity regulations in Canada and England continue to reflect their origins’, International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, 12, 3, May, 2010. 40 Ibid., 8 March 1855. 41 Ibid., 30 September 1909. 42 Clause 7, Public Schools Act, 1868. 43 See in particular D. Allsobrook, Schools for the shires, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1968 and B. Simon, Studies in the history of education, 1780–1870, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1960. 44 https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard, 15 March 1869. 45 Guardian, 11 June 2017. 46 https.//www.thirdsector.co.uk/analysis-academy-schools-charities. 47 https.//www.howcharitieswork.com. 48 Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2018. 49 Ibid. 50 Observer, The New Review, 13 January 2019, p. 13.

4

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

The Victorian legacy The years from 1895 to 1914 were, in many ways, the climacteric of the Victorian era. Britain had established control over the largest Empire the world had ever known. A second industrial revolution was in full swing and its effects were being experienced across society. The established heavy industries such as steel manufacture, shipbuilding and coal production continued to grow steadily in response to increasing demand.1 Alongside them, chemicals, electrification, machine-tool production, engineering and bicycle and later car manufacture were generating new industrial centres in places such as Merseyside, Nottingham, Coventry and in several locations in the Home Counties. This was of enormous significance for educators because it had three consequences, each of which placed new demands on the education system. First, these developments necessitated a more highly skilled labour force of a kind which the existing school system was ill-fitted to meet (although during these years policymakers were able to think in terms of universal literacy for the first time). Secondly, it resulted in increased suburbanization. Almost all of the major towns underwent boundary changes that greatly enhanced their scale at the start of the twentieth century. With enhanced powers, the municipal corporations became major players in the educational provision, each with its own views on what kinds of schooling were needed locally. Thirdly, the garden city movement was at its height at this time. Under the influence of Ebenezer Howard,2 several leading industrialists sought to establish their own ‘garden suburbs’ (Howard was the inspiration behind the development of Letchworth), which had the effect of deepening the contrasts between localities and even between suburbs that were quite close to each other. For the better off, this meant a novel commuting lifestyle, as suburban railways, trams and the new petrol buses (the first route to use a petrol powered bus ran between Kennington and Victoria from 1899) made it possible to travel greater distances to work. These commuting routes marked out the new middle-class suburbs, whose children were likely to have quite different aspirations and expectations from those of the old inner cities. With this lifestyle, a new politics developed, often fuelled by the appearance of a new tabloid press, following the founding of the Daily Mail by Northcliffe in

76 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 1896. Its early target was foreign policy, but this also meant that education now became a topic open to public scrutiny and discussion in ways it had never been before. The overnight distribution by rail of these newspapers across the country, and the appearance in the new suburban stations of news-stands (many run by W. H. Smith), meant that the commuting classes had an immediate access to contemporary politics and current affairs which was quite unprecedented. It was a development which was, ultimately, to make education a political football. Although gross domestic product reached unprecedented levels at this time, the pattern of professionalization meant that, as Chiozza Money put it, ‘inequality was probably at its height between 1880 and 1914’.3 Pioneering surveys by Charles Booth in London4 and Seebohm Rowntree in York5 established beyond doubt that poverty was endemic. Their meticulous door-to-door research made clear that at least one-third of the population was living in poverty, most of them in lowpaid work. Meanwhile, those benefiting from the new forms of employment and the professionalization of society were enjoying unprecedented levels of comfort and relative affluence. This recognition of poverty was underpinned by the growing realization, in the aftermath of the Boer War, that vast numbers of the working poor were in such deprivation that they were unfit for military service. The 1904 Interdepartmental Report on physical deterioration 6 spelt out that this had implications for practitioners, not least those working in education. The Report called for more games for children, in both school and public playgrounds, for open spaces and covered playgrounds with gymnastic apparatus, a focus on cookery, hygiene and domestic economy for girls, special schools for ‘retarded’ children, more physical training for boys, with an emphasis on drill and military training, and, not least, for special attention to the care of teeth and the teaching of ‘elements of hygiene’. Finally, they recommended ‘systematic inspection of the teeth, eyes and ears of schoolchildren’.7 This was revolutionary, imposing a new role on teachers that had never before been articulated, although several Victorian pioneers had already begun to anticipate this in practice in a small number of schools. In the following years, the impact on educational policy was to be massive, because it led to the gradual acceptance that it was the duty of society to use the education system to take some responsibility for the welfare of children as well as their instruction. Looking back, it is possible to think of the twentieth century as a ‘window of care’, in which these beliefs underpinned the education system. By the 1960s and 1970s there were a welter of ancillary services devoted to one or other aspect of the welfare of children. Developing during the Edwardian years, this commitment to the broader care of schoolchildren persisted until the working through of the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s made it increasingly difficult for teachers to perform this function, much as many of them might have wished to. Today, as I write, there are many schools that simply do not have the resources or funding to move beyond the demands of the National Curriculum. It has been undermined as much by funding restraints as by ideological change. It is in this sense that I write of a ‘window of care’.

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

77

One group was horrified by the implications of the 1904 Report. They were the followers of Francis Galton, who believed that many of the problems confronting the urban poor stemmed from their own fecklessness and promiscuity, which was leading to an increase in ‘degeneration’.8 Prominent among them was Ellen Pinsent, co-opted to the Birmingham School Board in 1900 because of her interest in mental deficiency. In 1903 she said in a public address: mental deficiency exists to an alarming extent and is increasing … We have to deal today with a popular sentiment which would not for one moment allow the lethal chamber or sufficient neglect to produce extinction … It would be more profitable to consider what can be done.9 As George Auden, the Chief Medical Officer for Birmingham, put it in his 1909 Annual Report: ‘sooner or later, society must protect itself from the unrestricted propagation of tainted stocks by the provision of institutions for … permanent custodial care’.10 This drive for segregation became institutionalized when, in 1907, the Eugenics Education Society was founded. One early enthusiast and member was the young Cyril Burt, who devoted his energies to the construction and refinement of intelligence tests that would facilitate better identification of those most in need of attention. This quickly evolved into a belief in ‘general intelligence’ and the use of these tests for the identification of more able and gifted children, but intelligence testing originated at this time from a fear of national degeneration. It, too, was a completely new element in the educational arena.11 One other key new factor in the educational debate at this time was the appearance on the national stage of the representatives of organized labour. By the end of the nineteenth century there were already over 600 spokespersons for the labour movement elected to local town and city councils, but none at Westminster. Following a lengthy discussion at the 1899 Trades Union Congress, it was decided to work collectively for the election of Labour candidates to Parliament. In February 1900 the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Social Democratic Foundation (SDF) and the Fabian Society met with trades union representatives to set up the Labour Representation Committee. Eight months later, Keir Hardy was elected to Parliament as the first Labour MP.12 Some of the separate strands of this Labour movement continued to lobby for educational reform: Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s pamphlet, The educational muddle and the way out, was published by the Fabian Society in 1901 and had a significant impact on policymakers.13 Even so, the Labour Party, which was formally established in 1906, did not articulate a coherent education policy until after the First World War, although its MPs had strong views on the schooling of the poor and were able to influence policy after the 1906 election. Of greater immediate significance was the work of several Christian Socialist tutors at Oxford University who used the University Extension Classes, operating up and down the country in many of the urban areas, to establish a ‘highway’ for working men to receive some kind of higher education. Their idealism was rewarded by the setting up of the Workers’ Educational Association in 1901. Pioneering tutors such as R. H. Tawney went on to offer three-year courses of

78 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 University Tutorial Classes in industrial townships such as Longton and Rochdale.14 The outcome was twofold. First, a whole new strand of adult education emerged at this time. Secondly, several of the key players in this movement, most notably Arthur Acland, Tawney himself15 and Michael Sadler,16 went on to become key participants in wider educational debates. The network they established at Oxford, most notably through Acland’s ‘inner ring’ of young tutors interested in social issues, was to prove important for the development of national educational policy, influencing even the implementation of the 1944 Education Act. There were, in particular, three implications of these social changes which were to make it virtually impossible for the schools to play much part in equalizing opportunity or even in minimizing the social disadvantages under which the poor suffered. First, the fact that non-landed income began to overtake landed wealth, as was pointed out by Harold Perkin,17 meant that the contrasts between the Home Counties and the rest of the country became greater rather than lesser. This factor alone helped the Edwardian period to be a golden age for the public schools as the demand (particularly from within the London area) for this kind of schooling grew and increasing numbers of the fast-expanding professional middle classes were able to afford the fees. Secondly, as Kathleen Chorley pointed out in her memoir of Manchester, ‘snobbery became geographical’ and very localized.18 As she put it, Alderley Edge looked down on Wilmslow, but both looked up to Peover, whose residents were ‘in with the county’. The experience of these Manchester suburbs was mirrored the length and breadth of the land, and contrasting experience of and aspirations for schooling were a key part of these local contrasts. Thirdly, if one development might have seemed to generate real chances of a lessening of social contrasts, it was the swift increase in the number of women entering the professions. Schooling was central to this. At the close of the nineteenth century, significant numbers of girls went on from elementary school to night school, where they learned clerical skills, most notably shorthand. During the Edwardian period, many of the new local education authorities (LEAs) opened municipal girls’ secondary schools. The result was a sudden increase in the number of young women who could look beyond domestic service and the factory for employment. The professionalization of society meant, too, that new job opportunities developed in nursing, elementary school teaching and clerical work. These were almost exclusively filled by females. On Jane Lewis’s estimate, there were 19,000 female clerks in Britain in 1891 and 125,000 in 1911.19 But this only happened at a time when the professions themselves were changing in scale and becoming more hierarchical in their career structures. Inevitably, the new female recruits found themselves trapped in the lower echelons of a quickly developing power (and pay) hierarchy. This was intensified by the widespread assumption that a professional woman’s employment would end when she married and that part of the object of professional employment was to put her in a situation where she might meet ‘a good husband’, or, as one contemporary magazine put it ‘a few years to be got through as comfortably … as may be until marriage’.20 The result was that the entry of females to the professions is best seen as part of a ‘restratification’ of society, rather than a decisive step towards greater equality.

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

79

A new administration for education All of these developments were pregnant with significance for education, placing the school system which had developed during the nineteenth century under enormous stress and making the reorganization of both the administration and the provision of education imperative. The piecemeal reforms of the Victorian era had made that administrative system a nightmare. With successive governments unwilling to exercise direct control, several competing and overlapping agencies had become involved in the direction and funding of schools. The Science and Art Department competed with the Education Department, the churches and the larger municipal authorities for oversight of the educational provision. The Dual System meant that school boards vied with a number of voluntary bodies to provide elementary schooling: consequently funding levels differed widely between town and country and between differing suburbs. The 1889 Technical Instruction Act was the most recent in a long line of attempts to plug the deficiencies in the provision of secondary education. But by granting town councils the right to raise a penny rate to provide technical education, and allowing them to draw on local taxes on alcohol for educational purposes (the so-called ‘whisky money’) it generated an even more muddled picture. Depending on their social class and location, young people might now look to an endowed grammar school, a public school, a private school, a higher-grade school run by a school board, a technical institute run by the local authority, or perhaps even a university extension class for their secondary schooling. It was a situation that Gladstone’s 1892 Liberal Government, with Arthur Acland holding the education brief, was determined to tackle. Acland’s first move was to ask one of his acolytes from the Oxford Inner Ring, Michael Sadler, to convene in October 1893 in Oxford a conference of over 200 delegates. This led to the establishment of the Bryce Commission to make proposals for the reform of secondary education. Sadler sat on this and with Sophie Bryant has been identified as the main author. The Commission immediately identified ‘the needless competition between the different agencies’ leading to ‘overlapping of effort and much needless waste of money’ as the major problem.21 Acland also established a research department, the Office of Special Enquiries and Reports to provide information, particularly on developments in other countries, on which to base policy, persuading Sadler to leave Oxford and become its Director. Its annual reports remain to this day an important source of information, but perhaps most significant was the appointment of Robert Morant as Sadler’s assistant. The collapse of their close working relationship into acrimony was to become a vital factor in the evolution of educational policymaking. It was Morant who, following the fall of the Liberal Government in 1895, ingratiated himself with the new administration and became the driving force of educational policy in England for more than a decade. He was closely involved in the planning of the 1899 legislation that set up a Board of Education to establish a single body that would assume overall control of the administration of schooling. Morant became its first Permanent Secretary in 1903, a post he held until 1911.

80 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 Equally significant was Morant’s setting up of a Consultative Committee to advise on policy along lines which were to be specified by the President of the new Board. This was in complete contrast to Sadler’s vision of an independent research agency that might inform educational policymakers of wider trends and new thinking. Sadler was sidelined, and continued his lobbying from within academia, but his aspiration for policymaking to be responsive to independent research findings, which had been promoted under the Liberal Government, now succumbed to the determination of the Anglican-dominated Conservative administration to control developments more directly.22 But a central problem that still confronted the Conservative Party was the increasingly difficult financial situation which the Church schools found themselves in, with attendance at Anglican churches beginning to decline, and steadily increasing funding from local authorities for the Board Schools. Arthur Balfour tackled this issue in the 1902 Education Act, making no bones about his motives in his Commons speech introducing the proposed legislation. He made clear his view that the major unforeseen consequence of the 1870 legislation had been the ‘embarrassment into which the Voluntary schools were thrown’, adding that he intended to bring to an end their ‘deplorable starvation’. In reply, CampbellBannerman dismissed the proposed legislation as ‘no more than an effort to obtain better terms for the Church schools’. The MP for Scarborough, Compton Rickett, went to the heart of the issue, commenting that ‘it is considered by the Church of England a priceless advantage to control the education of the children of this country’.23 The 1902 Act ensured that the Anglican Church would remain at the very least closely involved by stipulating that the Church schools would now receive funding on the same terms as the State schools from the new local education authorities which were being set up to replace the school boards. At a stroke, rather than ending it, Salisbury’s Government gave the Dual System viability for the foreseeable future. To this day, faith schools are treated as fully part of the State system of education. This restructuring meant that the State was finally giving itself the power to control the education system directly. But even this was partial. The establishment of the Consultative Committee of the new Board of Education to take responsibility for policy formulation resulted in the Board itself never actually meeting, despite the power exercised by its President. Equally significant was the fact that the secondary schools were now brought under the control of the new county and borough local education authorities. This meant that local influences and pressure groups were to play as large a part in their development as would national government. It is impossible, in a work of this nature, to do justice to the complexity and full significance of the reforms of this period. Excellent analyses by researchers such as Neil Daglish24 and Wendy Robinson25 have explored these issues in much greater depth, but it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the administrative reforms which were introduced in the years following 1895 made it easier for the gradations of education which had developed during the nineteenth century to persist in some form into the twentieth. They also ensured that the Anglican Church would remain central to educational policy making for the foreseeable future.

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

81

Towards a new elementary education The social transformations of this period had an impact on all aspects of the educational provision, not least elementary schooling. First, new suburbs required new schools, and these began to differ from the cavernous central hall schools that had been built following the 1870 Education Act. They tended to be smaller and built in the currently popular neo-Georgian style that was the mark of most civic architecture at that time, used for council buildings, public libraries and suburban swimming pools. But more important than their architectural style was the environment they offered to those lucky enough to attend them. In the aftermath of the Boer War, a growing number of doctors mounted a ferocious campaign for a healthier environment for schoolchildren. The campaign, which had been started by James Crichton-Browne and Francis Warner in the 1880s and 1890s, became a crusade following the major conferences on school hygiene that took place in Nuremberg in 1904, in London in 1907 and in Paris in 1910. The outcome was the pan-European ‘open air’ movement. Its high priests in Britain were a number of LEA doctors who began to instruct their architects to design pavilion style schools, with cross-ventilated classrooms arranged in wings separate from the school hall. George Reid in Staffordshire and Sidney Barwise in Derbyshire were among the first to persuade their architects to build in a completely new style, in defiance of the Board’s demand for a central hall. It was a movement which spread quickly to other local authorities. Their campaign was resisted by the new Board of Education, which was anxious to minimize the cost to the public purse of elementary schooling. Its Chief Architect, Felix Clay, wrote in 1906 that ‘the modern Board school, with its somewhat … bare building, offers a quite sufficient contrast to the homes from which the children come’.26 A year later, Percy Marks, a respected authority on school building, emphasized in his book that the elementary school should be far plainer than the secondary: ‘a difference of great import should at once be apparent … In the rate supported buildings, the object should be to obtain a plain serviceable structure’.27 In 1910, Clay was arguing that the Building Regulations should continue to insist on 70 children to each classroom in the elementary school, but that in secondary schools there should be a classroom for every 25 pupils.28 It was not until 1914 that the Board was reluctantly persuaded to modify its regulations, specifying that elementary schoolchildren should now be taught in ‘single-storied groups of rooms, arranged to let the sun and air into every corner’.29 In the context of the central argument of this book, it should be emphasized that this meant, quite simply, that the children of those fortunate enough to be able to afford to move to the new outer suburbs where these schools were being built would be educated in a far more hygienic environment (and in smaller classes) than those of the poorest, who were trapped in the inner cities in central hall schools which were to remain in use, in many cases, until the twenty-first century. It meant too that far more State support would go to the middle-class students attending the secondary schools, with their smaller classes, than was offered to the children of the poor.

82 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 In fairness, it must be conceded that for the most sickly of these children, open air schools began to appear on the outskirts of the larger towns, catering largely for victims of tuberculosis. The first were at Whitely Woods in Sheffield, and Uffculme in Kings Heath in Birmingham, and these too soon became a regular feature of LEA provision30. The design of these new schools put hygiene and physical well-being at the heart of elementary schooling. Their smaller classrooms marked the arrival on a large scale of classroom teaching, with less direct supervision from the head teacher. It is worth remarking also that, just as the schoolroom had mirrored the workshops of cavernous factories of the first industrial revolution, the classroom was now, whether consciously or not, replicating the arrangement of the new secretarial and design offices that were appearing in many of the newer workplaces. It may be stretching it too far to suggest that this was ever part of a conscious attempt to prepare the children for the world of work, but the parallel evolutions are striking. The establishment of classroom teaching across the elementary sector generated an increased demand for teachers, and this was largely met by the recruitment of females. The statements of reformers such as Beatrice Webb suggested that many of these new recruits were drawn from middle-class backgrounds, but researchers such as Frances Widdowson31 have shown that, in reality, there was a growing army of uncertificated women teachers who had not been trained in one of the residential colleges. For girls from working-class backgrounds, elementary schoolteaching was seen as ‘respectable’ and offered secure employment, despite the low pay levels (female teachers were paid less than males). In the elementary sector, by 1907–8 there were almost 14,000 male head teachers, 17,000 certificated assistants, but only 5,000 males who were uncertificated. By contrast, there were 18,000 female head teachers, 42,000 certificated females and 38,000 who were uncertificated. The 18,000 supplementary teachers were all female (men were not allowed to work at this level), were often paid as little as £20 per annum and worked almost exclusively with infants. It was employment that many workingclass female recruits were happy to take, since it was more than they could earn in a factory. The author’s own grandmother was ‘saved’ from factory employment in 1898 by the offer of uncertificated elementary schoolteaching, being told she was ‘too good for a factory’. The confirmation of the inferiority of elementary schooling to secondary during these years involved employment in this sector becoming increasingly dominated by women, and, even worse, in large numbers of females being trapped in the lowest grades of employment. Females were a cheap source of labour, being paid less than men. It would be hard to find a clearer example of the education system both illustrating and perpetuating the relative subjugation of females. At the same time, it was confirming the low status afforded to the education of the poor. Hardly surprisingly, these years were a period of significant change for the elementary sector. Under Morant, the Board of Education was determined to exercise stronger control over the whole system, and elementary schools were not exempt. Although the Code of Regulations issued in 1904 was relatively

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

83

permissive about the curriculum, it did end funding for the under-fives, standardizing the age of entry to school for the majority of children and removing the growing nursery sector from any form of State support. Nonetheless, the Handbook of suggestions for the consideration of teachers and others concerned in the work of public elementary schools issued in 1905 stressed that ‘the only uniformity of practice the Board desires to see in the teaching of public elementary schools is that each teacher shall think for himself and work out such methods as may … be best suited to the particular needs of the school’.32 Even though this carried the implicit assumption that reading, writing and arithmetic would remain at the heart of the elementary school curriculum, this was a remarkably permissive stance for the Board to take. Meanwhile, the higher-grade schools that had developed under the more powerful school boards had already lost funding under the terms of 1899 Cockerton Judgement. This had ruled that the London School Board would not continue to be funded to teach science and art to students over 11 years of age. It quickly became seen as a test case for the whole country. Next, these schools were further emasculated by the separate Code of Regulations which was applied to them in 1905. But over 40 such schools survived and ultimately became a model for a cheaper form of senior schooling for the working classes, such as was to be advocated by Hadow in 1926, in turn prefiguring the post-Second World War secondary moderns. Under the terms of the 1902 legislation, the new local authorities were given the power to appoint their own school inspectors, even though the Board’s inspectors continued to function. Their preparedness to challenge the clerical control of the voluntary schools may have been one reason why the Board’s Chief Inspector, Edmond Holmes, launched a vitriolic attack on this local inspectorate in a 1911 briefing paper. He described the ex-elementary schoolteachers appointed to the county authorities as ‘trying to survey a wide field of action from the bottom of a well-worn groove’, calling for the appointment of more Oxbridge graduates who would have the ‘ability and culture’ to be fitted for this work.33 When Morant distributed this document, the Liberals, who still viewed him with anathema as ‘the assassin of the school boards’,34 brought so much pressure to bear in Parliament that Lloyd George moved him to the new National Insurance Commission, ending his years of dominance of the educational arena. But this spat illustrated, not only the snobbishness and sense of entitlement which dominated much of elite discussion of education, but also that the long-term struggle to wrest control of the education system from Anglican interests, which had dominated the nineteenth century, was still alive at the start of the twentieth. Perhaps the most striking development in respect of elementary schooling at this time was the extent to which it began to involve itself in the welfare of poor and sickly children. In 1906 one of the first outcomes of the appearance of several Labour MPs in Parliament was legislation to allow local authorities to provide school meals for malnourished children, although only a third of local authorities implemented this before 1914, usually as a temporary measure during times of hardship or during strike action. In the following year the same Labour lobby

84 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 (inspired by the work of Margaret Macmillan, who had set up health centres for children in Bradford and London) was successful with a Bill to legalize medical inspection in schools and to make the provision of playgrounds compulsory. In 1908 George Newman was appointed as Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Education, and his annual reports chart the implementation of a nationwide programme. As W. H. G. Armytage put it: ‘Newman brought persuasiveness to his task. His 26 annual reports were propaganda for open air schools for the delicate, and for new techniques in physical education’.35 Newman’s work led directly to the establishment of the Ministry of Health in 1919. Thus, the period from 1895 to 1914 was one of transformation for the elementary sector. For the first time, the numbers attending State elementary schools began to exceed those in the Anglican schools. The arrival on a large scale of the classroom teacher meant that the nature of elementary education itself changed, although this did not involve a significant widening of the very limited curriculum that had evolved in the nineteenth century. It did mean that the Victorian ‘object lesson’ could give way to teaching based far more on observation, paving the way, eventually, for more progressive teaching methods. It should be noted that the novel features of the curriculum, such as domestic hygiene for girls and systematic drill lessons for boys, were acceptable partly because they helped ensure the generation of a healthier and more effective soldiery. Many of the new cross-ventilated pavilion style schools were designed with ‘marching corridors’ where boys’ drill lessons could take on a markedly militaristic style. Staffing ratios and funding levels in the elementary sector remained inferior to those in the secondary schools. We can only conclude that the ‘universalization’ of schooling that took place at this time was achieved in a form which ensured the maintenance of social distance between the rich and the poor, despite the growing aspirations of many for a ‘ladder’ that might give the disadvantaged real opportunities to use schooling as a lever for social mobility.

Regulating secondary education In 1889, writing in his monumental Life and labour of the people of London, Charles Booth summarized the role of the secondary schools as the nineteenth century drew to a close. ‘At present, secondary schools mean schools in which the children of clerks, tradesmen, managers, manufacturers and professional men receive their education’. He saw this as ‘not a fundamental definition’ but merely ‘an accident of the distribution of wealth’.36 This had been achieved, as a succession of witnesses told the Bryce Commission, as a consequence of the reform of these schools by the Endowed Schools Commissioners, which had made them at one and the same time less accessible to the working poor and unattractive to the rich. The Bryce Commission also highlighted the poor state of many small rural grammar schools, many with ‘few pupils, poor buildings and little money’.37 Yet, despite these shortcomings, the Commission had no hesitation in confirming the demands made by the Taunton Report 27 years earlier for a tripartite system of secondary schools. The outcome was that, while the Committee made the reform

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

85

of educational administration its first priority, in specifying how the system might be modified, it accepted unthinkingly the kind of hierarchical arrangement of secondary education that had been ruthlessly imposed under the terms of the 1868 Report: The deficiency which seems to be most general is in the supply of second grade and third grade schools, at a price sufficiently low to place them within reach of parents of limited means. The rapid growth and success of higher grade board schools, especially in great towns, indicates the extent of the demand for third grade Secondary Education at a cheap rate.38 With these words, the Bryce Commission doomed English secondary education to more of the same. Less controversial was the glaring demand for some kind of effective control of secondary education. The 1902 Act gave the new LEAs responsibility for ‘education other than elementary’, but offered no clarification on what that might mean. This was precisely what Morant sought to establish through the Board of Education’s Regulations for secondary schools, issued in 1904. First, these Regulations distinguished secondary education from what went on in the more specialized Technical Institutes and Evening Schools, stressing that the syllabus must be both general and complete. It then specified what might be seen, not unreasonably, as England’s first National Curriculum for the secondary sector: The course should provide for instruction in the English language and literature, at least one language other than English, geography, history, mathematics, science and drawing, with due provision for manual work and physical exercises; and, in a girls’ school, for housewifery. Not less than 4½ hours per week must be allotted to English, geography and history; not less than 3½ hours to the language where only one is taken or less than 6 hours where two are taken; and not less than 7½ hours to science and mathematics, of which at least 3 must be for science. The instruction in science must be both theoretical and practical. Where two languages other than English are taken, and Latin is not one of them, the Board will require to be satisfied that the omission of Latin is for the advantage of the school.39 Although they were in force for only three years, it is difficult to overstate the significance of these Regulations, since, through them, Morant determined the secondary syllabus for the foreseeable future. In the process he was imposing a view of a liberal education which may have reflected the value system of the Oxbridge educated liberal intelligentsia to which he belonged, but it was one which marginalized much of the technical education that was increasingly demanded for entry to the new and growing industries. Historians such as Meriel Vlaemincke are in no doubt about the significance of this:

86 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 all over the country, schools which in the 1890s had begun to come to terms with science subjects, elementary school pupils and local authority involvement, were encouraged to discard those features and re-emphasize their community of interest with the public schools.40 Brian Simon took an even more conspiratorial view, pointing out that many of the established secondary schools took children from the age of seven: ‘It was impossible to define secondary education as a definite stage, “end-on” to primary education, since it was precisely this concept that the Board, implementing a long standing policy, was determined to destroy. Secondary education was a different education’.41 There had been a significant increase in the number of girls’ secondary schools during the late nineteenth century. The Taunton Commission had identified only 12 such schools at work in the whole country: the Bryce Commissioners reported 80. But this still left significant gaps in the provision, particularly in the industrial towns, and this was largely met by the new local authorities. By 1913 over 300 new municipal secondary schools had appeared in the United Kingdom. Many of these were for girls, and the number of females receiving secondary schooling rose from 20,000 in 1897 to almost 200,000 by 1914.42 Since this involved the demise of the higher-grade and technical schools that had been offering courses more directly related to employment, it meant that this growing army of middle-class girls in receipt of secondary education now followed the more general ‘liberal’ syllabus specified by Morant in 1904. Even so, the vast majority of them went on to become schoolteachers or nurses, or else to follow relatively short-term employment in clerical posts prior to marriage. As Gregory Anderson summarized it,43 these were the only occupations available which enabled women to be “ladylike” … The typical Edwardian career girl wanted nothing more than “a frock-coated something in the City, to live in a suburban semi-detached villa and to carry a gilt-clasped prayer book to church on Sunday”.44 Another significant development during these years was the ruling by the Board of Education in 1907 that 25% of the places in municipal secondary schools should be made available at no cost, and that funding would be provided for students who had qualified by competitive examination. On the face of it, this attempt by the newly elected Liberal Government to broaden access to secondary education appears to have been a decisive step towards the democratizing of popular schooling and the opening up of a ladder by which the poorest could aspire to the privileges already enjoyed by the better off. In reality, it was little more than a sop. Many working-class children (including the author’s own father) won places at their local grammar school but refused them since their parents could not afford the school uniform and the books they would have to buy, and needed their children to enter the paid workforce as early as possible. Equally, from the side of the schools themselves, there was some reticence to accept the children of the poor. A number of grammar schools refused to cooperate with the scheme, and

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

87

some, such as University College School, Hampstead in 1911, were convinced by the parent body to refuse the grant from their local council and to accept no more entrants from elementary schools.45 In 1907, one school inspector reported ‘a defect in educational organisation’ in Bristol, which he thought was developing in other large towns: the old grammar schools of every grade, with all their faults, flattered themselves that they never let the really brilliant boy escape notice … It is generally recognised that our new municipal secondary schools are, and must remain, second grade schools … that the normal leaving age will be 16 or 17 … and the staff will be … men and women who have ceased to be students at the age of 19 or 20. It may therefore be assumed that these schools cannot, as a rule, attempt anything like a university scholarship standard of work. The result is that our secondary schools must be definitely graded, as indeed they are in practice.46 Thus, what was developing was an increasing fissure in the working class between those who did and those who did not aspire to secondary education for their children, and an increasingly sharp recognition among the quickly growing middle classes of which were the ‘better’ secondary schools. One of the criteria for this judgement now became how many of a school’s pupils had originally been taught in elementary schools. It amounted to a subtle reworking, rather than the deconstruction of the well-established Victorian gradations of the education system.

Educating the Edwardian elite The period from 1895 to 1914 was probably the high point of the public school movement. The schools themselves continued to grow, both in size and number, fuelled by the steadily increasing demand from the professional classes of the Home Counties and from newly enriched industrialists and businessmen across the country. For their alumni they offered access to positions of influence in the senior civil service, in politics and across the Empire. To many, Britain’s Imperial grandeur and dominance of the world’s financial markets seemed to be a living vindication of the attitudes and values imbued by the public schools, their ultimate justification. Yet, surprisingly, although much has been written about the public schools during the Victorian period, historians have had far less to say about them during the Edwardian era and the years leading up to the First World War. J. A. Mangan has highlighted the significance of athleticism at this time in defining masculinity and disseminating a ‘games ethic’ that was vital in confirming membership of an elite, forging bonds around the British Empire and imbuing society generally with a sense of fair play and a cult of amateurism, both of which shone a favourable light on the public schools.47 It was ex-public school boys who were able to dominate and control the new codes and administration of professional sports such as soccer and cricket. Some contests between public schools became major spectator events in their own right. Over 38,000 spectators attended the two-day Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s in 1914.48

88 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 Alongside this work, W. D. Rubinstein has analyzed in detail the social backgrounds of entrants to the public schools at this time and their career trajectories.49 He effectively dismissed the ‘cultural critique’ which underpinned arguments such as those of Martin Wiener,50 who claimed that ‘British culture, in its various manifestations and institutions was anti-industrial and anti-business’51 and that responsibility for this lay in large part with the public schools. What Rubinstein did demonstrate was that, in reality, at this time, many of the sons of businessmen who entered the public schools returned to work in the family business. Those who did move into the growing professional sector did so as much in search of security as status. It is also clear that by the turn of the twentieth century a clear hierarchy had emerged within the public school sector. Eton drew a quarter of its entrants from the landed gentry, Harrow 12%, Winchester 7% and St. Paul’s only 1%.52 Hardly surprisingly, for most of the first half of the twentieth century almost a half of Conservative Party MPs were Old Boys of Eton. The overall dominance of the public schools was reflected in their monopolization of the judiciary and other major professions such as medicine and architecture. As Fritz Ringer summarized it, the old assumption that educational expansion meant “democratisation” in the sense of increased individual socio-economic mobility has lost most of its credibility … The educational systems that emerged from the structural changes of that period [1870–1920] … ended by perpetuating and reinforcing the hierarchic organisation of their societies.53 In England, the public schools were the lynchpin of that process. Much the same judgement may be made of the universities at this time. The existing universities continued to grow in size. By 1914 there were over 4,000 students at both Cambridge and London, and at Oxford 3,500.54 Beyond this, what was beginning to look like a system was developing, as civic universities were established in several of the larger industrial towns. The growing demand for higher-level technical training, the philanthropy of leading industrialists and the initiative of city councils came together to ensure that technical institutes which had begun work in the second half of the nineteenth century were granted charters as universities in their own right. The attempt to establish a federal university of the north, the Victoria University, foundered within a few years, leaving Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield to go their own ways and become separate universities. In 1900, by Royal Charter, Mason College, Birmingham was granted university status. Within a few years similar developments had taken place at Bristol, Newcastle (although here the proximity of Durham meant that for 30 years only university college status was granted) and in the other northern cities. What followed very quickly was a scramble for identity. In the drive to appear academically respectable, all of these new universities reduced the number of parttime students, most of whom now had to seek a technological education in local colleges offering evening teaching. Within the newly chartered universities themselves, much energy was devoted to the resuscitation of the liberal arts.

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

89

Significantly, the Yorkshire College at Leeds was initially excluded from the Victoria University on the grounds that its proposed curriculum failed to offer a liberal education. No sooner was Birmingham University founded than the first Vice Chancellor, Oliver Lodge, was telling an audience of the ‘unfortunate impression abroad that Birmingham does not possess or does not encourage a Faculty of Arts’.55 Under him, the Arts Faculty trebled in size in 12 years. By 1905 he was boasting that Birmingham offered ‘a general education in the knowledge of the time’.56 By 1911 this had elicited a sharp response from the Birmingham Ratepayers Association, who petitioned the Privy Council with the complaint that ‘all that has been done by the merging of Mason’s Science College into the University has been to divert the funds meant for the industrial classes to the use of the wealthy … and now the middle and working classes are being asked to contribute to the education of the … well to do’.57 This process was paralleled elsewhere. The attempts by the new civic universities to model themselves on Oxford and Cambridge with monumental architecture and collegiate structures58 is partly explicable by the fact that many of the senior posts in these new universities were taken by Oxbridge alumni. Some influential Oxbridge figures clearly saw the leadership of the new provincial universities as being their concern and in their gift. In their correspondence at this time Henry Sidgwick and James Bryce discussed likely candidates for the Principalship of both Birmingham University and Owens College, Manchester.59 Meanwhile, the ancient universities were slow to adjust to the changing demands of the new industrialization. At a time when the major professions had all moved, or were moving, within the ambit of the universities, Oxford and Cambridge fell back (as their representatives told the 1922 Royal Commission) on providing a liberal education for practitioners before they received their specialist training elsewhere. This applied particularly to medicine, but was echoed in other disciplines.60 The Admissions Register of Lincoln’s Inn reported in 1899 that their entrants from Oxbridge had been schooled in ‘general principles and a liberal culture’ before they came to London for a specialist training.61 Nowhere was the power of Oxbridge to define an appropriate education more apparent than in respect of admission to the senior grades of the civil service. Following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854, entrance to the civil service became competitive. But the reforms of the later nineteenth century ensured that the examination papers were modelled on those of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1913 Sir Richard Lodge pointed out to the MacDonnell Commission that an Oxford man could win enough marks in the civil service entry examination without extending his education. At the same time a representative of Leeds University told the Commission that ‘among the class of parents from whom our students are drawn, the possibility of entering the Civil service is at present very little known’.62 Admittedly, there were limited attempts at both Oxford and Cambridge to accommodate the social changes of the time. The 1871 University Test Act granted Nonconformists full access to Oxford and Cambridge. By the end of the century the requirement that tutors must be celibate had been dropped. Scholarships to study science were becoming available, particularly at Cambridge. New

90 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 buildings for science and engineering began to appear. But all this was, at best, partial, leaving an enormous deficiency, which the new provincial universities were all too willing to fill. In 1896 only a minority of Oxford colleges were offering scholarships for science subjects. Greek remained a requirement for admission to both universities until after the First World War, whatever the subject to be studied. The three Nobel Prize winners who emerged from the Cavendish Laboratory during the Edwardian period all pursued research in pure physics, which was of no direct relevance to the new industries. In brief, the system of higher education that was beginning to emerge at the start of the twentieth century developed a ‘pecking order’ that neatly met the aspirations and needs of the new social hierarchies that were developing at this time. Oxbridge was able to reaffirm the power of a liberal education and in so doing to allow the most prestigious of the private schools in the south-east and the major public grammar schools to develop a stranglehold on admissions. Meanwhile, entrants to the new civic universities were drawn overwhelmingly from their own regions, and catered almost exclusively for the new suburban middle classes. It was a confirmation that higher education was for the children of the more privileged and one of its functions was to equip them for professional careers that would guarantee their social status. In 1860 Lord Salisbury had boasted that Britain was establishing ‘an Empire on which the sun never sets’. The evidence assembled in this chapter suggests that the phrase might be more aptly have been applied to the provision of education for the better off than to colonial policy.

Notes 1 The British economy: key statistics, 1900–1970, table C, p. 6, published by Times Newspapers for the London and Cambridge Economic Service, London, 1970. 2 E. Howard, Garden cities of tomorrow, Sonnenshein, London, 1902. 3 L. C. Money, Riches and poverty, Methuen, London, 1905, pp. 41–3. 4 C. Booth, Life and labour of the people of London, 17 vols., Macmillan, London, 1892–1902. 5 S. Rowntree, Poverty, a study of town life, Longman, London, 1901. 6 Interdepartmental report on physical deterioration, HMSO, London, 1904. 7 Ibid., pp. 90–3. 8 R. Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, doctors and the quest for national efficiency: an educational crusade, 1900–1939’, History of Education, 8, 4, December 1979, pp. 293–306. 9 Birmingham Ladies Literary and Debating Society, Annual Report, 1903–4, Birmingham, 1904. 10 Report of the Medical Superintendent for 1909, p. 76, Birmingham, 1910. 11 R. Lowe, ‘Eugenics and education: a note on the origins of the intelligence testing movement in England’, Educational Studies, 6, 1, 1980, pp. 1–8. 12 E. Hopkins, A social history of the English working classes, Edward Arnold, London, 1979, pp. 165–71. 13 See E. J. T. Brennan, Education for national efficiency: the contribution of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Athlone Press, London, 1975. 14 See in particular L. Goldman, Dons and workers, Clarendon, Oxford, 1995; H. Mackinder and M. Sadler, University extension: has it a future?, Froude, London, 1890; Oxford and working class education, Joint Committee Report, Clarendon, Oxford, 1908; A. Mansbridge, University tutorial classes, Longmans Green, London, 1913.

Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914

91

15 L. Goldman, The life of Tawney, Bloomsbury, London, 2013. 16 R. Lowe, ‘The divided curriculum; Sadler, Morant and the English secondary school’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 8, 2, 1976; J. H. Higginson, Selections from Michael Sadler, Dejali and Meyorre, Liverpool, 1979. 17 H. Perkin, The rise of professional society: England since 1880, Routledge, London, 1989, pp. 27–141. 18 K. Chorley, Manchester made them, Faber, London, 1950, pp. 155–7. 19 J. E. Lewis, ‘Women clerical workers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’, in G. Anderson (ed.), The white blouse revolution: female office workers since 1870, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, pp. 27–47. 20 G. Anderson, ‘The white blouse revolution’, in G. Anderson (ed.), The white blouse revolution: female office workers since 1870, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988, p. 10. 21 Secondary education (The Bryce Report), HMSO, London, 1895, p. 18. 22 R. Lowe, ‘Personalities and policy: Sadler, Morant and the structure of education in England’ in R. Aldrich (ed.), In history and in education, Woburn, London, 1996, pp. 98–115. 23 House of Commons proceedings, 24 March 1902. 24 N. Daglish, Education policy-making in England and Wales: the crucible years, 1895–1911, Woburn Press, London, 1996. 25 W. Robinson, ‘Historiographical reflections on the 1902 Act’, in R. Lowe (ed.), A century of local education authorities, Oxford Review of Education, special edition, 28, 2 and 3, June and September 2002, pp. 159–72. 26 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, 1870–1970, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, p. 66. 27 Ibid., p. 67. 28 Ibid., p. 72. 29 Ibid., p. 77. 30 R. Lowe, ‘The early open air movement: origins and implications’, in History of Education Society Conference papers, The fitness of the nation: physical and health education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, December 1982, pp. 86–99, and D. A. Turner, ‘The open air movement in Sheffield’, History of Education, 1, 1, 1972, pp. 58–80. 31 F. Widdowson, Going up into the next class: women and elementary teacher training, 1840–1914, Hutchinson, London, 1983, pp. 29–76. 32 Handbook of suggestions for the consideration of teachers and others concerned in the work of public elementary schools, Board of Education Blue Book, HMSO, London, 1905, p. 6. 33 J. Howlett, Edmond Holmes and progressive education, Routledge, London, 2017, pp. 169–72. 34 W. H. G. Armytage, Four hundred years of English education, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970, p. 203. 35 Ibid., p. 203. 36 Booth, op. cit., first series, iii, 1889, pp. 248–50. 37 J. Roach, Secondary education in England, 1870–1902, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 70. 38 Secondary education (The Bryce Report), HMSO, London, 1895, p. 78. 39 Board of Education, Regulations for secondary schools, HMSO, London, 1904. 40 M. Vlaemenke, ‘The subordination of technical education in secondary schooling, 1870–1914’, in P. Summerfield and E. J. Evans, Technical education and the state since 1850, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, pp. 55–76. 41 B. Simon, Education and the Labour movement, 1870–1920, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1965, p. 241. 42 J. Goodman, ‘Class and religion’ in J. C. Albisetti, J. Goodman and R. Rogers (eds.), Girls’ secondary education in the Western world, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 16. 43 G. Anderson, op. cit., p. 10. 44 The Woman Worker, 24 March 1909.

92 Schooling for a changing world, 1895–1914 45 D. Gillard, Education in England: a history, www.educationengland.org.uk/history/ chapter07, May 2018. 46 Public Record office, Ed. 12/139. 47 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian public schools, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 48 T. Money, Manly and muscular diversions: public schools and the nineteenth century sporting revival, Duckworth, London, p. 173. 49 W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, culture and decline in Britain, 1750–1990, Routledge, London, 1993. 50 M. Wiener, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, 1850–1980, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985. 51 Ibid., p. 2. 52 Ibid., pp. 116–18. 53 D. K. Muller, F. Ringer and B. Simon, The rise of the modern educational system: structural change and social reproduction, 1870–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 3. 54 R. Lowe, ‘The expansion of higher education in England’ in K. Jarausch (ed.), The transformation of higher learning, 1860–1930, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1983, p. 45. 55 Ibid., p. 53. 56 University Review, 2, 1905, p. 31. 57 Public Record Office, Education 119/1. 58 R. Lowe, ‘Building the ivory tower: the social functions of late-nineteenth century collegiate architecture’, Studies in Higher Education, 7, 2, 1982. 59 Bodleian Library, MS. Bryce 15. 60 Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge universities, HMSO, London, 1922, p. 37. 61 Lincoln’s Inn Admissions Register, 1420–1893, London, 1896. 62 Royal Commission on the Civil Service (The MacDonnell Commission), HMSO, London, 1915, Appendix to the third Report, p. 227 and p. 265.

5

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

War and its aftermath It would be difficult to understate the social dislocation caused by the First World War. In total almost five million men were recruited to the army alone. The economy was placed on a war footing, with unprecedented governmental planning and control of both public services and industry. This was all to impinge, however indirectly, on educational provision both during and after the War. In our context, three features of this disruption are particularly noteworthy. First, the War gave a massive stimulus to established industries. The manufacture of weapons and the mechanization of the army meant that the demands made of the iron and steel, machine tool and motor industries were enormous. In all of these sectors of the economy, production and productive capacity increased dramatically. But precisely the same thing was happening across the economies of both allies and enemies. The inexorable consequence was that, once the War was over, British industry, which was traditionally a net exporter, found itself competing against a growing number of rivals in a world market that was suffering contraction. This meant that the nation which had monopolized world trade during the nineteenth century was to find itself in an extremely exposed position when confronted by the brutal economic realities of the 1920s and 1930s. An almost permanent sense of economic crisis was the mainspring of governmental policy throughout the inter-War years. It is key to understanding attitudes within the Board of Education (and among policy-makers and many educationalists) that were to pre-empt any significant restructuring, or even development of, the education system. Secondly, and also pregnant with significance for schooling, during the War, the Government was forced, whether it wanted or not, to involve itself in much closer planning and oversight. In May 1915 the new coalition Government set up a Ministry of Munitions, with Lloyd George as its Minister. This Department alone set about detailed manpower planning, founding and running 24 of its own factories.1 Another precursor of nationalization was the governmental take-over of 130 separate railway companies, which were to be re-privatized after the War as four major concerns. With over 80% of the wheat consumed in Britain being imported, it proved necessary by 1916 to set up a Ministry of Food. This made it

94 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 illegal to eat more than two courses in a public place (or to feed pigeons), and in 1917 introduced food rationing as it established a tight control over the food supply. In 1915, following the recommendations made in a Board of Education paper by William McCormick, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was established. This remained in existence until 1965, making this aspect of education policy the one area in which governmental collectivism survived after the War. Initially, it supervised the manufacture of explosives, drugs, dyes and scientific instruments. In the words of Arthur Marwick: ‘collectivism was given a brief reign until 1920: thereafter there was immediate retreat. But the lessons of War could never be completely forgotten’.2 The growing readiness of successive governments to control and plan the education system can be dated from this moment. A permanently enlarged civil service made it possible for this to happen. More pertinently, in our context, the War resulted in the Labour movement identifying more clearly defined policies, with Sidney Webb leading the move towards adoption of a programme of common ownership of the means of production and R. H. Tawney devising a coherent education policy for the first time.3 Thirdly, the War had a massive impact on gender relations. Ironically, the first months of war generated a crisis in female employment as supplies of imported cotton dried up. By March 1915 the Government was forced to launch a registration scheme for women, and in July Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU rallied over 30,000 women in London, marching for a woman’s right to serve, as many suffragists swung behind the War effort, seeing the crisis in female employment as more immediate than the campaign for the franchise. But within a year the recruitment of growing numbers of males to the armed forces was generating a revolution in the pattern of female employment as they moved into the jobs the men had left vacant. By the end of the War the number of women working in munitions had quadrupled to almost a million. The number in banking had risen from 18,000 to 117,000; in commerce it had doubled to 934,000; in national and local government it had risen from 262,000 to 460,000. This precipitated the shift of females away from domestic service, which saw an irreversible decline as the number of women employed in this sector fell from 1,658,000 in 1914 to 1,258,000 by the end of the War.4 All of this, in turn, was to have a massive impact on the demand for middle-class schooling for girls and for a continuing focus on useful skills, even though these were beginning to look very different from those thought desirable in the nineteenth century. This had mixed consequences. On the one hand, the determination to find work for the returning soldiery after the War resulted in almost half a million women losing their jobs. There had been some equalization of pay levels during the War, but the big new male-dominated trades unions that developed in all of the heavy industries at the end of the War were hostile to equal pay for women, so what might have become a long-term trend was checked. On the other hand, the franchise was granted to women over 30 in 1918; the Sex Disqualification Act allowed women to become Members of Parliament, barristers and magistrates. Legislation in 1923 permitted women to file for divorce. The publication of Marie Stopes’ Married love in 1919 coincided with the widespread availability of effective

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

95

contraception for the first time. In brief, what happened to gender relations after the War was a microcosm of society as a whole. Anne Crowther summarized it as ‘a brief outburst of national fervour for reform which dissipated amidst post-War crisis and retrenchment’.5 Numerous historians, perhaps most notably Arthur Marwick,6 have stressed the importance of war as a catalyst of social change. What is perhaps most striking in respect of England (and, in our context, in respect of schooling) is that so well-established were the structures and hierarchies of British society that those changes that did occur might have been the precursors of longterm trends, but proved in the short-term to be limited and temporary. All this left Britain very ill-prepared for the economic roller coaster of the interWar years. The popular stereotype is of two decades of economic crisis, industrial unrest and hardship. But the reality was far more complex. The difficulties of the inter-War years were set against a backcloth of rising living standards, improvements in health and an increasing life expectancy. But, sadly, these were not universally shared, and if anything the contrasts between those comfortably off and the poor deepened between 1918 and 1939. Nor was this a period of steady progression. The coming of ‘normalcy’ after the War and the resumption of world trade meant that, once the disruptions of the return to peace had dissipated, the 1920s saw relatively steady economic growth until 1929. The Wall Street crash of that year caused widespread unemployment, which peaked in 1932. Thereafter rearmament and the stimulation of the newer industries, such as car manufacture, led to another economic surge during the late 1930s. Several factors help explain this conflicted picture. First, the widespread adoption of methods of contraception meant smaller families. This in turn meant more residual income for food and medical expenses. There was a general shift, for both men and women, towards white collar employment. This too meant a general increase in pay levels. It was the manual workers in the old industrial areas, many of which relied on a single from of employment (such as Jarrow, heavily dependent on Palmer’s shipyard), who proved to be most at risk of unemployment. Elsewhere, in places such as Birmingham, Coventry and the Home Counties, where the newer industries were located, many working-class families were better off than they had ever been before. The other key factor that intensified social contrasts was the building of vast new housing estates on the periphery of the larger cities to relocate families from slum areas. The 1919 Addison Act provided funding from central government for local authorities to build the ‘homes fit for heroes’ that Lloyd George had promised. Dagenham in East London, Wythenshaw in Manchester, and Kingstanding in Birmingham were among the largest of many new suburban estates. By 1935 Birmingham alone had 31 new council housing estates. In all, half a million new homes were built, two-thirds of them council houses. Ironically, G. C. H. M’Gonigle, the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, demonstrated in 1936 in his book Poverty and public health 7 that mortality rates were higher in these new suburbs than in the old remaining slums, probably because the higher rents and commuting costs from these new outer suburbs left less money available for food. Meanwhile, ribbon development around the conurbations (most notably in

96 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 the Home Counties: particularly the area served by the London underground) saw the appearance of new owner-occupied suburbs to house a newly forming lowermiddle class with its own aspirations and lifestyle. All of this was to be critical for the provision of schooling. It meant the generation of new areas on the outskirts of the cities with young families and a massive demand for ‘new build’ schools. Not only was social class being redefined, but these new groupings were to be given their own new schools, all in ‘pavilion’ design buildings. Meanwhile, the ‘old’ working class remained in the buildings that had appeared during the nineteenth century. Unthinkingly, English society was to use its school system during the inter-War year to confirm and restructure the working classes and perpetuate subtle distinctions between those living in differing suburbs.

Conflicting aspirations The other key factor influencing the provision of education in England at this time was the emergence of two dominant ideologies, which proved to be the battleground of policy-making. The first was the development of Eugenic thinking, which came to attract an increasing number of followers, many of whom were influential doctors, educational psychologists and educationalists. In 1920 Cyril Burt, who was a member of the Eugenics Society, was invited by George Auden, Chief Medical Officer for Birmingham (himself a prominent Eugenicist), to survey local schoolchildren in much the same way that he had already done in London. The focus was on identifying the ‘mentally deficient’, but Burt insisted on surveying the whole school population, concluding that the distribution of human abilities meant that a ‘treble track’ system of secondary education was vitally necessary, enabling not simply the separation of those unable to cope, but the nurturing of the most talented.8 Soon this view became an orthodoxy. In 1923, George Adami, Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool University, wrote in the Eugenics Review that universal testing was the only way to find the ‘real aristocracy’.9 A growing number of influential figures came to accept these ideas and join the crusade. J. M. Keynes, H. G. Wells, D. V. Glass, Carr Sunders, Julian Huxley and Marie Stopes were all involved in or sympathizers with the educational lobbying of the Society. In July 1931, the Eugenics society sponsored a Private Member’s Bill in the Commons to legalize the voluntary sterilization of the least able ‘so that later on we may have the benefit of the results and experience gained … before bringing in a Bill for the compulsory sterilisation of the unfit’.10 In the debate, it became clear that the Board of Education was complicit in this. Archibald Church, a Labour MP and Eugenicist, who introduced the Bill as a private member’s measure, cited the Report of the Mental Deficiency Committee set up by the Board of Education and the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency in 1925. Its Report had been published in 1929. As Church put it: a few statistics are available regarding the progressive deterioration of the stock in this country … the certifiable mental defectives in the country were

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

97

300,000, of whom 25,000, or only one-twelfth, were in institutions. Another 50,000 were under the control of guardians.11 For Eugenicists the solution was sterilization. Although the proposed Bill was rejected, among the 89 who voted for it were two future Ministers of Education (R. A. Butler and Ellen Wilkinson) as well as Anthony Eden and E. D. Simon (father of the eminent Marxist historian of education, Brian Simon). This Mental Deficiency Committee is of particular significance. It was convened as a Joint Committee of the Board of Education and the Board of Control and comprised almost exclusively Eugenicists. Ralph Crowley, Cyril Burt, Ellen Pinsent, Frank Shrubsall and A. F. Tredgold were all involved. All were Eugenicists. Not only did the Eugenicists lobby for the sterilization of the less able, but, even more significant in our context, they popularized the view that it was necessary to separate children in school into differing ability groups and to provide tests that were capable of making the necessary distinctions. In his survey for the Birmingham LEA in 1920, Cyril Burt collaborated with C. W. Valentine of Birmingham University to devise standardized tests of reading and mental arithmetic. They were the precursors of the intelligence tests to identify English Quotient and Mathematics Quotient which, in the years following 1945, were to be taken by all pupils in maintained schools (including the author). Through Eugenic lobbying, a new regime of intelligence testing was brought into being between the Wars.12 By contrast, the Labour Party, in formulating its educational policy after the First World War, was far keener to emphasize communality and to break down the barriers to elite education. It must be stressed, though, that this was mediated by a strong body of opinion within the Party that the route to achieving this was through implementation of the 1918 Education Act and the establishment of continuation schools. Accordingly, in 1922, when R. H. Tawney outlined the Party’s first formal policy on education, his aspiration was simply that all normal children, irrespective of the income, class, or occupation of their parents, may be transferred at the age of eleven-plus from the primary or preparatory school to one type or another of secondary school, and remain in the latter till sixteen.13 This commitment to different types of secondary education was an aspiration which Tawney shared with the Eugenicists (even though his world view was in complete contrast to many of theirs) and was to haunt Labour Party thinking on schooling for years to come. It is not unfair to conclude that the Labour Party, given its very broad base of support, had become ethically socialist, but at the same time, in respect of the practicalities of policy, gradualist. During the inter-War years at least, the Labour Party was happy to go along with Tawney’s advocacy of the establishment of different types of school for differing social groups.

98 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

Economizing on education In this context, it is hardly surprising that the public sector, and education in particular, felt the impact of swingeing economies during the inter-War years. These impacted most heavily on the schooling of the poor. Those who could afford to fund their children’s education in grammar and public schools remained relatively unaffected. In 1911 the Board of Education’s Departmental Committee on the cost of school buildings had already recommended that all new school buildings should be ‘semi-temporary’, using cheaper materials such as timber, steel frames and ferro-concrete.14 The Building Regulations were amended in 1914 to accommodate this and making it possible for local authorities to take out loans for up to 30 years on semi-permanent school buildings. This made the ‘pavilion style’ school the only show in town for years to come. Then, as the War ended, the focus on building ‘homes fit for heroes’ was met by a Departmental Circular to local authorities in August 1918 urging them to make do with ‘hut hospitals, regimental institute rooms, officers’ and nurses’ mess huts, since they were particularly suitable for school use’.15 By 1921 the Board had rejected proposals for new school buildings to the tune of over £1,300,000 on grounds of economy.16 The other obvious saving was on teachers’ salaries. By the mid-1920s the Board was encouraging class sizes of up to 50 for children younger than 11 in rooms designed for only 40 children, thus reducing the number of teachers required. As if this were not enough, the Geddes Cuts of December 1921 were a hammer blow to elementary schooling. They called for a reduction of £18,000,000 in the annual budget for education and went on to make recommendations on how this might be achieved. They confirmed the raising of the pupil-teacher ratio to 50:1; they called for the age of entry to school to be six rather than five and for a cut in teachers’ wage levels. Finally, they noted that the grammar schools were about to raise the number of places available for free scholars (many of whom were drawn from families who struggled to pay school fees) to 40% of entrants and insisted that it should stay at the existing level of 25%. State scholarships to universities, grants for technical education and teachers’ pensions were all cut.17 Under the first brief Labour Government in 1924, with C. P. Trevelyan at the Board of Education, there was some slight respite. But it came at the cost of him confirming the existing staffing ratios for children under 11 years old, while pressing for the establishment of more senior elementary schools which children would move to at that age. But since, as Tawney put it at the time, ‘there is no question of imposing on all children the kinds of secondary education which are most common today’,18 these would be ‘both different from and less generous’ than the existing grammar schools.19 Unthinkingly, a precedent was being set for the coming of universal secondary education 20 years later. It involved the grammar schools continuing to get the biggest slice of the cake. This paled into insignificance when, at the height of the economic crisis following the Great Crash, the May Report called for even more stringent economies, including a reduction of a further £13,600,000 in annual expenditure on

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

99

education. Accordingly, in September 1931, the Board of Education’s Circular 1413 (Reductions in educational expenditure) established a new template for the decade, initiating what Brian Simon described as ‘the politics of reversing educational advance’.20 For a while, at least, publicly funded schooling was to remain the poor relation of government expenditure.

Planning educational futures The Newcastle, Clarendon, Taunton and Bryce Reports were perhaps the most significant of numerous Royal Commissions that had a major influence on educational policy during the nineteenth century. During the inter-War years the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education exercised a similar influence. There was hardly any aspect of schooling which escaped attention, as successive governments demonstrated their readiness to plan on the basis of ‘expert’ advice. Significantly, though, in our context, this had the effect, almost without exception, of confirming well-established patterns. First, Nobel prizewinner, Joseph Thomson, was commissioned to advise on ‘the position of the sciences in education’. Although his committee recommended in 1918 that science should be taught in both elementary and secondary schools, with enhanced specialist teacher training and better laboratory provision, it also suggested that more time for sciences should be allocated to boys than to girls. Its call for better laboratory provision marks the moment when science laboratories became a common feature in secondary schools, rather than the minority which had added them during the nineteenth century. The suggestion that all children should be taught science to the age of 16 was a veiled proposal for the raising of the school leaving age. But perhaps the Report’s most salient comment on educational advance came in an aside, stating ‘but unless the national character suddenly changes there is little danger of chaos being created by a hurried adoption of too many reforms at the same time’.21 Further reports followed thick and fast. In 1920 the Young Report on scholarships and free places recommended not only an increase in the provision of secondary education, but that transfer to these schools should be at 11 years of age on the basis of tests of ability. The percentage of students in receipt of grant should be increased to 40, with a view to secondary schooling ultimately becoming free of charge.22 Perhaps most significantly, this Report was the first to rework the demands of the Taunton and Bryce Commissions for different types of school by arguing that there were different kinds of pupil. It claimed that ‘the secondary school of the normal type provides a form of liberal education … usually accepted as the most generally valuable kind of post-elementary education. But it is not so for all’. The Report cited ‘natural capacity’ as an important factor, adding that some children were interested more in things than in thoughts, or best developed by dealing with things rather than books, or on account of circumstances determining leaving age, or, again, on account of the character of future occupation. The question

100 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 for Local Authorities under the Act of 1918 is … that all normal children must be provided with the form of further education best suited to their ability. It follows, therefore, that exemption from fees must be provided not only in secondary schools but also in other schools of such types as may be established, or developed … to meet the needs of children of different characteristics.23 In this way, differences in performance and aspiration, which had much to do with social class background, were being subtly mediated to fit in with the growing acceptance of hereditarianism. It legitimated and justified what was to be a growing trend during the inter-War years, that local authorities met the demand for more years of schooling through the establishment of senior elementary schools which were to differ significantly from the existing grammar schools. In 1921 the Crewe Report on the place of Classics in the curriculum demonstrated how firmly the British establishment had its eyes on the past and how resistant the system was to radical change, arguing that the spirit of Greece and Rome are vital to the highest development of our civilisation. That it would be a national disaster if classical studies were to disappear from our education or to be confined to a small class of the community.24 But this Report was of significance not simply for what it said, but equally for the network it drew on. The Chairperson was Robert Crewe-Milne, Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. Both his Vice-Chancellor, W. H. Hadow, and Cyril Norwood (at that time Master of Marlborough College) were members of the Committee. Both were to play important roles in the years that followed. Hadow, in particular, was to chair the Consultative Committee as it produced what were, arguably, its six most influential reports. Norwood went on to chair its most controversial. A report on the teaching of English25 was soon followed by one on the differentiation of curriculum for boys and girls, chaired by Hadow. Although the tone of this Report was generally encouraging, it did reinforce the historical view that the needs and aspirations of boys and girls differed, arguing that the majority of the earlier pioneers of women’s education appear to have thought that the claim that women should have as good an education as men, and that they should be free to enter occupations solely on their merits, implied that they should have the same education as men. It is not so clear today, however … that that conclusion necessarily follows. In the first place, the fact that the majority of girls will marry and have the care of a family, if not of such exclusive importance as was generally supposed in the first half of the last century, is yet of very great significance.26 A second reservation was the familiar cry that it was important that girls’ education should be less demanding than that of boys: ‘more attention should be devoted by

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

101

parents, head mistresses, and school doctors to the possibility of taking suitable precautions for the protection of girls against physical fatigue and nervous overstrain’.27 This echoed the well-established practice of many girls’ secondary schools teaching only a morning curriculum, particularly during the years of the onset of puberty. Equally significant was a report in the following year on psychological tests of educable capacity.28 This committee involved the Eugenicist, George Adami, in policy-making for the first time and took evidence from a considerable number of psychologists and teachers who worked with the less able. It is hardly surprising, then, this was the moment that a belief in fixed intelligence came into the mainstream of educational thinking. In the words of the Report: ‘there are certain mental factors which remain more or less constant during the lifetime of individual human beings’. It went on to claim ‘that methods of examination have been discovered or can be discovered by which these factors in any individual can to a great extent be ascertained and differentiated from the results of training and education’.29 Several of its recommendations were soon being implemented. It called for the appointment of educational psychologists by LEAs to advise and to supervise the work of assessing children, as well as the establishment of specialist research centres in the University Departments of Education. It advocated that intelligence tests should be used ‘in selecting younger children for free places, for entrance to Secondary Schools, and for admission to Central Schools’.30 Within a few years, most LEAs were using intelligence tests as diagnostic tools for entry to secondary schools. The education of the adolescent, published in 1926, was perhaps the most influential of these Consultative Committee Reports, since its major recommendations were all to be implemented following the 1944 Education Act. It introduced the concept of ‘adolescence’ to public discourse and proposed that elementary and secondary schooling, which had originated as separate systems, should now be seen as stages in a child’s progress through schooling. But it also stressed that if secondary schooling was to be universal, it should be offered through three different types of school: ‘With due allowance for the varying requirements of different pupils, some form of post-primary education should be made available for all normal children between the ages of 11 and 14, and, as soon as possible, 11 and 15’. This meant that the post-primary stage of education should include other types of post-primary schools, in which the curricula will vary according to the age up to which the majority of pupils remain at school, and the different interests and abilities of the children. So, the existing grammar schools ‘which follow a predominantly literary or scientific curriculum, and carry the education of their pupils forward to the age of at least 16+’ would be complemented by ‘schools of the type of the existing selective Central Schools, which give at least a four years’ course from the age of 11+, with a “realistic” or practical trend in the last two years’, as well as

102 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 schools of the type of the existing non-selective Central Schools, which may either be the only Central Schools in their area, or may exist side by side with selective Central Schools and cater for those children who do not secure admission to such schools. Beyond that, for those who for one reason or another could not go forward to one of these three types of school, there would be teaching in ‘Senior Classes, Central Departments, “Higher Tops” and analogous arrangements’.31 At a stroke, Tawney’s aspiration for universal secondary education was being forced into a mould that ensured that the class distinctions which had been central to educational developments in the nineteenth century would persist, and that children from differing social backgrounds would receive very different kinds of secondary education. It was the widespread acceptance of hereditarianism and Eugenic thinking that made this appear not only uncontroversial, but appropriate. Further Consultative Committee Reports followed; on Books in the public elementary school (1928), on Primary education (1931) and on Infant and nursery schools (1933). It was during this phase of its work that the Consultative Committee was at its most forward-looking. Its recommendation of school libraries foreshadowed the more child-centred approaches to teaching adopted after the Second World War, with a book being seen as a resource as much as a textbook. Its famous invocation in 1931 that ‘the curriculum is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’32 was in the same vein. This point was made again in 1933, with further suggestions for record-keeping in schools, for the oversight of proper diet, for liaison between teachers, nurses and doctors, for good exercise and rest and for the utilization of open-air buildings.33 This was a far cry from the very limited conceptions of the role of the teacher which had dominated previous eras. If these Reports offered the vision of a brighter future, in which children might be educated in the broadest sense rather than indoctrinated and instructed, the Spens Report ensured that this would happen within a very familiar framework. First, the Report showed that its recommendations were driven by heredetarianism, arguing that intellectual development during childhood appears to as if it were governed largely by a single central factor, usually known as ‘general intelligence’, which may be broadly described as innate all-round intellectual ability. It appears to enter into everything which the child attempts to think or say or do, and seems on the whole to be the most important factor in determining his work in the classroom.34 This focus on the needs of boys was confirmed when the Report went on to claim that a technical education was what best suited many of them: ‘we are of the opinion that for certain types of boy the education provided by this curriculum and the practical method of approach to various subjects, e.g. Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Drawing, best develop their capacities’.35 Conversely,

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

103

they argued that ‘valuable work is being done in Home Training Schools for girls and, for the reasons stated … we recommend that these schools should continue as heretofore’.36 The implication of all this was that ‘in view of the provision of Technical High Schools which we are recommending for boys, a somewhat higher grammar school provision is likely to be required for girls’.37 Although they called for the adoption of a leaving age of 16, their conclusion was that the needs of the nation were best served by using intelligence tests at the age of 11 to place all students in one of three types of school: grammar, technical or modern. They had considered the ‘multilateral’ schools being called for by some members of the Labour Party, but considered them unwieldy and difficult to manage, with little prospect of viable sixth forms. In particular, grammar schools ‘should retain a special character and must retain a special importance’.38 In this way, the ‘tripartite’ system of secondary education that emerged after the Second World War, with grammar schools firmly established at the apex, was made a central plank of Government policy. The Spens Report is one final illustration of the extent to which this government planning, driven by ‘fashionable’ expert opinion, was able to determine the shape of educational developments, and, in the process, ensure that the English education system was to remain one which offered distinct advantages to the better off, for years to come.

Schooling the common people After the War, local authorities found themselves in a very difficult situation because, while the 1918 legislation and the Consolidation Act of 1921 demanded that they make adequate provision for older pupils (the minimum leaving age was currently 14) and recommended that this was best done through continuation schools, the programme of public spending cuts made this virtually impossible. By 1922 the ambivalence felt about these schools was made clear in the House of Commons, where it was pointed out to the Minister that they were generating a shortage of young employees. William Joynson-Hicks went so far as to suggest that ‘as the local authorities are gradually dropping them, they might be done away with altogether and save the £500,000’ per annum that they were currently costing.39 Nonetheless, several local authorities did make efforts to comply with the Act. The LCC opened over 50 central schools as well as a number of senior departments in elementary schools. Manchester opened several, but insisted that these should operate under the Regulations for Elementary schools so that they could operate at ‘very low cost’.40 In Leicester these schools were labelled ‘Intermediate’ or ‘Senior’. Elsewhere the term ‘Upper Elementary’ was used. But in all cases, these schools were operated under the Elementary Code to minimize cost. In the process, it was made inevitable that the drift towards universal secondary schooling was done ‘on the cheap’ and in a form that ensured that the provision for those social groups receiving some kind of secondary schooling for the first time was seen from the outset as being both cheaper than and inferior to the pre-existing provision for the middle classes.

104 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 This pressing demand for a more prolonged schooling, together with the impact of suburbanization, meant that the vast majority of ‘new build’ elementary schools were located in the suburbs and catered for older children. The poorest sections of society, trapped in the nineteenth century inner cities, had to make do with old, pre-existing buildings, many of them relics of the Victorian era, and ‘central hall’ in design. Economization meant that architects were now building in the pavilion style, which was seen as providing a healthier environment, but, more to the point, was far cheaper than the old ornate brick buildings. Subtly, and without it being pre-planned, the development of popular education was also confirming the subtle gradations that were developing within the working classes and the newly forming middle classes. As the salary inexorably took over from the weekly wage, it was the new ‘salariat’, able to afford a move to the suburbs, who became the greatest beneficiaries of new school building during the inter-War years. As it became clear that the vast majority of elementary schools being built were senior schools, pressure mounted on the provision for younger pupils. The 1931 Hadow Report lamented that, for most junior schools, ‘the efforts of authorities will be largely directed to the improvement of existing buildings’.41 Several things followed from this. First, it meant that those new build schools that did appear within the elementary sector, with specialist rooms for science, art and domestic science, were only available for a relatively small number of older pupils. Economic constraints meant that most developments were delayed until the 1930s, by when architects were aware of the modern movement sweeping mainland Europe. But, with local authorities unable to afford to implement it as the planners might have wished, they sought to imitate it as cheaply as possible. A good example of this happening is the schools designed by W. T. Curtis for the Middlesex Local Authority. The authority found itself in an almost impossible position. The inexorable growth of London was confronting it with an insatiable demand for new school places: the economic slump denied it the funding to meet it adequately. Accordingly, Curtis was instructed to devise buildings which would cost 30% less than the currently fashionable pavilion design schools (themselves already popular in part because of their cheapness). This he did at Oakington Lane, Wembley; Headstone Road, Pinner; and Lockett Road, Harrow Weald. The solution he found, involving flat roofs, steel frames, lower ceilings and wider windows was soon being copied across the country.42 Thus, those that did appear were cheap copies of schools recently built elsewhere in Europe. One by one, local authority architects fell into line. In Sussex, G. C. Stillman designed senior elementary schools for Sidlesham, Selsey and Shoreham, which incorporated elements of modern design but in which, as he emphasized in his book some years later the revolt against neo-Georgian style as such amounted to little more than the exchange of one architectural style for another. … The same rigidity of composition, and inflexibility of construction, so apparent in earlier buildings, were to a large degree retained.43

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

105

In Weston-super-Mare the architect A. J. Toomer built a County School for older pupils in 1935 around two quadrangles, one for boys and one for girls, with science laboratories that could be shared and a hall that could be subdivided at the heart of the building. But more significant was the correspondence between the LEA and the Board of Education about the planning of this school: the UDC recently approached the Education Authority pointing out that the site is scarcely suitable for the provision of an elementary school, because the houses which have been built in that area are mainly of a residential type … On the other hand, the buildings which are now being put up on the East of the loop line are distinctly of the working-class type and therefore better suited to an elementary school. The widely accepted view that differing social classes required differing kinds of schooling could not have been more clearly articulated.44 In these straightened economic circumstances it is hardly surprising that there was little development of the restricted curriculum and authoritarian teaching methods which had evolved in elementary schools during the nineteenth century, even though the advocacy of ‘progresssive’ teaching methods was increasingly fashionable. Perhaps the one local authority that was able to hint at offering something more to the children in elementary schools was Cambridgeshire, where an enterprising Director of Education, Henry Morris, was able to persuade the Board of Education to recognize four village colleges, at Sawston, Bottisham, Linton and Impington. Morris’s ability to attract external funding, at Sawston from the Carnegie Trust and at Impington from the Chivers jam factory, made it possible to attract well-known architects (Impington was designed by Maxwell Fry and Walter Gropius) and to incorporate features absent from almost all other contemporary elementary schools.45 But for the vast majority of those who could afford nothing more than an elementary school education, the crises of the interWar years meant that they were offered only ‘more of the same’. Not for them the advocacy of the former Chief Inspector of Elementary Schools Edmund Holmes, who had called for a complete revision of teaching methods in his 1911 book What is and what might be. 46 This was described by Galton, Simon and Croll as ‘the first striking manifesto of the “progressives” in its total condemnation of the arid drill methods of the contemporary elementary school’.47 Although his thinking became increasingly fashionable among educationalists at this time, its impact was to be felt elsewhere. In summary, the caustic judgement made by R. H. Tawney in 1931 proved to be a not unfair summary of the lot of the poor in respect of schooling. The hereditary curse upon English education is its organisation on lines of social class. ‘An elementary school education’, remarked recently an experienced educational administrator ‘has always meant, and still means, a cheap education. An elementary school textbook means a cheap book … carefully adapted in language and content to a wholly derogatory estimate of the needs

106 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 and powers of the children of a certain element of society, who are supposed not to be capable of the same kind of education as the children of parents who have more money’. The effect … is to poison their soul … smitten by a blight of social inferiority … A special system of schools, reserved for children whose parents have larger bank accounts than their neighbours, exists in no other country on the same scale as in England.48

Gradations of schooling: educating elites between the Wars Meanwhile, the grammar schools and public schools were able to benefit from the upside of the social and economic changes that occurred during the two decades between the Wars. Between 1914 and the outbreak of the Second World War, the number of pupils in secondary schools rose from 130,000 to almost half a million. By 1938, 44% of them were in receipt of free place scholarships. This represented only a small percentage increase since 1914, so it follows also that a far greater number of families were able and willing to pay school fees. But, as Kenneth Lindsay showed in 1926,49 not only were there more fee payers, but the free scholarships went in the main to those already advantaged. One elementary school in Lewisham won as many free scholarships as the whole of Bermondsey put together. There were similar disparities right across the country. Even worse, the numbers refusing free places was greater than those accepting, and in cities such as Bradford and Manchester it was shown that many of the refusals came from the most able. In a nutshell, the ancillary costs of grammar school education, such as uniforms and books, added to the loss of an extra income to the family for a protracted period, led thousands of the less well-off to reject secondary education. Nonetheless, the schools themselves thrived. Several of the most notable, such as Bolton School, King George V (Southport), Manchester Grammar, King Edward’s (Birmingham) and Merchant Taylor’s were able to move to spacious suburban sites and employ well-known architects to design monumental buildings that marked these schools out as offering something very different from elementary education. The social contrast could not have been more stark. These grammar schools all followed the Board of Education’s curriculum policy, first established in 1904 and reiterated in 1917, which stipulated that ‘in order to be recognized, a secondary school must offer … a progressive course of general education’.50 These regulations specified in detail the subjects that must be taught. Although this may have suggested some blurring of the gender contrasts in these schools, the curricular choices of boys and girls at sixth-form level told another story. Arts subjects and languages remained overwhelmingly attractive to girls, and those girls that studied sciences were as likely as not to study biology rather than the ‘hard’ sciences, physics and mathematics, which were dominated by males. The whole ethos of these schools remained dominated by the belief that boys and girls were, by and large, destined for differing life outcomes. Even within this grammar school sector, social class gradations began to appear. In 1919 those endowed schools that were in receipt of public funding, but were at risk of becoming subject to the policies of their local authorities, were given the

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

107

option of receiving their funding direct from central government in return for accepting agreed numbers of free scholars.51 Two hundred and fifty schools claimed this ‘direct grant’ status and the most prestigious joined the HMC. This had two immediate consequences. First, a route by which the sons of the new urban middle classes could aspire to the ancient universities and to the upper echelons of professional employment was more clearly established. Secondly, at a stroke, a massive inducement was given to the deployment and use of intelligence tests to determine who would win scholarships to these schools. Strangely, although the public schools remained ‘the undeniable pinnacle of this educational structure’, they were still, as Rodney Barker pointed out, remote from the political gaze, not through their own efforts, but because ‘before the 1950s the Labour Party shared with Liberals and Conservatives a lack of any desire to make the role or position of the schools a matter of public policy’.52 As Tawney wrote in Secondary education for all, ‘they need not be taken into account in considering how the system can be improved and extended’. As late as 1955, Aneurin Bevan commented that ‘in a class society … it is impossible wholly to prevent class education. Different levels of income will always find expression in different levels of expenditure’.53 Impressive as was this growth in the secondary sector, the governmental commitment to a general education left a massive gap in respect of technical training and vocational work at secondary level. Two compensatory routes appeared. First, in 1926 the Board of Education officially recognized the growing number of Junior Technical Schools that the LEAs were establishing. These taught clerking to boys and secretarial and housewifery skills to girls. By 1938 there were almost 250 such schools at work in England. These schools were full-time, but operated during the day in the premises of the local technical colleges. Sarah King has shown that, in these schools, ‘although it was officially claimed that “the education given to boys and girls is largely similar”, in practice male and female pupils were prepared for very different kinds of employment’.54 The technical colleges themselves provided the route for vast numbers of the new lower-middle class, whose parents could not afford to postpone entry to employment, to get a technical training at night school as part of their apprenticeship and as a route towards a career in industry. They provided the ‘compensatory’ higher education in practical subjects which the universities did not. In a telling speech to the Association of Technical Institutions in 1909 George Beilby had given a prescient analysis of the situation which developed after the War. He said: some of the universities have given us a noble lead in our earlier development. But … we have outgrown that need. I discriminate sharply between the function of the technical college, the training of large numbers of competent craftsmen or professional men, and the development of a smaller class of scientific pioneers.55 By 1931 the numbers bore this out. In total there were 22,000 students at the ‘old’ universities and 15,000 at those established since 1900. The vast majority of

108 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 these were not enrolled on technical courses. At the same time, there were over 100,000 adolescents in continuation schools and approximately a million parttime students enrolled on courses of study at technical colleges. These institutions were offering a new token of ‘respectability’ to the emergent lower-middle class. Yet, in the process they helped confirm the social divisions generated by the English education system, which continued to involve the perceived inferiority of technical education to humane studies, reflected in both social attitudes and funding levels. Even within the university sector, significant social class distinctions were confirmed during the inter-War years. The old universities continued to offer a residential collegiate education, steadily increasing the numbers admitted from the public schools and becoming increasingly available to the sons of the new urban elites who had been educated at the best local grammar schools. Meanwhile, the greater numbers passing through the civic universities were drawn from a lower social stratum. The vast majority were day students commuting to attend their local university. This generated a particular set of problems. It meant that these civic colleges were in the main regional institutions whose students had little spare time from lectures for library work. The introduction of seminars and smaller tutorial groups, signalling a more reflective approach to learning, was one of the developments of this period. This was all part of the civic universities modelling themselves on Oxbridge. This also meant giving greater prominence to Arts subjects that had little to do with local trades and industries. Yet the realities of economic growth meant that departments such as engineering, chemistry and modern languages were themselves obliged to diversify, developing courses focused on particular specialisms or single languages. This spawned new more specialized departments, as well as the beginnings of honours courses as we know them today.56 These universities also became more susceptible to planning. The introduction of both the Committee of Vice Chancellors and the University Grants committee in 1919, linked to the continuing influence after the War of the DSIR, meant that although a strong competitive element was always present, there was a growing coherence and it became possible for the first time to think in terms of a ‘system’ of higher education. Nonetheless, underlying all this was a widespread acceptance that the civic universities catered for a particular social group. As the Principal of Birmingham University, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, put it in his 1928 annual report: ‘the provincial universities, compared with Oxford and Cambridge, attract few who will not have to earn their own living’.57 For Sir Ernest Barker, the ancient universities remained ‘the stronghold of pure learning’ while the new universities were more attuned to the ‘demands of material progress’.58 Some historians, such as Martin Wiener, have seen this as set of values and behaviours which worked to cripple recruitment to industry. His summary of the inter-War years argued that there was a rise in the number of university graduates entering industry, but this occurred more out of necessity than choice. The better students on the whole found more gentlemanly employment, and the number of industrialists’

Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939

109

and engineers’ sons leaving their father’s sort of life continued to exceed the numbers of graduates entering it.59 It is difficult not to conclude that, in respect of higher education, as was the case at every level of education, responses to the tensions and demands of the interWar years served only to confirm well-established social distinctions.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

J. Bourne, Britain and the Great War, 1914–18, Edward Arnold, London, 1989, p. 184. A. Marwick, The explosion of British society, 1914–1970, Macmillan, London, 1971, p. 11. A. J. P. Taylor, English history, 1914–1945, Pelican, London, 1965, pp. 129–30. On this see J. Lewis, Women in England, 1870–1950, Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton, 1984 and A. Marwick, Women at war, 1914–1918, Fontana, London, 1987. A. Crowther, British social policy, 1914–1939, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988, pp. 30–9. A. Marwick, Britain in the century of Total War: war, peace and social change, 1900– 1967, Pelican, London, 1970. G. C. M. M’Gonigle and J. Kirby, Poverty and public health, Gollancz, London, 1936. C. Burt, Report of an investigation upon backward children in Birmingham, Birmingham Education Committee, Birmingham, 1920. See also R. Lowe, ‘Eugenics and education: a note on the intelligence testing movement in England’ in Educational Studies, 6, 1, 1980, pp. 1–8. G. Adami, ‘The true aristocracy’ in Eugenics Review, 14, 1923, pp. 16–25. House of Commons Proceedings, Hansard, 21 July 1931. Ibid. On this see also R. Lowe, ‘Eugenicists, doctors and the quest for national efficiency: an educational crusade, 1900–1939’ in History of Education, 8, 4, December 1989, pp. 293–306, also R. Lowe ‘The educational impact of the Eugenics movement’ in M. Depaepe (ed.), The scientisation of education through empirical research – International Journal of Educational Research, 8, 27, 1997, pp. 647–60 and G. Sutherland, Ability, merit and measurement: mental testing and English education, 1880–1940, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984. R. H. Tawney, Secondary education for all, Labour Party, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1922. Board of Education Departmental Committee on the Cost of School Buildings, Report and abstracts of evidence, HMSO, London, 1911, p. 5. Board of Education, Circular 1051, 2 August 1918. M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, 1870–1970, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, p. 112. B. Simon, The politics of educational reform, 1920–1940, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1974, pp. 37–40. ‘T’, ‘The new direction in education’, Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1924. R. Barker, Education and politics, 1900–1951, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 54. B. Simon, op. cit., pp. 171–87. Report of the Committee appointed to enquire into the position of natural science in the educational system of Great Britain (The Thomson Report), HMSO, London, 1918, p. 8. Report of the Departmental Committee on scholarships and free places (The Young Report), HMSO, London, 1920, p. 47. Ibid., p. 37. The position of Classics in the education system of England (The Crewe Report), HMSO, London, 1921, pp. 267–8. The teaching of English in England (The Newbolt Report), HMSO, London, 1921.

110 Schools fit for heroes? 1914–1939 26 Differentiation of the curriculum for boys and girls respectively in secondary schools (The 1923 Hadow Report), HMSO, London, 1923, p. 132. 27 Ibid., p. 139. 28 Psychological tests of educable capacity and their possible use in the public system of education (The 1924 Hadow Report), HMSO, London, 1924. 29 Ibid., p. 137. 30 Ibid., p. 141. 31 The education of the adolescent (The 1926 Hadow Report), HMSO, London, 1926, pp. 172–4. 32 Primary education (The 1931 Hadow Report), HMSO, London, 1931, p. 93. 33 Report of the Consultative Committee on nursery and infant schools (The 1933 Hadow Report), HMSO, London, 1933, pp. 173–9. 34 Report of the Consultative Committee on secondary education (The Spens Report), HMSO, London, 1938, p. 358. 35 Ibid., p. 371. 36 Ibid., p. 374. 37 Ibid., p. 381. 38 Ibid., pp. xix-xx. 39 House of Commons Proceedings, Hansard, 29 March 1922. 40 B. Simon, op. cit., pp. 118–21. 41 Primary education (The 1931 Hadow Report), HMSO, London 1931, p. 116. 42 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, 1870– 1970, RKP, London, 1977, p. 131. 43 G. C. Stillman and R. C. Cleary, The modern school, Architectural Press, London, 1949, p. 17. 44 Public Record Office, File Ed. 21/39042. 45 Seaborne and Lowe, op. cit., pp. 133–5. 46 E. Holmes, What is and what might be, Constable, London, 1911. 47 M. Galton, B. Simon and P. Croll, Inside the primary school, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980, p. 34. 48 R. H. Tawney, Equality, Unwin, London, 1931, cited in H. Silver, Equality in education, Methuen, London, 1973, pp. 51–5. 49 H. Silver, Equal opportunity in education, Methuen, London, 1973, pp. 28–42. 50 See A. M. Kazamias, Politics, society and secondary education in England, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1966. p. 241. 51 The public schools and the general educational system (The Fleming Report), HMSO, London, 1944, pp. 32–3. 52 R. Barker, Education and politics, 1900–1951, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 99. 53 Barker, op. cit., p. 100. 54 S. King, ‘Technical and vocational education for girls: a study of the central schools of London, 1918–1939’, in P. Summerfield and E. Evans, Technical education and the state since 1850, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, pp. 77–96. 55 R. Lowe, ‘The expansion of higher education in England’ in K. Jarausch, The transformation of higher learning, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1983, p. 54. 56 E. Ives, D. Drummond and L. Schwarz, The first civic university: Birmingham, 1880– 1980, Birmingham University Press, Birmingham, 2000, p. 245. 57 Ibid., p. 265. 58 M. Wiener, English culture and the decline of the industrial spirit, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 133. 59 Ibid., p. 132–3.

6

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ Education, 1939–1979

Schooling during the Second World War ‘The education system is the most effective safeguard of the social stratification we all in our hearts bow down to and worship’.1 This judgement, which appeared in a Times Educational Supplement editorial in 1943, sprang from a perceived threat to the social order that arose from the shock of total war. For many in positions of authority, the economic disruption caused by the War, together with the consequent social transformations and the spirit of national unity and collectivism that Churchill and those around him sought to promote, seemed to have threatening implications. Stability might be ensured by confirming the pre-existing structures of the education system. Such considerations help us to understand why the 1944 Education Act was the only domestic legislation enacted during the War and why it took the form it did. It would be hard to understate the impact for the United Kingdom of involvement in a war that was global in scope (arguably the first truly ‘world’ war). In order to meet its military obligations Britain ran up a massive current account deficit: by 1945 a quarter of Britain’s pre-War wealth had been liquidated. The War effort gave a massive stimulus to the iron and steel, machine tool, vehicle, aircraft, chemical, plastic, electronic and electrical industries. Meanwhile railways, roads and the textile industry suffered severe disinvestment.2 Military conscription introduced in 1939 saw (as had been the case between 1914 and 1918) many women filling jobs left vacant by males. There has been a lively debate among feminist historians about how permanent was the shift in patterns of employment and attitudes towards a gendered workplace.3 The War may be seen as the first to impact directly on Britain’s civilian population, since most industrial towns and cities experienced bombing raids at one time or other. For once, the British experience matched that of its rivals. France, Germany, Italy and Japan all introduced evacuation programmes for schoolchildren. But the British scheme was the most thoroughgoing, with over 800,000 children being relocated to rural areas in the first wave of evacuation in 1939. This evacuation programme was initiated as soon as the War broke out, forcing the Ministry of Health and the Education Department into unprecedented levels of ‘hands on’ planning. Thousands of town children found themselves in rural

112 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ locations with which they were completely unfamiliar. Many village schools had to arrange double and even in some cases triple shifts to cope with the numbers. Meanwhile, town schools stood empty, or were used for War purposes. Many teachers found themselves with no children to teach. By the start of 1940 more than half of the evacuated children had returned home. The direct effect on the provision of schooling was dramatic, but, if anything, the impact on public perceptions was greater, as a growing number of reports appeared in the press of evacuee children who were underfed, unhealthy and lacking toilet training. This fed public perceptions of an urban sub-class. These prejudices were often linked to religious or racial bigotry. It was a confirmation of class distinctions in a particularly painful and direct manner. This experience of the first evacuation doomed two subsequent schemes (both responses to German bombing campaigns) to limited success, although in the summer of 1944 almost a million London children were re-evacuated in response to the V2 rocket attacks. The long-term impact of evacuation has been hotly contested by historians, but, in our context, it seems fair to conclude that one key outcome was that hostility towards urban schoolchildren was one important factor working towards a reduction in the chances of any truly radical restructuring of the post-War education system. It certainly provided a cautionary backdrop to wartime legislation. The War occurred at a moment when, as we have seen, planning was already well-embedded in the governmental psyche. In his influential book, Reconstruction, in 1933 Harold Macmillan conceded that ‘planning is forced upon us’.4 Pressure groups such as Political and Economic Planning, founded in 1931, and the Next Five Years Group (1934) lobbied for greater State intervention in both social and economic policy. From 1936 the Left Book Club became steadily more influential with its monthly release of socialist tracts. It is hardly surprising therefore that the planning for a new educational Jerusalem intensified during the War. In an important recent book, Hsiao-Yuh Ku has highlighted the part played in this debate by key figures such as Fred Clarke, R. H. Tawney, Shena Simon, H. C. Dent and Ernest Simon, who all campaigned for significant change.5 On 4 January 1941 the widely read weekly magazine Picture Post ran a 40 page special edition entitled ‘A plan for Britain’. A. D. Lindsay’s article on education was a thinly disguised plug for the policies of the Labour Party. This heightened expectations, but probably also alerted those on the Right politically to the challenges they faced. It was also widely known in government circles that Beveridge was about to publish his wide-ranging report on social insurance.6 It was in this context that, in July 1941, R. A. Butler was appointed President of the Board of Education. Churchill told him that he was expected to produce ‘powder monkeys for the war effort’,7 but Butler had other aspirations. His appointment in the same month that he became Chairman of the Conservatives’ Post-war Problems Central Committee put him at the heart of domestic policymaking. The issue of fully integrating church schools into the State system led Butler to propose legislation. Churchill warned him that ‘we cannot have party politics in wartime’8 and not to ‘raise the 1902 controversy during the war’.9 Butler wrote later that ‘I decided to disregard what he said and go straight ahead’.10

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 113 But first, the planning process was used by Butler to straightjacket the form that legislation was to take. In October 1941 he commissioned the Consultative Committee, chaired by Cyril Norwood, to report on the curriculum and examinations in secondary schools. This produced, in 1943, a statement that gave a theoretical underpinning to the perceived need for three different types of secondary school, which is worth quoting at length: rough groupings, whatever may be their ground, have in fact established themselves in general educational experience … For example, English education has in practice recognised the pupil who is interested in learning for its own sake, who can grasp an argument or follow a piece of connected reasoning, who is interested in causes, whether on the level of human volition or in the material world, who cares to know how things came to be as well as how they are, who is sensitive to language as expression of thought, to a proof as a precise demonstration, to a series of experiments justifying a principle: he is interested in the relatedness of related things, in development, in structure, in a coherent body of knowledge. He can take a long view [note the gendered language] and hold his mind in suspense … Such pupils, educated by the curriculum commonly associated with the Grammar School, have entered the learned professions or have taken up higher administrative or business posts … the assumption is now made, and with confidence, that for such callings a certain make-up of aptitudes and capacities is necessary, and such make-up may for educational purposes constitute a particular type of mind. Again, the history of technical education has demonstrated the importance of recognising the needs of the pupil whose interests and abilities lie markedly in the field of applied science or applied art … The various kinds of technical school were not instituted to satisfy the intellectual needs of an arbitrarily assumed group of children, but to prepare boys and girls for taking up certain crafts – engineering, agriculture and the like. Nevertheless it is usual to think of the engineer or other craftsman as possessing a particular set of interests or aptitudes by virtue of which he becomes a successful engineer or whatever he may become. Again, there has of late years been recognition, expressed in the framing of curricula and otherwise, of still another grouping of pupils, and another grouping of occupations. The pupil in this group deals more easily with concrete things than with ideas. He may have much ability, but it will be in the realm of facts. He is interested in things as they are; he finds little attraction in the past or in the slow disentanglement of causes or movements. His mind must turn its knowledge or its curiosity to immediate test; and his test is essentially practical.11 This was the group that was soon to be allocated to a third type of school, to be labelled ‘secondary modern’. With these words the tripartism of the Taunton and Spens reports was given a quasi-scientific underpinning and became the new orthodoxy for post-War Britain.

114 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ No sooner had this report appeared than Butler issued a White Paper, Educational reconstruction, to spell out the direction of the legislation he was planning. Its cheerful tone could not disguise the enthusiasm with which Butler was buying in to the Norwood proposals: legislation would be designed to ensure a fuller measure of education and opportunity for young people and to provide means for all of developing the various talents with which they are endowed and so enriching the inheritance of the country whose citizens they are. The new educational opportunities must not, therefore, be of a single pattern. Schools and courses must be available to suit the needs and aptitudes of different types of pupil or student. It is just as important to achieve diversity as it is to ensure equality of educational opportunity.12 Education was now to be reorganized into two stages, primary and secondary, with all pupils entering a secondary school best suited to their aptitudes. In reality this was to become, very quickly, selection on the basis of a test of general intelligence and of the English and Arithmetic quotients pioneered by Eugenicists between the Wars. It was in this context that the 1944 Education Act became the only piece of domestic legislation to reach the Statute Book during the War. The draft legislation, which had already been drawn up by civil servants before Butler arrived at the Education Department, suited his aims well. He used the existence of the Fleming Committee on the public schools, which was yet to report, as a rationale for ignoring these schools in the legislation. Butler boasted later that ‘the first class carriage had been shunted onto an immense siding’.13 State education was to be delivered in two stages, primary and secondary. The local authorities were given until 1947 to draw up plans for the organization of secondary education, taking into account local needs and circumstances. The Dual System was reinforced by insisting that the voluntary schools were drawn fully into the State system, with the churches being given permission to build new schools in locations where there was a strong parental demand. The school leaving age was to be raised immediately to 15, and to 16 as soon as circumstances permitted. The Board of Education was upgraded to a Ministry. The word ‘curriculum’ did not appear in the legislation. Whether this brilliant political dexterity by Butler should be considered, as H. C. Dent put it, ‘the greatest measure of educational advance since 1870, possibly the greatest ever’, or ‘a clever exercise in manipulative politics by a past master of the art … with the aid of a state bureaucracy devoted to highly conservative objectives’, which was Brian Simon’s judgement, remains an open question.14 It was certainly the case, as Paul Addison pointed out, that there was a direct political motive in promoting education at this time, namely, ‘the eclipse of Beveridge by a political measure’.15 Consequently, it became inevitable that the post-War implementation of the Act would be in the class-ridden mould of what had gone before. Thus, by 1945, Butler was able to boast that his legislation made Britain educationally ‘one nation, not two’.16 But the situation was probably captured more

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 115 accurately by a memorandum he received from his Permanent Secretary, Sir Maurice Holmes: it was the clear intention of Parliament that the net of secondary education should be cast more widely into the lower income scales … that merit, whatever that may be, should be the test … It was not the intention, of course, that all this should come to pass at one stroke, nor is it clear that it can ever wholly come to pass. Nevertheless, the goal is further ‘democratisation’ (is there a decent word for this?): whether the goal is a worthy one or not – this is of course arguable – we are bound to proceed towards it.17 Civil servants and administrators were poised to put the brakes on any post-War attempts to completely restructure the education system. When the 1945 election returned a large number of new Labour MPs who had themselves been through grammar school and saw no case to destroy the ladder by which they had ascended, the die was cast. Whatever precise form it took, England’s education system would continue to separate children on lines of social class and gender. ‘Merit’ was now to be used as the criterion for favouring those who were already, in one way or another, advantaged.

‘The search for freedom from want’:18 the post-War years The aftermath of the War involved severe economic problems. The dislocation of the economy could not be rectified immediately, partly because demobilization of the armed forces took several years. There were fuel shortages (particularly during the hard winter of 1947); rationing of key commodities and foodstuffs remained necessary into the 1950s; by 1948 it proved necessary to accept American funding to promote recovery in the form of the Marshall Plan. Even worse, Britain’s central role in the War effort and its imperial history left it with huge military and overseas commitments, which economic historians such as Sidney Pollard have argued were a key reason for the slow growth of the post-War economy and the underinvestment in industry and commerce. This difficult context for the implementation of the 1944 Act was made worse by the sudden and unforeseen rise in the birth rate immediately after the War, a trend that was to prove semi-permanent, and which placed extra demands on the provision of school places. All of this pre-empted a major restructuring of the education system, even had there been the political will. Nonetheless, by 1950 a current account surplus of £297 million had been achieved and a relatively long period of increasing affluence was under way. For much of the 1950s and 1960s the two major political parties were broadly in agreement on both economic and social policy (described in the popular press as ‘Butskellism’19), and this involved a shared commitment to a mixed economy involving close planning and oversight by the State. But this all took place against the backdrop of a series of balance of trade crises which dominated policymaking

116 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ and led inexorably to the harsher climate of the 1970s, following Wilson’s devaluation of the pound in 1967, and culminating in an IMF bailout in 1976. Despite this roller coaster of economic growth and policy, it is possible to discern several trends which determined the realities of schooling during these years. First, the readiness of governments (of whatever political hue) to plan various aspects of social policy, which had become imperative during the War, gave way to detailed economic planning when the Conservatives returned to power in 1951. No service was more susceptible to this trend than education, and the period from 1939 to 1979 can be seen as the high point of educational planning. One result was that more new schools were built than during any comparable period. This was only possible because of the spirit of collectivism which had developed from shared suffering during the War and which, for a while at least, enabled politicians to appeal to common national interests. In the field of education this meant a 40-year period when it appeared relatively uncontroversial, part even of the natural order, to plan for a coherent national system of schooling. The second major trend that impacted on education enormously and that forced educational administrators to plan (in the process putting the local education authorities at the heart of policymaking) was the unrelenting onset of suburbanization. Following the New Towns Act of 1946, a total of 26 new towns were built. The stark fact that those who were relocated from the cities into the new towns were drawn almost exclusively from particular social groups had massive implications for the new schools that were needed. These became the venues in which the children of a new, emerging post-War lower middle class were schooled. There could hardly be any clearer example of schooling as a form of social stratification. Meanwhile, the flight of increasing numbers who could afford owner occupation and a commuting lifestyle into rural locations meant a steadily growing expansion of the villages, and ultimately a complete transformation of rural England. All of this involved a massive house-building programme, symbolized by Harold Macmillan’s announcement of a target of 300,000 new homes a year when he became Minister of Housing in 1951. It is impossible to make sense of educational developments in post-War England without bearing these developments in mind. In 1958 the Harvard economist J. K. Galbraith published The affluent society. Although his book focused on the growing gap between the rich and the poor in North America, it had resonances in Britain where, despite the relatively slow growth of the economy compared to other industrialized nations, full employment meant that increasing numbers found themselves unprecedentedly well off. The welfare reforms introduced by Attlee’s post-War government, most notably National Insurance and free universal health care through the NHS, greatly reduced the risks of falling into poverty. This led inexorably to heightened expectations, a growing demand for owner occupation, consumer durables, leisure pursuits, car ownership and all the trappings of affluence. It was inevitable that, over time, this would extend to greater expectations of schooling and a greater say in what went on in schools. This was a long, slow process, but it began with the coming of affluence.

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 117 It is important, too, to point out another significant trend of these post-War years, and that was a change in patterns of immigration. Full employment meant a labour shortage, and the ways in which Britain met it were to have major long-term implications for education. The well-established pattern of Irish manual workers entering the United Kingdom to find work intensified after the War. Small but significant communities of Poles developed after the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act, which offered citizenship to a quarter of a million Poles who had fought with the Allies. Many immigrants, of various nationalities, were relocated in Britain from the Displaced Persons Camps that had appeared across Europe. Schemes such as this and independent migration resulted in Italians becoming the fifth largest immigrant community in Britain by 1961. After the War, recruitment teams were sent to several Commonwealth countries in an attempt to meet the labour shortage. This campaign was particularly successful in the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies. All this meant that the post-War education system developed against the backdrop of a series of demographic challenges which, if not entirely unprecedented, were on a scale not known previously. These striking population transformations facilitated not only economic expansion but a restructuring of the workplace that made its own demands of schooling. Two trends stand out. First, there was a further shift towards the tertiary sector of the economy. Immediately after the War, 9% of employees in the UK worked in the primary sector in jobs such as mining, fishing and farming. By the late 1970s this figure had fallen to 3%. There was also a small but not insignificant fall in the percentage employed in the secondary (productive) industries, from 37% to 33%. Meanwhile, those employed in the service sector rose from just over half of the labour force to two-thirds. Secondly, and also pregnant with significance for schooling, there were changes in the pattern of female employment. Circumstances dictated the forms it would take. On the one hand an acute labour shortage opened up opportunities for women to enter the workplace, and smaller families meant fewer years during which women were focused exclusively on child rearing. But, on the other hand, it remained widely understood (even by feminists such as Myrdal and Klein20) that childrearing and the management of the home remained the wife’s responsibility. It was therefore inevitable that the growing number of females at work involved much part-time employment and an unreadiness to commit to senior positions which would not allow flexible use of time. This fitted precisely with the other reality of these years, which was that, as the size and scale of many companies grew, they remained hierarchical in their power structures, or as Elbaum and Lazonik put it, ‘adapting only poorly … In Britain institutional structures did not break down under the pressure of new economic imperatives’.21 This particular aspect of the ‘British disease’ meant that after the War employers continued to look to the schools to provide males and females qualified to enter workplaces that remained gendered and hierarchical. Underlying all this were familiar ideological tensions, which, despite the spirit of collectivism generated by the War, had never quite gone away and which remain with us today in a particularly sharp form. Already, in the years immediately following the War, the drive to establish universal secondary education and school

118 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ buildings that were fit to house the growing number of schoolchildren was taking place against an influential background chorus from those anxious to preserve the advantages of the upper and middle classes. John Garrett, headmaster of Bristol Grammar School, and Eric James at Manchester were among the most vocal of the many grammar school teachers who were deeply concerned that universal secondary schooling would mean a permanent dilution of their work. Within the universities Geoffrey Bantock, at Leicester, was equally vociferous. Their thinking chimed with that of the group of Conservative Members of Parliament who founded, in the early 1950s, the Fighting Fund for Freedom, set up to combat what they saw as the threat of communist thinking in education. This British version of McCarthyism had four central targets for its rhetoric. The first was the perceived threat to the grammar schools arising from universal secondary education. The particular object of their hostility was the common secondary school. A second, but hardly less muted, concern was what they saw as the threat from progressive or child-centred approaches to teaching. A third preoccupation was the appointment of known communists to teaching posts, in both universities and schools. And underlying all was an appeal to an imagined, preindustrial England, largely rural, and with a common people among whom craftsmanship and the medieval craft guilds were universally respected. They saw urbanization since the industrial revolution as having destroyed this, and elite educational institutions for the more privileged as the only means to preserve what was left and to pass on the ‘high culture’ of the Renaissance and scientific innovation to future generations. There is not space here to dilate on these themes (they have already been well illustrated22), but they need to be borne in mind as important elements in the debate on education into the 1950s.

The primary concern: building a new sector of education The terms of the 1944 legislation meant that every sector of the education system had to be reconfigured. But, for every age group, this reconfiguration took place in a context which meant that, whatever the aspirations of those on the Left politically, the outcome was the maintenance, rather than the diminution, of social class contrasts, even though many who lived through it and numerous subsequent commentators have claimed that the opposite was the case. Under the terms of the Act the old elementary sector was re-designated as ‘primary’. But the fact that secondary education now became universal, together with the realization that the grammar schools would be admitting significant numbers of 11+ pupils whose parents had not themselves attended secondary school, led to a swift upturn in demand for places in the fee-paying preparatory schools. These educated pupils to the age of 13, almost all with aspirations to go on to a private secondary school of one sort or another. Although the Fleming Report had advocated a blurring of the distinction between the private and State sectors, proposing two schemes for the admission of non-fee paying students to private schools, the reality was that, for all but a few, the public and private sectors remained two entirely separate spheres. By buying a place at a preparatory school

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 119 (which offered a broader curriculum, smaller classes and usually better accommodation, as well as preparing their pupils for the 13+ common entry examination for the major public schools) parents were avoiding the risks associated with the 11+ examination that now became universal in State schools, and, hardly surprisingly, their waiting lists were quickly filled after the War. Butler’s determination that the private sector would remain untouched by legislation was confirmed, rather than challenged, by both Ellen Wilkinson and George Tomlinson, Attlee’s two Ministers of Education. Tomlinson reassured the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools at their 1950 conference that they need ‘feel no qualms’ about the Government’s intentions towards them.23 So, high on the list of unintended consequences, the 1944 Act resulted in the maintenance and stabilization of the rift between the private and State sectors. Secure in the knowledge that they could continue to operate, the number of preparatory schools grew steadily during the post-War years. Even within the State sector, the major changes forced on the new primary schools ensured that they became unwitting agents in the preservation of social class contrasts. First, there was a frenzy of school building to meet the post-War baby boom and the demands of suburbanization, which, in combination, intensified the crisis generated by the fact that over 5,000 primary schools had suffered war damage. The experience gained by having to build accommodation for armies on the move towards the end of the War was now applied to school design, as young planners with wartime experience were appointed to fast-growing local authority architects’ departments. Prefabrication became the watchword of the day. George Tomlinson, as Minister of Education, encouraged this with his announcement of the ‘Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School Age’ (HORSA). By the time Labour left office in 1951, 7,000 new classrooms and over 900 new primary schools had been built under this scheme, using flat-packed concrete and wood walls and rooves of corrugated asbestos. Although intended to be temporary, a small number remain in use today. A few more permanent buildings did begin to appear during the 1940s. In Whitby, for example, the new County Primary School, built in 1949, followed the finger plan designs that had been pioneered between the Wars, with classrooms set along open corridors.24 Within a few years, though, a more imaginative approach to school design was attributable to the initiative of the local education authorities, overseen by a Ministry of Education determined to exercise close control. In 1948 a Development Group was set up within the Architects’ Department of the new Ministry. This recruited leading LEA architects such as Stirrat Marshall and David Medd from Hertfordshire and later Dan Lacey from Nottinghamshire. These pioneers quickly made a new kind of primary school a reality.25 From 1957 prefabrication took on an industrial scale as Nottinghamshire joined with four neighbouring counties to set up the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme (CLASP) to collaborate in bulk buying of materials and shared use of building designs. It was the first of several such collaborations. The overall result was that the primary schools built in the 30 years following the War contrasted in both design and classroom organization with the old elementary sector.

120 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ Tables began to replace desks arranged in rows, and specialist areas for wet and dry play and children’s activities also began to be seen. But if we pause to reflect that the vast majority of these were new builds in rural and semi-rural locations, and that of the 23,000 primary schools operating in 1962 almost 18,000 had been built before the First World War, we realize that suburbanization meant not simply a new way of life, but a completely different experience of primary schooling for those lucky enough to benefit. Even more telling, it was in these schools particularly that real attempts could be made to implement the spirit of the 1931 Hadow Report by working towards a ‘child-centred’ education with less formal classroom arrangements. These attempts to transform the education of the under-12s in the primary sector were underpinned by new Building Regulations, which, in 1945, for the first time prescribed national standards. These doomed the new primary sector to inferior status, since class sizes and staffing ratios compared badly with what was required at secondary level. But they did attempt to ensure minimum standards. For example, in a primary school of 160 pupils at least 4,280 square feet of teaching accommodation must be provided. In a secondary school of 150 pupils, the equivalent figure was 8,549 square feet. Even these rather austere limits had to be reduced in view of the economic situation in 1951 and then again in 1954.26 When a system of cost place limits was also introduced in 1949 similar contrasts between the primary and secondary sectors were imposed.27 Even worse, within a few years, the challenge of transferring pupils at 11+ to three different kinds of secondary school was casting its own shadow over the new primary schools. As early as 1921 the eugenicist, Cyril Burt, had been advocating tests of ‘educable capacity’.28 As Brian Simon has shown, early versions of streaming were already widespread in elementary schools before the Second World War.29 After the War almost all of the primary schools that were large enough established separate streams for pupils of differing ability.30 Worse, for many the curriculum was focused, particularly for older pupils, on drilling in the narrow range of subjects needed for the 11+. Ambitious parents coached their children at home to ensure that they were ‘successful’ in what originally had been claimed to be a diagnostic examination. Children were offered rewards for ‘passing’ and gaining entry to grammar school. In 1950, the author’s reward was a gleaming new two-wheeler bicycle with Derailleur gears. For me, another outcome was that almost all of my close friends were told that they were less intelligent and so would go to a different secondary school. I then lost touch with them completely. In this way the new primary schools became a key part of the mechanism for sorting ‘sheep’ from ‘goats’, a phrase drawn from the Bible,31 but all too often heard in that context. When I write in conclusion of children becoming victims, as much as beneficiaries, of both the education system and of parental aspirations it is phenomena such as these that I am referring to. Yet, despite these drawbacks, this period is remembered as one in which ‘progressive’ ideas on the education of primary schoolchildren were widely canvassed and became, by the 1960s, the current orthodoxy. In 1944 the Board of Education’s suggestions for teachers in elementary schools stressed the importance of ‘activity and experience, rather than knowledge to be acquired and facts to be

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 121 32

taught’. In the years that followed, several educationalists became the high priests of this doctrine, notably Mary Atkinson, W. K. Richmond, Lillian de Lissa, Nancy Catty, J. C. Gagg and M. V. Daniel. The restructuring of the Schools Inspectorate after the War saw Christian Schiller appointed as Staff Inspector for Junior Education. This role placed him ‘at the centre of a most influential network of promoters of progressivism’.33 Within the local authorities Alec Clegg in the West Riding, Stewart Mason in Leicestershire and Edith Moorhouse in Oxfordshire saw to it that the schools under their care reflected these ideas in practice. In 1949 a pamphlet published by the Ministry and authored by A. L. Stone, a littleknown Birmingham primary school head teacher, advocating dance as the core of the primary school curriculum, sold over 60,000 copies.34 In 1966 the publication of Children and their primary schools by the Central Advisory Council threw more weight behind the movement. All of this came to fruition in the 1967 Plowden Report.35 This Report has been described as the ‘high water mark of progressivism in English primary education’,36 but it was also summarized by Peter Cunningham as being ‘the last great education policy statement by an anti-democratic consensus among the elite of educational policy makers’.37 It is hard to be precise about the impact of this advocacy on classroom practice. The Initial Teaching Alphabet, introduced in 1961, was widely used and remained popular until the late 1970s. Dienes Rods and Sterne Apparatus became a common feature of the primary classroom, used to teach number. The introduction of threeyear courses of teacher training in 1960, together with a vast expansion of the colleges in the late 1960s and the introduction of the B.Ed. degree at the end of the decade, meant that a generation of young teachers was made familiar with the thinking of Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget. From 1964 the Nuffield Foundation disseminated research findings on the teaching of mathematics, science and modern languages at primary level. One outcome was the movement to de-stream the primary school, pressed most forcefully by journals such as Forum. While the ‘mood music’ was clear throughout these years, what is less certain is the extent to which practising teachers implemented these ideas in the classroom, given the insistent pressure from parents for ‘success’ at 11+ (although this became more muted in the 1960s and 1970s in those areas which committed to comprehensive secondary education). Parents also showed a growing readiness to criticize educational practices that differed from those they had known. For many of them, teaching through drilling and memorization, learning the times tables and focusing on the three Rs remained the desirable objectives. It was therefore inevitable that there could not have been more than a partial transformation of the new primary sector at this time, partly because of the immediate practical problems the sector faced, and partly as a result of the fact that there remained, throughout this period, a powerful minority lobby which was deeply suspicious of any abandonment of the ‘traditional’ elementary school curriculum and teaching methods. These immediate problems included an ongoing issue of teacher supply that had dire consequences, particularly in terms of class size. The Times Educational Supplement reported in 1948 that most primary school classes were too large, adding that ‘in classes of this kind the indulgence of free activity makes teaching

122 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ a nightmare’.38 The expansion of teacher education into the 1960s and 1970s did alleviate this situation, but at a cost. That cost was the perpetuation of the gendering of the workforce in primary schools. Since the growing university sector continued to accept a majority of male students, many able female students were attracted instead to the expanding colleges of education. The outcome was that throughout this period the primary sector continued to operate with a predominantly female labour force, with senior positions usually being filled by males, largely as a result of many women continuing to see employment in a caring profession such as teaching as something that was compatible with their roles as mother and homemaker. Conscious of the demands of raising a family, thousands chose not to apply for senior positions. The government campaign during the 1960s to attract married women back into primary school teaching followed the publication of a report in 1961, which showed that over a half of female teachers left the primary sector within five years of starting their career to raise their own family.39 In these ways the primary sector became, inadvertently, a powerful reinforcement of well-established gender stereotypes. In 1950 Geoffrey Bantock used the Times Educational Supplement to attack child-centred approaches to teaching.40 Nineteen years later the Black Papers began to appear, and what had been a minority view in the educational press became a sustained chorus. By the 1970s the tide was perceptibly turning against progressivism. In 1976 the Auld Enquiry into the William Tyndale School (where progressive teaching had encountered a parental backlash) focused the public mind on what were to become the two major issues: namely, how far should teachers be free to determine the curriculum, and how much of the energies of a primary school should be devoted to teaching the core curriculum of reading, writing and arithmetic.41 At almost the same time the widely publicized Bennett Report42 came out in favour of didactic teaching methods in primary schools and the Ruskin Speech gave the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, the opportunity to make it clear that the time had come for Government to take a closer interest in what went on in schools. Brian Simon suggested that these were responses to a revolution that never occurred,43 and he may well have been right. Nonetheless, these developments were harbingers of a sea change in educational policymaking,44 and one of the things to go would be the freedom of primary school teachers to experiment in the classroom, whether or not they had ever truly done so in the years since 1945. In conclusion, to return to the central argument of this book, in 1978 the overall impact of these changes was reviewed in an HMI report on primary education in England.45 Reviewing the performance of children in schools in contrasting areas it concluded that ‘that the average reading scores for 9 and 11 year old classes and mathematics scores for 11 year old classes were significantly lower in inner city schools than for classes in rural and “other urban” schools’. What this signified was that the post-War reconstruction of the schooling of children below 11 years of age had done little if anything to alleviate the chronic problem that the accident of birth was the key determinant of educational success. It also signalled an increasing readiness to see the core curriculum as the main focus of public debate on primary schooling.

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 123

The false dawn of comprehensivization: secondary schooling, 1945–1979 For many living through it at the time, the coming of comprehensive schools appeared to be the signal of a new order, with the changes taking place appearing to be permanent, and promising far greater equity and social cohesion. The reality was otherwise. The closer they came to bringing about a fairer distribution of opportunity, and threatening the primacy of the grammar schools, the more these schools sealed their own fate. But this is only one element in the complex story of secondary schooling in the years following the War. First, the immediate aftermath of War saw a determined effort to implement tripartism. Obliged to submit their plans for secondary schooling by 1947, the vast majority of local authorities came up with one or another version of a system offering three routes to pupils at 11+, although, as David Crook has shown,46 a significant number of these proposals involved some limited form of comprehensivization. The result was that, by the time Labour left office in 1951, there were hardly any comprehensive schools at work in England. For the vast majority, the Eleven Plus examination led to either a grammar or a modern school. Even worse, the system carried its own massive flaws. The number of grammar school places available in different authorities varied widely; in Westmoreland 42% of the school population entered grammar school during the 1950s but in Gateshead, at the other extreme, the figure was only 9%.47 Facilities to provide the planned technical education were scarce, and many technical schools were forced to operate on the premises of existing technical colleges. Since there was no time, nor were there resources, to build new technical schools, the numbers admitted to such schools were painfully low. Official policy placed no exact figures on what percentage of students were ‘suited’ to each type of school, so no strategy existed to prevent this happening. Nor was the context ideal. The raising of the school leaving age to 15 in 1947 was met by the emergency training scheme, whose products (many of them recently demobilized ex-servicemen) were widely seen as best suited for employment in the secondary modern schools. Even this was not enough to meet the shortfall in teachers, and the outcome was that, from the start, the secondary modern schools had far higher staff/student ratios than the selective schools, and this disparity was soon adopted as part of official policy. The shortage of specialist teachers of technological subjects meant that in many parts of the country what developed was effectively a bipartite system, with pupils entering either a grammar or a modern school, with one or the other offering some kind of ‘technical’ route. In this way, unthinkingly, the nation established a system of secondary schooling whose only sure outcome was the separation of social classes. As early as 1951, the Times Educational Supplement was reduced to the dismissive conclusion that ‘what the secondary modern can do is to help their pupils in their difficulties’.48 One correspondent observed that the secondary modern was the place where ‘material for leisure is provided, since these boys and girls are not to be trained for any of the significant activities of society’.49 These may be

124 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ fairly extreme examples, but it is certainly the case that pupils in these schools suffered from patronizing attitudes from the off. This was all further complicated by the fact that much expert opinion was scathing about the implementation of the Norwood proposals the moment the new system was up and running, as has been shown in detail elsewhere.50 Even Cyril Burt could see little sense in a system that classified children ‘according to qualitative mental types rather than … general intelligence’.51 This scepticism was reinforced during the 1950s from within the ranks of educational psychologists by researchers such as Alice Heim,52 who began to doubt the whole concept of general intelligence, and from without by critics such as Brian Simon, who was, and remained, prominent among those who favoured and lobbied for a common secondary schooling.53 As these reservations became more general, local authorities began to experiment with comprehensive education. One catalyst of this was the damage done to existing schools by wartime bombing raids. So cities such as Coventry, Bristol and Middlesex, which had suffered badly during the Blitz, all became venues for early experiments in comprehensivization. Also, suburbanization was beginning to present the local authorities with a problem of secondary school supply on the periphery of the towns and cities, where no secondary school had previously existed at a moment when they did not have the resources to build two new schools. The problem was made sharper by the fact that, in locations such as Wolverhampton, overspill suburban development was taking place outside the boundaries of the borough but within the catchment of a Tory-controlled local authority. In this case the Staffordshire LEA opened three new comprehensive schools in 1955 in new fast-growing suburbs on the periphery of the fast-growing town. This is why several of the earliest comprehensive schools were built under a Conservative Government in parts of the country under Conservative control, despite this being no part of Conservative education policy. It also helps explain why many politicians were keen to see these schools as ‘experimental’, loath to legislate for wholesale change and perhaps even keen that they might be seen to fail so as not to threaten existing elite schools. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the steadily growing number of local authorities reorganizing on comprehensive lines was matched by clear trends in educational research. First, the emergence of the sociology of education as a discipline in its own right, increasingly central to teacher education courses as they strove for academic respectability, was marked by the appearance of influential texts. None was more significant than Jackson and Marsden’s study of education and the working class,54 tracking first-generation grammar school entrants in a northern town and arguing that those who benefited most tended to be drawn from respectable working class homes, which afforded them several advantages before they even commenced schooling. At much the same time, psychologists such as Joseph McVicker Hunt were stressing the importance of environment rather than genetic endowment in intellectual development.55 In these ways the underpinnings of the fixed intelligence lobby, and the arguments of those who claimed it could be measured fairly, came under severe attack.

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 125 The drift towards comprehensivization was reinforced by government policy when Labour returned to power in the 1960s. Circular 10/65 spelt out ‘the Government’s declared objective to end selection at eleven plus and to eliminate separatism in secondary education’,56 requesting all local authorities to submit their plans for the reorganization of their secondary schools. It should be remembered that this was not mandatory. Several authorities had still failed to comply when Labour left office in 1970, and the incoming Conservative administration immediately issued Circular 10/70 to rescind it (even so, Margaret Thatcher went on to become the Minister of Education who closed the greatest number of grammar schools as proposals from the local authorities for comprehensive reorganization continued to pour in during her period in office). Further, the 179 Direct Grant schools that received their funding from central government remained aloof from these schemes. So, for example, in Bradford, a local authority keen to introduce universal comprehensive secondary schooling, could do nothing about Bradford Grammar School, which was not under its control. Thus, what emerged in reality was never more than a patchwork of comprehensive schools, albeit with some clear patterns emerging. This meant that the word ‘comprehensive’ came to mean different things in different settings. In many rural locations it did come to mean a community school, although there was hardly any part of England where aspirant families did not facilitate commuting for their children either to attend prestigious urban grammar schools, often many miles away, or to attend private and public schools as boarders. In the Home Counties this kind of commuting to a preferred secondary school was made easier by the extensive system of public transport. Within the larger conurbations, the comprehensive school was largely the school of the growing suburbs, but even here there were subtle but important gradations. The West Midlands offers a not untypical example. As a regular visitor during the 1970s to a wide range of secondary of schools across this region, I became aware of the social distinctions which were being generated by comprehensive schools in differing locations. By the late 1970s, the middle suburbs were largely served by comprehensive schools, although the surviving system of local grammar schools meant that no school served all of the pupils in its locality. The pupils of these comprehensive schools were mostly drawn from lower middle-class homes with parents in minor professional or skilled manual employment. Large overspill housing estates on the periphery of the conurbation were also provided with custom built comprehensive schools, but since housing policy resulted in the tenants of these estates being predominantly (often almost exclusively) white unskilled manual workers, they quickly became seen as schools with a particular cachet and little chance of building viable sixth forms. Meanwhile, in the inner city, it became possible to identify eight or ten comprehensive schools which, also as a direct result of housing policy, catered almost exclusively for children from ethnic minority backgrounds (mostly Afro-Caribbean). In a fuller account of this process elsewhere I described this as a form of educational apartheid.57 At the same time, two local townships, Sutton Coldfield and Solihull, confirmed their middle-class status, with higher house prices, and the comprehensive schools in

126 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ these locations had a quite different air, having much the ‘feel’ for a visitor of a grammar school. This was reflected in the performance of their pupils in external examinations. The picture was further complicated by the fact that some of the east-central suburbs became the prime location for families with origins in Pakistan, with a few schools in these suburbs reflecting that. Finally, as a complicating factor, aspirant professionals and business people with origins in the subcontinent increasingly targeted the grammar schools, particularly the two most prestigious, so that by the late 1970s the entry to these schools was not an accurate reflection of the ethnic composition of the region (if it ever had been!). In this complex situation, it was impossible to devise a single definition of comprehensive schooling. Rather, the development of secondary schooling reflected accurately, and in some ways may have helped to perpetuate and exacerbate, social distinctions. What makes these developments even more surprising is the fact that they took place against a background of ‘integrationist’ policies, as central government became increasingly sensitive to the impact of immigration. Circular 7/65 was issued by the Labour Government after a year in power to encourage local authorities to implement ‘dispersal’ policies, to pre-empt more than a third of any school’s intake being drawn from immigrant families. Ultimately, only a dozen local authorities complied, although some, such as Southall, where, by the mid-1970s 2,900 children of primary school age were being ‘bussed’ for their education, made thoroughgoing efforts to comply. Elsewhere, as in Birmingham, integration was encouraged by sending children to their neighbourhood schools but devoting significant resources to assimilatory policies, in this case the employment of over 100 full-time teachers at the Centre for Teaching English as a Second Language, so that newly arrived immigrant children could be given intensive language teaching. Following the 1967 Plowden report, the Government sponsored Education Priority Areas to devote extra resources to deprived areas. Equally, the commitment to assimilation was far from universally accepted. What made the issue particularly controversial was the racialization of the problem by psychologists such as Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck. In 1969, Jensen’s paper in the Harvard Educational Review 58 argued that compensatory programmes were necessarily doomed to fail since intelligence was largely hereditary, going on to claim that the black population was innately intellectually inferior to the white. This deeply racist claim caused widespread ripples, notably in Britain where his ideas were picked up and reinforced by his friend and erstwhile mentor, H. J. Eysenck. Eysenck, writing in the second Black Paper in the autumn of 1969, alongside Cyril Burt and Richard Lynn, stopped short of explicit support for Jensen’s racism, but did use his arguments about heredity to attack comprehensivization, de-streaming (currently very fashionable in comprehensive schools), and what Eysenck called ‘The rise of the mediocracy’.59 Both Burt and Eysenck were to be accused later of falsifying their research evidence, but their involvement at this time helped sustain the support of selective education and of grammar schools, and to undermine integrationist policies, two themes which were to dominate political discourse during the Thatcher years.

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 127 A further complication was that these years witnessed a steadily accelerating drift towards co-education at secondary level, although it is difficult to identify a clear pattern. Most of the grammar schools were single sex, and remained so, although more than a few of the municipal secondary schools that had been founded at the start of the century were mixed. Significantly, almost without exception, these were seen as the least prestigious choice for pupils who had qualified for a grammar school place. Thus gender played a central role in determining the status hierarchy of grammar schools. Most, but not all, of the secondary modern schools were mixed, as were almost all of the new comprehensive schools. But as local authorities tinkered with existing schools in the 1970s, a few singlesex comprehensive schools were reorganized to admit both sexes. By the mid1970s even some of the public schools had begun to admit girls, usually initially at sixth-form level. But whether this trend marked a levelling up of opportunity is open to question. There was a background chorus that continued to hint at the need for girls’ education to differ from that of boys. The 1959 Crowther Report was typical, referring to the majority of girls whose ‘direct interest in dress, personal appearance and problems of human relations should be given a central place in their education’.60 In the same vein the Newsom Report had written of ‘the girl having less eager curiosity than the boy’ in science lessons.61 It was becoming increasingly clear at this time that girls were ahead of boys at various points in their schooling, but continued to underperform in external examinations and were more likely to leave early. To counter this, many local authorities continued to award more grammar school places to boys than to girls. Others marked girls down in the Eleven Plus examination so that they did not monopolize entry to grammar schools. Those schools that were coeducational made sure that there were separate curricular tracks for boys and girls. Within the classroom, in mixed schools, it was almost universal for boys and girls to sit separately, usually by their own volition. In mixed schools, headships and senior teaching posts remained monopolized by males. Writing on this issue in 1997, I commented that ‘what seems to have been developing during this period was a system which was … more effective than the one it replaced at imposing on pupils a gendered view of their roles’.62 In hindsight, I see little reason to modify that judgement. At the very moment that the feminist movement was developing a new cutting edge and coming to see patriarchy and male domination of power as key issues, schools and colleges in England continued to act as a drag on any progress towards real equality between the sexes. Meanwhile, the three major Commissions that investigated the public schools at this time (Fleming, 1944; Newsom, 1968; and Donnison, 1970) all called for closer integration of the private and public sectors and all went largely disregarded. In consequence, the private sector, whose rolls had fallen during the War, continued to grow steadily: in 1950 it had a quarter of a million pupils; by 1980 the figure had reached 522,000, constituting 6% of the total school population.63 It will be seen that the development of secondary schooling during this period was too complex to permit of any simplistic summary. Texts such as Halfway there, published in 1970,64 appear to suggest that an inexorable transformation

128 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ was under way. The appearance of the Black Papers makes it clear that this was at best contested, and that attempts to democratize educational opportunity were controversial and to some eyes counterproductive. Much writing about secondary schooling at this time depicted this as some kind of ‘golden age’ when the tripartite sharing of power between central government, local authorities and the schools themselves was, at last, bringing about significant reform and generating a real political consensus.65 In 1964 the Schools Council was established as ‘a hopeful act of reconciliation between central and local government and teachers’.66 During the 1960s a sudden burst of sociological interest in the public schools appeared superficially to suggest that they were finding new ways to integrate more closely with the State sector.67 But the reality was that they continued as a separate system whose products were enormously advantaged in accessing the major universities and professions, as well as dominating the boardrooms of British business. The new secondary sector did play a major role in promoting economic change during the post-War years, projecting a generation of young people into a wide range of quickly expanding professional employments that would have been beyond their parents’ own aspirations. But all the evidence suggests that those who benefited most were already in significant ways advantaged before they entered primary school, and many of the senior posts in the major professions remained out of reach to all but a very few as new career hierarchies developed. Central to this was the restriction of thousands of females to ancillary or junior roles in a gendered workplace, with homemaking still seen by many as the primary female role.

‘For all those who are qualified by ability and attainment … and who wish to do so’:68 the post-War expansion of higher education The determination to provide an appropriate higher education for all who were qualified and who wished to pursue it (better known as ‘the Robbins principle’), which set the tone of the major report published in December 1963, provides a useful insight into post-War trends in higher education. The period from 1945 to 1979 saw steady, unremitting growth of the higher education sector, an unprecedented degree of governmental planning and far greater systematization than had previously been the case, and this involved a drift from exclusivity towards the expectation of much wider participation in higher education, as Robbins foresaw. But this all took place within a very recognizable hierarchical pattern, and the reasons for this are not far to seek. The War itself had two major implications for the universities. First, conscription meant that from 1941 there were virtually no males in Arts faculties, and this reinforced the long-term gendering of the departments concerned. Secondly, the waiving of conscription for students studying certain sciences enabled these departments to continue to function almost normally and to remain a largely male domain. After 1941 bursaries covering the full cost of teaching and residence were available to study radio, engineering and chemistry. Co-operation between Government, manufacturers and a few universities gave the Allies a decisive edge in the

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 129 fields of radar and nuclear technology. This was based on the expertise of small research teams around a few individuals, notably John Cockroft at the Cavendish Laboratory, Frederick Lindemann at the Clarendon (appointed as Churchill’s scientific adviser during the War, Lindeman had attracted several leading refugee researchers from Nazi Germany in a bid to enable his Oxford laboratory to rival the Cavendish at Cambridge), Marcus Oliphant and Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham, and James Chadwick and Otto Frisch at Liverpool.69 The extent to which this group facilitated the victory of the Allies is arguable; what is clear is that they offered a model to politicians of how Government might seek to promote technological development through higher education after the War. What followed was an unprecedented degree of control and planning of higher education in Britain. This process began before the War ended with the appointment of the Percy Committee to report on higher technological education. It called for the establishment of a National Council of Technology and regional advisory councils, as well as the selection of ‘at least one institution … as a centre for post-graduate study of industrial administration’.70 It also lamented the performance of the public schools, ‘whose bias is often overwhelmingly against the technical professions, and for most of which the Universities of the industrial Midlands and North hardly exist as possible places of education for their scholars’.71 The moment Labour returned to power at the end of the War, they showed their own determination to plan the future of higher education with the appointment of the Barlow Committee, which had the effect of underlining the Percy Report’s recommendations, going further and calling for a ‘limited number of Technical Colleges, [offering] full-time technological courses of University degree standard’,72 as well as ‘the development, preferably in University Cities, of a few Institutes of Technology whose aim should be to provide graduate and postgraduate courses and to conduct research of a standard at least equal to that demanded of candidates for doctorate degrees in the Universities’.73 Significantly, neither report considered technological education worthy of full university status. Further evidence of the elitism that underlay thinking about the development of higher education at this time is provided by the fact that the group of Scottish Christian Socialists (with A. D. Lindsay, John Fulton and Hector Hetherington the key movers) who were planning the development of the university sector, did not have technological education in their sights. The ‘new universities’ that they foresaw were planned instead in response to what was seen as the unbridled ‘scientism’ of the German universities, which they believed had been a contributory factor to the Holocaust. Lindsay chaired the Allied Commission investigating the German universities after the War, and his proposal for a year of ‘studium generale’ became the template for the first new university at Keele (where he became the first Vice-Chancellor) and subsequently very influential in shaping the novel curricula of the new universities that were established a few years later. In this conflicted scene, the expansion of higher education, fuelled by steadily rising demand for a full-time education after the age of 18, took on a familiar pattern. The new universities and the existing civic universities all grew steadily in size, but the dominance of the Oxbridge collegiate model meant that they all

130 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ came to place massive demands on the public purse for an expansion of residential accommodation, and none grew to rival in size the larger North American colleges, which were seen as too large to offer a pastoral function. Initially, the aspirations of the Percy and Barlow Committees were met by the existing technical colleges, many of which developed degree level courses, awarding external degrees of the University of London to facilitate expansion. These LEA funded colleges were more capable of responding quickly to changing student demand, and soon became the main means of expansion, as what was soon to become known as the ‘binary system’ evolved spontaneously. In 1956 the Government went some way to recognize this in its White Paper on technical education, which painted a dismal picture and proposed the establishment of 25 Colleges of Advanced Technology in major urban centres, with surrounding ‘satellite colleges’. It was, though, not until the Robbins Committee recommended upgrading several of these to full university status that this sector really began to take off. Deeply influenced by witnesses such as Jean Floud and the Fabian Society, who pointed to a vast pool of ‘untapped ability’, the Robbins Committee, which reported in December 1963,74 undertook what probably remains the most ambitious post-War attempt to restructure higher education as a coherent system. Fulfilment of ‘the Robbins principle’ involved making far more places available. The keys to this were to be a new degree-awarding body (the Council for National Academic Awards), which could validate the expansion of the technical sector, and a single augmented grants commission to replace the UGC and oversee all full-time higher education. Newly in power, Harold Wilson’s Labour Government immediately gave full university status to Aston, Bath, Guilford (Brunel), Loughborough and Salford, all institutions which had only recently been recognized as colleges of advanced technology. Ironically, they all quickly mirrored the way in which the new civic universities at the start of the twentieth century, set up to promote technology, had quickly developed Arts faculties. As they sought to attract students across a wide range of subjects, they became, in the process, a safety valve for the expansion of more well-established university disciplines. Civil servants such as Toby Weaver saw these developments as threatening to place an insupportable burden on the public purse, and Anthony Crosland, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, was duly despatched to Woolwich, on 25 April 1965, with the press conveniently in attendance, to trumpet the Government’s commitment to a ‘binary policy’. This sought to control further expansion by diverting it to the 30 new polytechnics that were designated a few months later, and which began work in 1970. This enabled expansion to continue at a lower per capita rate of funding and at the expense of local taxpayer rather than the national government. Ironically, the first ever edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement, in September 1971, showed that these developments had failed to resolve the chronic crisis of the shortage of scientists and technicians. It reported that, across the United Kingdom, there were only 1,240 applicants for the 1,962 engineering places available, 2,700 applicants for the 3,571 science places on offer, but over 10,000 applicants for the 2,200 arts and social science vacancies. The principals of the new

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 131 polytechnics read this and licked their lips. Once again, government had succeeded in developing a new status hierarchy, whilst failing almost completely to resolve the long-term problem of the shortage of science and technology students. One further attempt to soak up constantly growing demand was the establishment of the Open University (the brainchild of Jenny Lee), which enrolled its first students in 1971. By 1980 it had become one of the most significant degreeawarding bodies, with over 60,000 students. Its appearance coincided with the terminal decline of the Workers’ Education Association, which for most of the century had provided a compensatory route for those who had been failed by the formal school system, as well as a stamping ground for future leaders of the Labour Party. This was all part of a deep-seated change in which informal educational agencies were running into the sand as the planned ‘system’ assumed greater dominance and eventually became almost ubiquitous. If this catalogue of unremitting growth might appear to be a reflection of the ‘Butskellism’ that marked policymaking during these years, there was one portent of future developments which bucked the trend. In 1969 Harry Ferns, of the University of Birmingham, enlisted Max Beloff and the Institute of Economic Affairs to lobby for the creation of a free university. In 1976, after heated debates, 65 students enrolled at the new University of Buckingham, with Beloff as principal designate and a determination to remain completely independent. Although degree recognition was pointedly refused by Government representatives in 1974, a free university fitted well with Margaret Thatcher’s ideological leanings, and it was duly awarded recognition as a university college by her Conservative administration in 1982. This alone marked a decisive end to any widely shared political consensus in the development of higher education.

A note of caution It is necessary to add a note of caution. Several friends and colleagues, all respected authorities in their own right, have commented that the 40 years following the Second World War are the one period for which it is particularly difficult to sustain my general argument. They point to the massive ‘levelling up’ that took place within British society at this time, the development of a welfare system that had the effect of being a safety net for the most vulnerable, the degree to which the common people shared in the growing affluence of these years, and the thousands who became first-generation entrants to employment in the professions and service industries as a direct result of their schooling and higher education. Many of these made their way into the major professions, notably medicine and the law. All of this is undeniable. It chimes with the optimism about the power of schooling to ‘level up’ society shown by such detailed studies as that by Halsey, Heath and Ridge.75 Yet it remained the case that, despite the massive changes which occurred in every sector of education, the bastions of privilege remained firmly in place and largely closed to those from humble origins. Gender relations remained fixed within very recognizable stereotypes of domesticity and wage-earning. The growth of the financial and service sectors of the economy accelerated the drift towards

132 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ the south-east and perpetuated (even intensified) the hegemony of London and the Home Counties. The upper echelons of the major professions continued to recruit almost exclusively from those who had attended elite educational institutions. If one role of the education system was to promote social and economic change, another was surely to retard social mobility. Much as politicians might have trumpeted equality of opportunity while justifying the development of education, the reality was that schooling, at every level, was dominated by those who, almost all, either knowingly or unconsciously, bought in to a belief in gradual reform of society rather than the root and branch restructuring that would have been necessary to bring about real change. All the evidence points to the reality that, right across the economy, with very few exceptions, where social mobility did occur it took at least three generations for members of any particular family of humble origins to achieve positions of real influence and power. The post-War reform of the education system ensured that it would continue to act as a retardant, rather than a catalyst, of social mobility. There is not space here to explore these rather generalized claims in detail, although I have approached them in earlier work.76 But they do call for more detailed research by future historians. In brief, the post-War years witnessed what was little short of a transformation of education. But into the late 1970s, gender, social origins and ethnicity remained the most significant determinants of an individual’s life chances. It is the fact that education had done relatively little to change this situation, which leads me inexorably to the conclusion that between 1939 and 1979, as it had done for two centuries, schooling acted as a key retardant of social mobility.

Notes 1 Times Educational Supplement, 28 June 1943, p. 303. 2 A. Sked, Britain’s decline: problems and perspectives, Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 27. 3 H. L. Smith, ‘The effect of the War on the status of women’, in H. L. Smith (ed.), War and social change, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989, pp. 208–29. 4 H. Macmillan, Reconstruction, Macmillan, London, 1933, p. 18. 5 Hsiao-Yuh Ku, Education for democracy in England in World War II, Routledge, London, 2020. 6 The Beveridge Report, Social insurance and allied services, Cmd. 6404, HMSO, London, 1942. 7 R. Lowe, ‘Education in England during the Second World War’ in R. Lowe (ed.), Education and the Second World War, Routledge, Abingdon, 1992, p. 9. 8 P. Addison, The road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War, Pimlico, London, 1994, p. 173. 9 A. Howard, RAB: the life of R. A. Butler, Jonathan Cape, London, 1987, p. 115. 10 R. A. Butler, The art of the possible, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1971, p. 95. 11 Report of the Board of Education Secondary School Examinations Council (The Norwood Report), HMSO, London, 1943. 12 Board of Education, Educational reconstruction, HMSO, London, 1943, p. 1. 13 See Lowe, op. cit., p. 14. 14 Ibid. 15 P. Addison, The road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War, Pimlico, London, 1994, p. 215.

‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 133 16 D. Thom, ‘The 1944 Education Act: the “art of the possible”?’ in H. L. Smith, War and social change: British society in the Second World War, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986, p. 101. 17 Ibid. 18 C. Attlee, Speech to the London Labour Party, 5 May 1946. 19 K. O. Morgan, The people’s peace: British history, 1945–1989, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, pp. 118–9. 20 J. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 72 and A. Myrdal and V. Klein, Women’s two roles, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1956. 21 B. Elbaum and V. Lazonek (eds.), The decline of the British economy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, quoted in M. Ball, F. Gray and L. McDowell, The transformation of Britain: contemporary social and economic change, Fontana, London, 1989, p. 42. 22 See B. Simon, Education and the social order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1991, pp. 125–129 and R. Lowe, The death of progressive education: how teachers lost control of the classroom, Routledge, London, 2007, pp. 24–39. 23 R. Lowe, Education in the post-war years, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 33. 24 M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organization, 1870–1970, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977, pp. 130–1. 25 Seaborne and Lowe, op. cit., pp. 160–3. 26 Ibid., p. 159. 27 Ibid., p. 161. 28 C. Burt, Mental and scholastic tests, London County Council, London, 1921. See also B. Simon, The politics of educational reform, 1920–1940, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1974, p. 235. 29 Ibid., pp. 237–250. 30 B. Simon, Education and the social order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1991, pp. 150–4. 31 The Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 25, verses 21–46. 32 Board of Education, Handbook of suggestions for the consideration of teachers and others concerned in the work of public elementary schools, HMSO, London, 1944, p. 111. 33 P. Cunningham, Curriculum change in the primary school since 1945, Falmer, London, 1988, pp. 57–62. 34 A. L. Stone, Story of a school, Ministry of Education Pamphlet no. 14, HMSO, London, 1949. See also B. Simon, Education and the social order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1991, pp. 360–1. 35 Department of Education and Science, Children and their primary schools; a Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), HMSO, London, 1967. 36 R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 50. 37 Cunningham, op. cit., p. 156. 38 Times Educational Supplement, 24 July 1948. 39 Lowe, op. cit., p. 104. 40 Times Educational Supplement, 16 June 1950. 41 Simon, op. cit., pp. 445–6. 42 Ibid., p. 446. 43 Ibid., p. 447. 44 Lowe, op. cit., pp. 147–63. 45 Primary education in England: a survey by H. M. Inspectors of Schools, HMSO, London, 1978. 46 D. Crook, ‘Local authorities and comprehensivisation in England and Wales, 1944–74’, Oxford Review of Education, 2 and 3, June and September, volume 28, pp. 247–60, 2002. 47 Lowe, Education in the post-war years, p. 107. 48 Ibid., p.46. 49 Times Educational Supplement, 23 March 1946.

134 ‘The safeguard of social stratification’ 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Op. cit., pp. 37–8. Ibid. A. Heim, The appraisal of intelligence, Methuen, London, 1954. B. Simon, Intelligence testing and the comprehensive school, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1953. B. Jackson and D. Marsden, Education and the working class, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962. J. McVicker Hunt, Intelligence and experience, Ronald Press, New York, 1961. Department of Education and Science, Circular 10/65: the organisation of secondary education, HMSO, London, 1965, para. 1. R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, 1997, pp. 80–95. A. Jensen, ‘How much can we boost I.Q. and scholastic achievement?’, Harvard Educational Review, 39, 1969, pp. 1–123. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (eds.), Black Paper Two: the crisis in education, Critical Quarterly Society, London, 1969, pp. 34–40. 15 to 18 (The Crowther Report), HMSO, London, 1959, pp. 32–4. Half our future (The Newson Report), HMSO, London, 1963, p. 142. See R. Lowe, ‘Bridging the gender gap?’ in R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 96–109. P. Bolton, Education: historical statistics, House of Commons Library, HMSO, London, 2012, p. 34. C. Benn and B. Simon, Half way there: report on the British comprehensive school reform, McGraw Hill, London, 1970. See, for example, P. Gordon, R. Aldrich and D. Dean, Education and policy in England in the twentieth century, Woburn Press, London, 1991, p. 66. M. Plaskow (ed.), The life and death of the Schools Council, Falmer, London, 1985, p. 1. J. Wilson, Public schools and private practice, Allen and Unwin, London, 1962; G. Kalton, The public schools: a factual survey, Longmans, London, 1966; H. Glennerster and G. Wilson, Paying for private schools, Allen Lane, London, 1970. Higher education (The Robbins Report), HMSO, London, 1963, p. 8. M. Sanderson, The universities and British industry, 1850–1970, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1972, pp. 339–44. Higher technological education (The Percy Report), HMSO, London, 1945, para. 47. Ibid., para. 43. Scientific manpower (The Barlow Report), HMSO, London, 1946, paras. 30–1. Ibid., para.35. Higher education (The Robbins Report), HMSO, 1963. A. H. Halsey, A. F. Heath and J. M. Ridge, Origins and destinations: family, class and education in modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. See in particular R. Lowe, ‘Schooling as an impediment to social mobility in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain’, in C. Majorek, E. V. Johanningmeier and F. Simon (eds.), Schooling in changing societies: historical and comparative perspectives, in Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series, vol. 4, Gent, 1998, pp. 57–68.

7

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

New challenges, 1979–2020 It is, at best, hazardous to write contemporary history. The dangers are obvious and have been frequently pointed out.1 But this book demands an attempt to relate my argument to the contemporary situation, not least because the problems confronting educators today are in large part mediated by the past. What follows can only be a set of provisional judgements, open to comment, criticism and modification. But in a period of rapid, unprecedented change it is important to try to unravel the extent to which present discontents are derived from established practice and attitudes. As I write this, in 2020, one central question is what is novel and what is derived from past practice? That is the issue underlying this chapter.

A novel context? Four developments have transformed the context within which educators operate during the most recent 40 years. The first has been the collapse of the post-War political settlement, involving a shared belief in a mixed economy and in the planning of the public services by central and local government, and the development of new and shifting positions for both major political parties. Most notable has been the emergence of a ‘New Right’ politics,2 hinted at in James Callaghan’s Ruskin Speech in 1976, but first championed expressly by Margaret Thatcher. It has influenced every subsequent government. It is possible to discern two strains in this new approach to politics that conflict and mean that any policy which emerges is ridden with internal contradictions. One is the ‘neo-Liberalism’ of thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, who believed in a completely deregulated free market economy and saw the family, rather than the State, as the key to social regeneration. The other is the neo-Conservatism of those in the 1974 Conservative Philosophy Group, which provided a platform for thinkers such as Roger Scruton. After one of its early meetings Margaret Thatcher said, ‘We must have an ideology. The other side have … We need one too’. This group lobbied for more, rather than less, power being centralized. In the event, the education policies which emerged under her government drew on both, promising more control to parents and consumers but insisting on strong central oversight to ensure maintenance of standards.

136 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism The subsequent adaptation of several aspects of Thatcher’s education policy by New Labour, coming to power in 1997, guaranteed the semi-permanence of this shift. The focus on standards and choice, and the drive for greater equality of opportunity through a tighter inspection regime and the development of specialist schools drawing in part on private sponsorship, all signalled the final abandonment of Labour’s blanket drive for universal comprehensivization. This duopoly of increasing local autonomy allied to an increasingly strong inspection regime has remained a feature of every subsequent administration. In retrospect it is clear that what gave traction to this novel politics was a second major development, the globalization of the economy.3 Obviously, the world economy can be described as having been ‘global’ for at least two centuries, arguably for far longer. Britain’s economic development was founded on international trade. What has been novel in the most recent period has been the dramatic rise to economic domination of multinational corporations, the coming of the worldwide web (pioneered by an English computer specialist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989), making trans-national communication and transactions far easier than ever before, and the simple fact of accelerating world population growth. All this has generated an unprecedentedly large world population equipped to participate in this new global traffic in ideas, services and commerce. This globalization has made it difficult for social policy (particularly in areas such as education) to drift too far from norms that are increasingly determined and dictated by supranational influences. Notable examples have been the influence of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Programme (TIMMS), which since 1995 has monitored student performance in two key subjects. The outcome has been a heightened sense of international competition and a curriculum which is increasingly sensitive to external influences. One aspect of this globalization has been the transformation of the world’s media, which appears in retrospect to have facilitated the ascendancy of ‘populist’ governments on a world scale and has reduced policymaking to what appears, at times, to be a series of ‘soundbites’ reflecting no more than yesterday’s headlines. A growing readiness to ignore expert advice or the views of the Civil Service is but one aspect of this, and illustrates neatly the way in which these technological innovations have impacted on policy. This growing preparedness to reject or question expert advice and the autonomy of professionals can be seen as but one token of what might be considered a third shift in the context within which educators have worked during the most recent 40 years. It might best be summarized as the rise of populism4 and the corresponding undermining of professionalism. The motors of this in Britain have been the dominance of a right-wing press, and subtle and on-going changes in the tone and content of the mass media. The education service has proved particularly susceptible to these trends. Whereas for much of the preceding two centuries education was, if ever, only briefly at the heart of political concerns, in recent years it has become central to domestic policymaking, with Tony Blair in particular making ‘education, education, education’ the centrepiece of his domestic policy.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

137

In the process two developments have transformed the context within which teachers work. The first has been the erosion of the autonomy of the teaching profession and a steady chipping away at their professionalism. The second has been the adoption of educational policies by government that have more to do with ideological predispositions than with the advice coming from civil servants and education researchers, best illustrated by the disparaging dismissal of educationalists as ‘the Blob’, first by Chief Inspector Chris Woodhead in 1990 and more recently by Michael Gove during his term as Secretary of State for Education. Whereas the tripartism of the post-War period and the drive for universal comprehensive secondary schooling each had their own underlying rationale argued by a strong consensus of ‘expert’ opinion (whether or not one might have agreed with them), it is doubtful, at best, whether recent initiatives command similar support. Rather, they appear to emanate from a popular press whose proprietors all too often have a vested interest, often involving the maintenance of privilege or else from think-tanks that support one or other political party, with as much interest in gaining power as in open debate. A fourth development has been the re-emergence of eugenics as an influence on policymakers. Often labelled ‘scientific racism’,5 this was in reality simply a resurgence of already familiar ideas and attitudes. Much of this originated in North America, but it was equally influential, and remains so today, in Britain. Two organizations were central to this. The Pioneer Fund, established before the outbreak of the Second World War, was mandated to ‘pursue “race betterment” by promoting the genetic stock of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons”’. From 1960 it funded Mankind Quarterly to promulgate the work of a few authors whose views were unacceptable to most mainstream journals. It also sponsored the Ulster Institute for Social Research, a think-tank which shared its prejudices. This organizational structure enabled a small number of polemicists, masquerading as serious academic scholars, to exercise a disproportionate influence. Among the most notable were William Shockley, Roger Pearson, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin and J. P. Rushton. The fact that Shockley came to this as a Nobel prize-winning physicist gave him credence in a field with which he was far less familiar. The implications of all this for education were made crystal clear in 1994 by the publication of The bell curve by C. Murray and R. Herrnstein.6 This widely influential book argued that intelligence was largely genetically determined, that ethnicity was an important factor, and trotted out the old eugenic line that national intelligence (in this case that of the USA) was in decline because the less able tended to have more children. Although this polemicizing was largely targeted at a North American audience it became very influential in Britain. It was apparent by the 1970s that this thinking had once again percolated into right-wing elements within the Conservative Party. For example, in a widely publicized speech given in Edgbaston in 1974, a few years before he became Margaret Thatcher’s longest serving Secretary of State for Education, Keith Joseph went on record as saying that

138 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism our human stock is threatened … a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us … Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfactions … Yet proposals to extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition … The worship of instinct, of spontaneity, the rejection of self-discipline, is not progress – it is degeneration.7 More recently, in March, 2018, the Guardian newspaper revealed that ‘a semiclandestine conference on intelligence and genetics’ had been meeting regularly for some years at University College London, without the University’s knowledge, and that Richard Lynn had been a regular participant.8 Significantly, this thinking has influenced policymakers. As Gavin Evans has recently shown, Michael Gove’s then adviser at the Department of Education, Dominic Cummings, drafted a 250 page tome attacking the Government’s Sure Start programme … which was subsequently abandoned … Cummings said that there was little scientific evidence that this kind of thing worked and that children’s performance in school was based more on IQ and genetics than teaching … “There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics” he wrote. “Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless”.9 With these words the personal adviser to the Secretary of State for Education threw in his lot with the authors of The bell curve. The practical implications of this view were made clear a few weeks later by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who, as Evans explains, used a speech to ‘mock the 16 per cent of society with IQs below 85 and implied the poor had lower IQs, suggesting the State should put more effort into the 2 per cent with IQs over 130’.10 In this way

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

139

the New Eugenics has provided a veneer of quasi-intellectual respectability for the implementation of ‘alt-right’ policies in mainstream education, involving a complete rejection of the inclusivity and integrationism that had marked post-War planning. It is worth noting, in conclusion, that this picture is further complicated by the launch of the Human Genome Project in 1990. An integral part of this was its Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications programme ‘to identify and address issues raised by genomic research that would affect individuals, families, and society’. By 2014 this project was funded to the tune $18 million per annum. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, E. W. Clayton commented that ‘the most commonly expressed fear is that genetic information will be used in ways that could harm people – for example, to deny them access to health insurance, employment, education’.11 This is an issue which may well be of concern to educational policymakers in the near future. At the moment it is difficult to assess its implications, although it may well be that interpretations of a growing understanding of genetics will be used to reinforce new eugenic thinking and to influence educational policymaking.

A new economic order The social and economic changes that have taken place in England since 1979 have been dramatic and have themselves also altered radically the context in which teachers work. Changing patterns of employment have fuelled both internal and external migration. Gender relations have been significantly reshaped. The contrasts between regions have been, if anything, intensified. And, most significantly, the gulf between rich and poor has deepened. The initial catalyst of all this was the attempt of the Thatcher Governments to restructure the economy by abandoning subsidies for industry, encouraging privatization and disempowering the trades unions. No subsequent Government has entirely abandoned the main lines of Thatcher’s policies and the outcome has been a transformation of patterns of employment, although, in the longer historical perspective, it should be added that this was no more than an acceleration of trends already under way. In 1979, 3.22% of the workforce were employed in the primary sector of the economy, jobs such as farming, fishing and forestry. By 2016 this had fallen to 1.3%. The fall in the manufacturing sector was even more dramatic, from 33% to 15%. Meanwhile the tertiary sector of the economy assumed even greater dominance, rising from 63% to 83% of those in work, with a particularly notable doubling in the education and health sectors, which together now employ 27% of the labour force. A notable feature of these developments was the growth of the private sector, from 10 million employees in 1979 to 27 million in 2018. This was matched by a corresponding fall in the public sector.12 There were some interesting features to this changing labour market, all impinging on schooling. First, women continued to play an increasingly important role in the labour market. In 1979 nine out of every ten males of working age were in employment, but only two-thirds of women. By 2018 this had largely

140 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism levelled up, with three-quarters of the population at work, and females almost as likely to be employed as males. But, significantly, within these figures, in 2018 women still dominated part-time employment, comprising 75% of that workforce, whilst only four out of every ten full-time workers were female. In brief, despite the steady progression, the perception that childcare was women’s work had not entirely dissipated. Further, those women who worked full-time were more likely than poor females to be able to afford the costs of childcare, so there remained a social class element hidden in these figures. A second characteristic of this changing labour market was the increasing casualization of employment. This too originated in Margaret Thatcher’s drive to encourage both public and private sectors to become more efficient by subcontracting services to outside companies. In 40 years this has spawned several multinational companies (such as Serco and GS4) and has resulted in even small firms relying increasingly on casual labour for an increasing proportion of their activities. Two of the consequences are critical for the provision of education. First, the schools themselves, working under strained budgetary constraints, have been forced to rely increasingly on outside companies to provide a range of services such as school meals and cleaning. This means that the business of managing a school has been transformed. Secondly, the number of self-employed has risen dramatically, resulting in a growing number of school pupils coming from families who are dependent on casual labour, have none of the familiar employment rights and are generally low paid, since the competitive element introduced by outsourcing tends to drive down pay levels. By 2020 an unprecedented 15% of the workforce in the United Kingdom were self-employed, many of them, despite the National Minimum Wage legislation introduced in 1999, living in poverty. This is also one of the reasons why unemployment was, by 2020, at an all-time low, since those on ‘zero hours’ contracts are not recognized as being unemployed. This has led several economists to comment recently that underemployment, rather than unemployment, would be a better means to measure the health of the British economy in the early twenty-first century. This changing labour market was intimately linked to housing policy and to patterns of home ownership. Since 1979 this has too been transformed. At that time almost one-third of the population lived in council houses (now known as ‘social housing’). Thatcher’s introduction of a council tenant’s right to buy in 1980 triggered extensive selling of council-owned property. By 2010 only 17% of the population was housed in this way. The growing use of outsourcing by local councils meant that by 2020 most council-owned property was managed by ‘arm’s length’ companies. Also, as the cost of owner occupancy continued to rise, taking it beyond the reach of many first-time buyers, there was a sharp increase in private renting, with a big acceleration in recent years. In 2007 the number of such properties stood at 2.8 million. By 2020 it was 5 million.13 In combination these two developments resulted in a growing number of unaffordable rents and a consequent massive increase in the number of children attending school from households living in or near poverty.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

141

For teachers the implications have been stark. One recent estimate suggests that the recent dramatic rise in the number of those forced into poverty will mean that by the early 2020s as many as five million children may fall into this category.14 As I write, the impact of coronavirus can only increase this figure. One head teacher from a poverty-stricken suburb in Cumbria commented recently, ‘My children, who have gone from me up to the local secondary school, have grey skin, poor teeth, poor hair, poor nails. They are smaller, they are thinner’.15 Another drew attention to the extent to which teachers in these areas were becoming social workers as much as schoolteachers.16 Another key factor, relating to all this, was migration, both internal and external. Internally this meant that the old industrial areas (mostly in the north) lost population to the more affluent parts of the country, particularly East Anglia, the East Midlands, the Home Counties and the south-west. This was matched by an increasing trend for established professionals in these areas to relocate to rural and semi-rural areas, with a big increase in commuting, more often than not by car. In recent years this has, if anything, intensified. Half of the new jobs created in England since 2010 have been in the south-east.17 This complex picture was pregnant with significance for the education system, as each of these trends was related in one way or another to social class. Late twentieth century England was sifting itself into discrete social groups, each with their own demands and expectations of schooling. Meanwhile, economic change had its own impact on external migration. Whereas, for much of the twentieth century, the numbers entering Britain roughly matched the numbers leaving, from 1998 this changed dramatically. The need to staff public services, such as health, and to a lesser extent education, allied to the need for seasonal labour on the land, in hospitality and in catering, resulted in a steady growth in inward migration, which was not matched by the numbers leaving. One reason for this was the underlying fact that Britain has become, since the War, an ageing population, with steadily increasing demand for care services and a shrinking percentage of the population being of employment age. This upswing in immigration happened at a moment when the assimilatory policies of the 1970s were no longer in fashion. There were inevitable consequences for the provision of education, most notably that immigration became, more than ever before, a political football, with much comment focused on schooling. Whilst organizations such as Migrationwatch UK (a right-wing think-tank founded in 2001) have repeatedly claimed that this was placing intolerable pressures on the education system, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has taken a quite different line, arguing that migration has, if anything, a positive effect on school and pupil performance … pupils doing better in schools with lots of EAL pupils … dire prophecies of the collapse of the education system under the weight of nonEnglish speaking children seem to be the opposite of the truth.18 Recent research has highlighted some of the ways in which economic change, linked to migration, has had a dramatic impact on education. Nicholas Shaxson’s

142 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism book The finance curse 19 shows that the drift to the south to work in a growing financial sector has distorted educational demand: ‘all the money swirling around our oversized financial sector may actually be making us collectively poorer. And Britain’s economy has steadily become re-engineered towards serving finance, other parts of the economy have struggled to survive in its shadow’. One key outcome has been a changed attitude towards particular specializations: ‘finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry … people who might have become scientists, who in another age might have dreamt of curing cancer or flying people to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers’.20 In brief, while the demand for courses in such fields as business management has escalated, those for the sciences have declined. The effects of this were intensified by the underlying reality that the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ was growing. As the Equality Trust has shown, inequality increased markedly during the 1980s, peaking in 1990. Since then it has remained relatively stable, with the top fifth of earners ‘continuing to dominate the income spectrum, taking almost half the income before and after the 2008 crisis’.21 It is impossible to comprehend the development of schooling in England since 1979 without knowing something about this complex web of social and economic changes, all with significant implications for the education system.

Implementing the new politics of education Initially, with Mark Carlisle as Secretary of State for Education, Thatcher’s education policy followed familiar lines. Thatcher’s four years as Minister for Education in Ted Heath’s Government cast a long shadow. She had earned the lasting nickname ‘milk snatcher’ for her ending of free milk supplies to primary schools as part of her programme of financial cuts in 1971. Her failure at that time to slow significantly the flood of proposals from LEAs for comprehensive reorganization (leaving her as the Minister of Education who closed the greatest number of grammar schools) had nurtured a deep-seated hostility to their ability to impede or modify central government policy. So what followed when she became Prime Minister was hardly a surprise. The introduction of an Assisted Places Scheme in 1980 redirected pupils and funds into selective schools. By 1997 there were some 34,000 pupils and 355 schools involved. The 1980 Education Act precipitated parents into school governorship. Legislation enforcing comprehensivization was rescinded; the reports of H. M. Inspectorate were made public, placing the schools under direct public scrutiny. Cuts to the funding of the local authorities were accompanied by ‘rate capping’, which made it impossible for the authorities to support their schools by switching funds from elsewhere. It was only when his successor Keith Joseph introduced the Technical and Vocational Initiative in 1982 that a new educational settlement began to emerge. Seen by many of his colleagues as the intellectual who best articulated a new Conservative approach to education, Joseph had made clear in his public pronouncements what were to be the main elements in this, stressing that ‘we oppose

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

143

the imposition of a uniform state monopoly over education, not for the sake of privilege, but, on the contrary, in order that the area of choice can be widened and made available to more citizens’.22 The reduction of the role of the State and the exercise of parental choice were to be the central features, although in view of his subsequent interventionism, this has to be seen as something of a chimera. Joseph went on to merge the GCE and CSE examinations, and tightened Government control of the universities, introducing the appraisal of staff and, in a 1985 White Paper, The Development of Higher Education into the 1990s, calling for the external assessment of their research. One outcome of this was that research income quickly came to be seen as being as significant as the quality of the research undertaken. At the 1986 Party Conference Joseph announced the setting up of City Technology Colleges. This proved to be a significant step in the gradual deconstruction of the local education authorities. However, when Joseph failed to end the long-running teachers’ strike (which was largely a reaction to the impact of his policies), his successor, Kenneth Baker took on the teachers directly, forcing them back to work and introducing the 1987 Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act. By specifying the number of hours that teachers were obliged to work, this marked a watershed in relations between teachers and the State and a decisive step in the de-professionalization of teaching. But the icon of Thatcher’s education policies remains the 1988 Education Reform Act. This wide-ranging legislation introduced the first-ever National Curriculum, involving four ‘key stages’ with programmes of study and Statutory Assessment Tests, whose results were to be made public. In an echo of the nineteenth century system of ‘payment by results’, a new ‘funding formula’ made each school’s income dependent on the number of pupils it attracted. At the same time it was made illegal for local authorities to fix the number of entrants to any school (thus giving teeth to parental choice). The Inner London Education Authority, which had been a thorn in the side of successive Conservative Governments, was disbanded. As a further blow to the local authorities, urban schools were encouraged to break free from their local authority by redesignating themselves as City Technology Colleges or as City Colleges for the Technology of the Arts. These schools, like the new Grant Maintained Schools, were to be directly funded by and answerable to Westminster. By the time the Conservatives left office over 1,000 schools had been taken out of local authority control. During the final years of the Conservative administration, new initiatives continued to come thick and fast. Pay bonuses were introduced for ‘gold star’ teachers; private agencies began to offer alternative routes into a teaching career. This was linked to a relaxation of the drive for every teacher to be formally qualified to teach. In 1990 the first centre for the training of school head teachers was opened at Oxford Polytechnic, funded by British Telecom. Head teachers were to be required to present an annual Course Development Plan to their governing bodies. Finally, the reconstitution of the Schools Inspectorate as the Office for Standards in Education made it possible for the first time for people with no background in education to become school inspectors. The appointment of the ebullient Chris Woodhead as Chief Inspector in 1994 enabled him to become the most prominent spokesperson for this new educational settlement during the following six years.

144 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism During its 13 years in office from 1997, New Labour did nothing to reverse this trend. If anything, the decision to place education at the core of their domestic policies had the effect of intensifying it. Twelve Acts of Parliament and a succession of press briefings, announcements and policy initiatives ensured that the drive to control schooling more directly and to specify how teachers should operate became a permanent feature of the British system. A Standards and Effectiveness Unit was set up, followed by the publication of a list of 281 failing schools, which were to be placed in special measures. Inner city areas were targeted through the establishment of Education Action Zones. The drive to force schools to focus on numeracy and literacy, particularly at primary level, was intensified through the adoption of National Strategies. Primary schools were encouraged to stream their pupils and or use ‘setting’ to separate out the most able students. Whole class teaching was encouraged, as was the establishment of specialist secondary schools. The 2002 Education Act gave wide-ranging powers to the Secretary of State to intervene with both schools and local authorities which were thought to be failing. By the time Labour left office this had crystallized into the drive to establish over 200 privately sponsored academy schools, modelled on the charter schools that had been introduced in the United States. The Private Finance Initiative was used to subcontract key services and the building of new schools to outside sources of funding. The shortage of qualified teachers was massaged by appointing ‘classroom assistants’. It was, in brief, a period when the attacks on the professionalism of teachers and the drive to assert tighter central government control were intensified. The return of a coalition Government in 2010 signalled yet another increment in the process, in which, as one commentator has put it, ‘the State has restructured its role in England, in terms of centralizing power, regulating the role of different actors, and distributing resources in a marketized and increasingly “privatized” education system’.23 Immediately after the election, the new Government announced an austerity programme that involved abandoning many of the spending plans in place, including an ambitious school building programme that New Labour had begun. In what has been called ‘the bonfire of the QUANGOs’, 106 governmental advisory bodies that provided expert advice to policymakers were abolished: many of these were educational. Academisation was accelerated, with new measures making it possible for Government to force failing schools to become academies. Numerous Free Schools were set up, further undermining the role of the local authorities, and, amidst a political uproar, institutions of higher education were allowed to charge their students up to £9,000 per year to study. Thus, in brief, since 1979 there has been nothing short of a transformation of the political framework within which the schools operate, and every aspect of this has served only to reinforce the educational contrasts between different social groups and different localities.

The realities of change: the primary sector In the context of these massive social, economic and political developments, what have been the realities of schooling during these most recent 40 years? For the primary sector, it has meant a clear break from the sense of innovation and

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

145

experiment that was a major characteristic of the post-War years. Rather, for those working in the classroom, it has come to feel at times more like a struggle to preserve as much as possible of best practice. The schools themselves have become fewer and rather larger. One reason for this is that increasing numbers have been in receipt of some kind of nursery or pre-school education. For many of the more affluent with two parents at work, this has meant expensive private provision. But there has been a growing trend for nurseries to be attached to or associated with particular primary schools. Recent research by Amy Palmer on the early twentieth century raises the suggestion that this trend may well have had pedagogic implications, since, as had been the case for many years, those nursery schools that were unattached to primary schools, with their own governing body, were free to meet the needs of under-fives in ways that were beyond those controlled by a primary head teacher, with a different agenda and often with far lower levels of funding.24 Meanwhile, within the classroom, although there was a widespread belief that primary schools had become hotbeds of child-centred education, surveys conducted at the end of the 1970s demonstrated that this was not the case. The HMI study of primary schools in England published in 1978 made clear how little the primary schools had moved away from didactic teaching methods, as did the ‘Oracle Project’ undertaken by the University of Leicester. In brief, ‘teaching was largely didactic in character … enquiry or discovery-based learning seemed almost non-existent’.25 Despite this, the Thatcher administration came to power determined to exercise more direct control of the school curriculum, and the primary sector was not to escape. A framework for the school curriculum was circulated in 1980, expounding a need to focus on the core curriculum. A year later The school curriculum was even more assertive in tone, stressing the ‘overriding responsibility’ of the primary sector to attach high priority to English and Mathematics. Significantly, it also emphasized that an approach which may be suitable for an able child – for example through a relatively sophisticated use of language – may be beyond the understanding of a less able child: to treat both alike would be an injustice to one or both.26 Two years later the House of Commons Education, Science and Arts Committee announced in Achievement in primary schools that control of the curriculum was being taken away from the DES and placed under direct Parliamentary scrutiny. Thus, in retrospect, it became clear that the establishment of a National Curriculum, of Key Stages and of Standard Attainment Tests in the 1988 Education Act had been just another increment in an on-going process. Nor did it end there. In 1992, in the run up to a General Election, Kenneth Clarke commissioned the ‘three Wise Men Report’ on primary education to encourage streaming and a return to more formal classroom teaching. Although the Report paid little attention to streaming, it came as an indictment of the teachers, referring to:

146 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism questionable dogmas which have led to excessively complex classroom practices … Standards of education in primary schools will not rise until all teachers expect more of their pupils … If ‘Plowdenism’27 has become an ideology to which thousands of teachers have unthinkingly subscribed, then it is necessary to ask why the teachers concerned have stopped thinking for themselves and have apparently become so amenable to indoctrination … Teachers will need to abandon the dogma of recent decades. They will need to focus firmly on the outcomes of their teaching. They will need to know more about the subjects they teach.28 It came as clear evidence of the reality that, for the foreseeable future, primary school teachers were going to be told what to do rather than trusted to use their own judgement. Similarly, when Labour came to power in 1997, the adoption of National Strategies for literacy and numeracy made it clear that the teachers must adopt teaching methods specified by the Government, insisting that ‘every course of initial teacher training for primary teachers should give the highest possible priority to ensuring that all trainee primary teachers are taught how to teach literacy in accordance with the Government’s new nationally established requirements’29. To facilitate this, it was announced in January 1998 that the National Curriculum would be suspended for two years for primary schools, allowing them to focus on the basics. An OFSTED report on Setting in primary schools confirmed in January 1999 that a growing number of schools were responding to this pressure by adopting ability grouping, particularly in deprived urban areas. In 2000 the Government announced the introduction of a ‘Foundation Stage’ of education, extending its oversight to the schooling of children from the age of three. It specified six key areas of learning: personal, social and emotional development; communication, understanding of the world; physical development and creative development. The Foundation Stage was to be delivered in all pre-school settings. This meant that nurseries and reception classes in primary schools as well as playgroups, day nurseries and nursery centres all became answerable to Government policy on the curriculum. In 1999 the Literacy Task Force commissioned by the Government maintained the pressure, calling for a ‘pro-active strategy’ on the primary school curriculum, with literacy, numeracy and ICT prioritized.30 In 2005 Jim Rose was commissioned to prepare a review of the teaching of early reading. This proved decisive for practice, claiming that ‘synthetic phonics, offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers’.31 This proposal was widely implemented and a Phonics Screening Test was introduced in 2012 to monitor the schools’ use of this method, despite the fact that in 2011 an All Party Parliamentary Group had cast serious doubt on the desirability of relying on this approach. In 2010, the year in which the coalition Government came to power, the teachers’ unions called a boycott of the SATs tests and over 25% of primary schools participated. Despite this clear evidence of unrest within the profession the new Government pressed ahead with an even more frenzied reform agenda. The Bew

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

147

Review, on Key Stage Two, published in 2011, spelt out that ‘external accountability is a key driver of improvement in education and particularly important for the least advantaged … A system of objectively measuring pupil progress and holding schools to account is vital’, adding that ‘school autonomy must be accompanied by robust accountability’.32 It soon became clear that these were not idle words. In 2013 a report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission placed some of the blame for the problems of the inner cities on the schools themselves, stressing that ‘the most deprived areas still have 30% fewer good schools and get fewer good teachers than the least deprived’.33 In 2012 a Statutory Requirement for Early Years Foundation Stage spelt out precisely how children under five should be taught and nurtured. This was immediately followed by the requirement that schools must prepare a profile on every five-year-old, reporting on 20 aspects of their educational performance. At the same time, it was announced that OFSTED was extending its tough inspection regime to nurseries, with underperforming pre-schools to being stripped of their legal status if they failed to improve rapidly.34 In September 2013 a new detailed National Curriculum for Key Stages One and Two was announced, with schools required to report on pupil progress. At the same time a Statutory Instrument was issued specifying the Attainment Targets subject by subject which schools must achieve. Putting a positive spin on it, the DES announced that this was a ‘reform’ of primary school assessment, designed ‘to align with the high expectations set by the new national curriculum that schools have been teaching since September 2014’. Further, Michael Gove, as Secretary of State for Education, set about the active encouragement of ‘academization’. One of the ways he did this was by the appointment of eight Regional Schools Commissioners who had the power to ‘convert underperforming schools into academies, sending warning notices if academies fare below expectation and deciding whether schools can expand’.35 They were also given powers to intervene in schools that were thought to be ‘coasting’. By the time Gove left office in 2014, one in five primary schools had become academies, taking them out of local authority control and bringing them under the direct oversight of Westminster. Bit by bit, governmental control of the day by day conduct of primary school teaching was being intensified. By the end of the decade some of the consequences of this interventionism, coinciding with a period of economic austerity, were becoming clear. Despite a new Funding Formula announced in 2016, schools continued to find themselves in financial difficulties. In an attempt to level out the disparities involved in LEA funding, the new Formula guaranteed each primary school £3,500 per pupil, with supplements for meeting specified conditions. This was announced as significant increase in governmental support for schools. Yet, within months, the Education Policy Institute (an independent think-tank) was pointing out that there is not a single local authority in which no school loses funding and there are 12 authorities in which no schools gain at all. Some schools are set to gain by more than 25 per cent, although there is no clear trajectory for when those gains will materialise.36

148 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism At the same time, the Audit Commission was suggesting that schools needed to find savings of over three billion pounds by 2019 to meet rising cost pressures.37 A sombre picture of the implications of these policies was painted by the Guardian in 2019, which claimed that ‘total school spending per pupil has fallen by 8% after inflation since 2009 and by 5% since 2015’.38 It emerged too that since 2016 almost two-thirds of primary schools were spending beyond their income to stay afloat, yet still having to cut back on both teachers and classroom assistants. In 2018 the Education Policy Institute investigated the extent to which these financial cuts were accentuating already existing regional contrasts. They found, hardly surprisingly, that the areas with the highest percentage of schools in deficit in 2010 were the North West, at 7.7 per cent, followed by East Midlands, at 6.4 per cent. By 2016–17, three regions had more than 8 per cent of their maintained primary schools in deficit: the North East (10.1 per cent), London (8.6 per cent) and Yorkshire and the Humber (8.4 per cent).39 In brief, the areas which felt the greatest impact of these economies were the most deprived. Alarmingly, it has become increasingly clear that it is children with special needs who have suffered most. While the cost of support for high-needs children has skyrocketed, the diminishing ability of local authorities to meet their legal obligations has generated what, in 2018, Matt Dunkeley, the Director of Children’s Services for Kent called ‘a perfect storm’, which he saw as threatening the viability of all local authority educational provision. His authority alone had seen the cost of providing for high-dependency children rise from £119 million to £169 million in five years.40 By 2018–19 over 20,000 children were being sent away from their home areas to special schools, some over long distances. There was also growing recourse by LEAs to private providers: this, too, placed heavy financial demands on local authorities. Despite this, many children were waiting for long periods, with no schooling at all, whilst placements were sought. Most recently, an unprecedented alliance of head teachers, school governors, local councils and trade unions has lobbied the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, for an extra five billion pounds annually for the state sector ‘in view of the woefully underfunded provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities’.41 There is clear evidence that those at greatest risk were the ones suffering most from these educational reforms. All of this had a dramatic impact on the staffing of primary schools. As the Guardian reported in 2018, Every teacher knows someone who has left the profession, retired early, had a breakdown, or been signed off work with stress. Just under 40,000 teachers quit the profession in 2016 (the latest figures available) representing about 9% of the workforce, according to government figures.42

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

149

Some geographical areas were particularly hard hit, especially those already suffering from social deprivation. As one South Yorkshire head teacher explained: Areas such as Doncaster and Barnsley are not seen as desirable [places to live]. Many … schools, including mine, are seen as failing but we are in a deprived area where achieving targets is more challenging. However, teacher pay is related to reaching targets – why would a good teacher come to a school where it’s harder to reach targets and get pay increases? Yet an enquiry by the Audit Commission revealed that, at the other extreme, the Executive Head Teacher of the Durand Academy Trust in south London, Sir Greg Martin, had received a 50% pay rise in 2012–13, increasing his annual remuneration package to £229,000, despite also being a director of an associated company.43 Thus, the Government’s determination to grant greater financial independence to the schools themselves was working to intensify regional and local disparities,44 and at the same time facilitating greatly enhanced senior salaries in some locations. The extent to which this was intended remains an open question. One of the ways in which the Government sought to alleviate these problems was by proliferating the routes into teaching. By 2020 there were eight different modes of teacher training available, mostly school-based, and bursaries were used to attract applicants. When the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee reported on this in 2016, it mounted a blistering attack on the Government’s performance, pointing out that they had failed to recruit enough teachers for four consecutive years and had no coherent plan to deal with the problem. This, the Committee claimed, was entirely their own fault: the Department does not understand, and shows little curiosity about, the size and extent of teacher shortages around the country and assumes headteachers will deal with gaps. Despite repeatedly missing its targets, the Department shows no sense of leadership or urgency in making sure there are sufficient new teachers.45 One outcome of this was that the size of teaching groups in the primary sector shot up, despite there being a ‘statutory limit’ of 30 children in each class. By 2019 more than half a million primary schoolchildren were being taught in classes above the legally permitted size, and in one extreme example, at Broadclyst in Devon, ten- and eleven-year-old pupils were being taught in groups of up to 67 in a room designed more as a lecture theatre than a classroom.46 Hardly surprisingly, it was in the more deprived areas, such as Bury, Oldham, Trafford and Tameside, that oversized classes were most common. As the Guardian made clear in 2017, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the performance of children from poor homes (particularly those on free school meals) in Standard Attainment Tests was deteriorating, while that of their more affluent counterparts was steadily improving. The phonics test taken by five- and six-year-olds at the end of year one told a

150 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism similar story.47 In brief, to summarize, the gulf between children from better-off and poor homes in the primary sector had always been apparent. Sadly, the policy shifts and developments of the most recent era have served only to deepen this chasm, despite the protestations of a succession of Governments that their initiatives would at last do something to lessen this problem. Meanwhile, it is important to note in our context that the private sector, comprising over 500 preparatory schools with over 130,000 pupils, has continued to thrive throughout this most recent period. Several factors contrived to make these schools, if anything, more attractive to potential parents. A growing number of parents found themselves in a position to afford to pay for their children’s education; at the same time the challenges faced by the maintained primary schools made the option of a private schooling appear less risky. Better staffing ratios and more attractive and wellmaintained premises made them more able to adapt to governmental curricular requirements. And they continued to receive warm support from the right-wing press. In September 2019, for example, the Daily Telegraph drew up a list of the ten preparatory schools that offered parents the best value for money: the further from London you look the likelier you are to find keenly priced options. However, London has an array of choices … Here are the Telegraph’s top ten options nationwide; the schools listed are all prep schools or the junior schools of all-through independent day schools.48 This stood in stark contrast to the coverage that the maintained primary schools received from the press. Looking at the big picture, one is forced towards the conclusion that, although much has changed in the period since 1979, in respect of the schooling of younger children, history continues to cast a long shadow.

Outsourcing secondary education It is hardly overstating the case to claim that, since 1979, secondary education in England has effectively been outsourced. In 1979, 93% of the secondary sector comprised schools that were ‘maintained’ by their local authorities. By 2019 the figure had fallen to 18%, with 7% of the others being in the private sector and the vast majority being part of an Academy Trust, government funded and responsible directly to the DfES, but independently managed. This backdoor privatization was but one of several key changes which, during this period, has transformed secondary schooling. In an increasingly bureaucratized system, heightened Government control, linked to a powerful inspection regime, has resulted in a much greater focus on the core curriculum and on outcomes (as measured in league tables), a new more hierarchical approach to school management, increased teacher stress, much more ferocious competition between schools for pupils and funding, and an accentuation of pre-existing contrasts between the schooling of the rich and the poor. This transformation has occurred incrementally, and the period has been marked by regular modifications to the demands placed by Government on the secondary schools, all working towards this outcome.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

151

As soon as it was in power, Thatcher’s Government legislated to make it more difficult for the local authorities to introduce schemes for comprehensivization. Next, the power of the authorities was further weakened by allowing parents to choose which secondary school their child would attend. At the same time, an Assisted Places Scheme offered help to the selective schools; very soon 15,000 students a year were being directly funded by central Government to attend grammar school. This was funding which would previously have gone to the local authorities. The journal Education described this as ‘a shift in the balance of expenditure towards independent schools’,49 and the Guardian commented more tartly that ‘Mr. Carlisle legislates for inequality’.50 Next, the Government saved £400 million a year by making the school meals service (which ensured at least one decent meal a day for poorer children) financially independent. Yet, despite this, for a few years, the swing towards comprehensive education persisted. Of the 315 grammar schools operating when the Conservatives came to power, 130 had been assimilated into local authority schemes for comprehensivization by January 1982. In retrospect it is clear that this only heightened the resolve of the Government, and Keith Joseph’s term as Secretary of State saw a series of attempts to destabilize the local authorities. During 1983 he intervened regularly to dictate the prescribed curriculum in a range of subjects.51 At the same time he introduced the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative in order to create new, more specialized curricular tracks in the secondary schools. The fact that this was generously funded through the Manpower Services Commission dealt another blow to the local authorities, since the scheme was designed for their schools. Initially, 14 local authorities participated. Thwarted in his attempts to introduce ‘vouchers’, which would have had the effect of transferring power from the authorities to parents, Joseph fell back on a policy of centralization. As Brian Simon summarized it, this meant ‘the strengthening of the DES and government control at the expense of the other “partners” – particularly local authorities and teachers’.52 Joseph’s successor, Kenneth Baker, proved far more effective, altering the landscape of secondary schooling beyond measure. He revolutionized the terms and conditions of employment for teachers. Anticipating what has become since then a significant increase in the levels of remuneration of senior staff, he told the Commons that the pay structure ‘should contain differentials to reflect the varying responsibilities of teachers … The Government want a pay structure for the teaching profession which will provide more incentive posts’.53 Together with mandatory In-Service Training Days and specified hours of work for teachers, this marked a watershed in relations between teachers and the Government. It also put paid to many extra-curricular pursuits, such as school sports and after-school activities, all hitherto voluntary. This was only the preamble to an on-going policy of asserting central Government control, the next step being the 1988 Education Act, which, as we have seen, brought in sweeping changes. That Autumn, Baker told the Conservative Party Conference that ‘the pursuit of equality is over’. During this period the reform of external examinations at secondary level did much to further enhance the chances of those already advantaged. The new GCSE, implemented in 1988, involved the assessment of coursework. This

152 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism favoured students from more affluent homes with study space and often parents with more time and opportunity to offer practical help. Since it preserved many of the features of the old GCE, it remained at heart an examination for the elite. At the same time, the introduction of a Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education for those 17-year-olds thought unsuited to advanced level work was neatly summarized by Morris and Griggs in 1988 as typifying the approach of the Conservative Government: ‘general education on more traditional lines for a minority of young people; vocationally directed education for most’.54 Further, by specifying Standard Attainment Targets for the four Key Stages of schooling in the 1988 Act, each to be regularly assessed, the Government committed the schools to a more intensive testing and examining regime throughout a young person’s time at school, involving teachers in detailed record keeping and providing simplistic criteria by which the performance of both pupils and teachers could be judged. This marked, conclusively, the end of the ‘golden age’ of teacher autonomy. Hardly surprisingly, over the next few years it became apparent that there was a growing teacher shortage at secondary level. In response the Government set about identifying ‘Gold Star’ teachers, introducing performance-related pay initially for senior teachers and within a few years for all. Various experiments were tried with ‘fast-track’ routes into teaching, initially through the licensed teachers’ scheme as an attempt was made to move towards school-based initial teacher training, all in the hope of attracting entrants from a wider range of backgrounds who would not otherwise have considered teaching as a career. These initiatives failed to resolve the problem, in part because the demands of the new National Curriculum and of accountability were confronting teachers with a growing mountain of paperwork, as the teachers’ unions were quick to point out, and partly because the Public Expenditure White Paper which was presented to Parliament in February 1989 placed severe financial restraints on the schools. A year later, several local education authorities began to dismiss teachers on grounds of cost. Meanwhile, the repositioning of the Labour Party under Tony Blair meant that its education policies resembled increasingly those of the Conservative Party. The result was that, during their 13 years in office, from 1997 to 2010, the drive for specialism at secondary level, for a loosening of local authority control, and for the development of new kinds of school was intensified. Their intentions were clear from the start. In 1997 a White Paper, Diversity and excellence, called for ‘three types of school’. By the end of the decade Blair was criticizing ‘standardised, monolithic comprehensives, that failed to cope with pupils of differing abilities’. A few weeks later his press officer, Alastair Campbell, in a widely quoted remark, referred to ‘bog standard comprehensives’. In 2002 Blair promised his party conference that they could look forward to a ‘post-comprehensive era’.55 After this, there was no going back. It was in this context that Labour went on to push through schemes for faith schools, trust schools and for city academies. In 2002 the first three academies were opened: by 2007 there were 87 at work. So successful were these policies that, by the time Labour left office in 2010, 96.6% of all maintained secondaries were specialist schools of one kind or another, as reported by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust,56 which had been set up to oversee their work.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

153

The flaws in these programmes were quickly pointed out by the Government’s own advisers. As early as 2005 the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee warned that: ‘We fail to understand why the DfES is putting such substantial resources into academies when it has not produced the evidence on which to base the expansion of this programme’.57 It identified the exclusion of underperforming pupils and the impact of academies on neighbouring schools as key concerns, adding that there was inevitably ‘differential achievement associated with ethnicity and gender’ and that ‘poverty was often statistically associated with low achievement’.58 Two years later, the Commons Accounts Committee was more nuanced. Whilst it stressed that ‘the concept of diversity remains a central plank of the Government’s plans for education’,59 pointing out that the specialist schools programme was largely being marketed as a school improvement tool and that OFSTED were backing specialism as a route to improvement, it conceded that there were problems. It went on to outline what have since become well-established criticisms of the trend towards greater independence, pointing out that ‘schools in less affluent areas continue to experience difficulties in raising the funds necessary to attain specialist status’, that the average academy was costing £21,000 per place each year, whilst pre-existing schools cost only £14,000. It concluded that ‘the rapid expansion of the Academy policy comes at the expense of rigorous evaluation’.60 In this new climate the management of pupil behaviour quickly became a burning issue. Several of the key problems were highlighted in the 2005 Steer Report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills. Schools were encouraged to ‘identify strategies for effective internal exclusion where behaviour warrants removal from normal school activities but not from the school’. The Report supported the growing practice of using ‘withdrawal rooms as a very effective alternative to fixed term external exclusion … teachers consider internal exclusion to be more effective in addressing behaviour problems than fixed period exclusion. We endorse this view’. Hardly surprisingly, this Report commented on the high level of exclusions of pupils with special educational needs and on the disproportionate rate of exclusion among some black and minority ethnic groups: for example, in 2003–04 Gypsy/Roma and Travellers of Irish heritage pupils were permanently excluded at four times the rate, and Black Caribbean pupils at around three times the rate, of all other ethnic group pupils. These are national averages: in some local authorities the rates are even higher.61 This Report has to be seen, in retrospect, as clear evidence of the growing stress which both teachers and students felt themselves under and of the extent to which practices which would previously have been seen unthinkable, and are now seen as at least extremely controversial, were becoming part of regular procedure in the secondary sector during these years. Despite this growing evidence of the drawbacks of this new educational settlement, many of those involved in the debates around schooling remained determined to press ahead, and this view coloured the policies of the Labour

154 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism Government throughout its period in office. In 2009 an expert group on assessment convened by Ed Balls as Secretary of State highlighted some of the key flaws in the new examination regime, pointing out that it ‘can lead to unequal attention to all pupils’ needs, and to pupils being put under undue pressure by teachers as they prepare for, and sit, the tests. It can also lead to schools narrowing the curriculum’.62 But for them, and for the outgoing Government, the answer was not to change tack, but to insist on ‘a high level of accountability for each school’, which it considered ‘beneficial for everyone who has a stake in the education system: pupils, parents, schools and the taxpayer’.63 Thus, by the time the Coalition came to power in 2010, the demolition of the post-War educational settlement was already well under way. David Cameron’s Government set about its completion with a will. They immediately passed an Academies Act, inviting all state schools to become academies and giving the Government power to enforce ‘academization’. The Act also removed the requirement for teachers to have qualified teacher status. A year later the 2011 Education Act set about raising standards by giving teachers legal powers to root out poor behaviour, making clear the right of head teachers to exclude students. It abolished the General Teaching Council, which Labour had set up in 2000 to support schools, and handed its powers to the Secretary of State. By 2012 there were over 1,600 academies at work, the vast majority secondary schools. This has proved to be one of the most controversial (and in many eyes the most damaging) aspects of policy in the most recent decade. ‘Academization’ has proceeded apace despite growing evidence of its shortcomings. In 2012 the New Statesman focused on the extent to which the academies were quietly getting rid of students who might damage their external examination profiles, highlighting one South London school, the Lillian Baylis Technology School, which was being obliged to accept increasing numbers of pupils who had been suspended or quietly ignored on long-term suspension by their own academies.64 Yet, down to the present (2020) apologists have continued to argue, as did the 2013 House of Commons Select Committee, that ‘greater autonomy drives up educational standards, and is most effective when coupled with accountability’.65 This committee also argued that the greater autonomy given to senior management to innovate and manage resources was a prerequisite of school improvement. Yet the doubts remained. That same Select Committee warned that the DfES had already overspent its planned budget on academies by one billion pounds, an indulgence which would never have been allowed for the schools under the local authorities.66 In 2015 the NAHT told a Commons Select Committee that they ‘would warn strongly against seeing structural reforms as a panacea for school improvement, despite their seeming simplicity to track and manage from the centre; structural change is at best a means to an end and at worst a distraction’.67 In 2014 the Trojan Horse affair placed another major question mark over the process of academization, when it emerged that one Birmingham Academy Trust had been deliberately targeted by Muslims standing as school governors in order to replace school leaders with heads who would adopt a more Islamic agenda in running the schools. Their ‘Trojan Horse’ letter purported to offer advice to

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism 68

155

communities in other cities as to how this could be done. The Commons Committee investigating this pointed out that the ‘greater autonomy of academies makes it easier for a group of similar-minded people to control a school’.69 Gove’s response was to announce that the Government would ‘put the promotion of British values at the heart of what every school has to deliver for children’.70 A year later the head of OFSTED, Amanda Spielman, stated that a significant proportion of private faith schools, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, were rated as inadequate, with ‘well-meaning school leaders … who naively turn to religious institutions of a particularly conservative bent for advice about religious practice’ and ‘children being taught solely religious texts at the expense of learning basic English and Mathematics’.71 It was at this time, in response to press reports of increasing numbers of pupils carrying knives, that a Government White Paper on behaviour in schools recommended a crackdown on disobedient students, specifying the punishments available to teachers and recommending the continued use of isolation booths as well as expulsion in extreme cases.72 These isolation booths quickly became one of the most contentious issues in education circles. For many years it had been considered acceptable to make a difficult pupil stand outside the classroom for a short time, but this seemed to many to be taking discipline to a new level. At the same time, many teachers welcomed the use of isolation as a way to minimize disruption and facilitate effective teaching for the majority. By 2020 the BBC was reporting that it had identified 200 pupils who had recently spent at least five consecutive days in isolation in England. It emerged that furniture companies were selling large quantities of isolation booths to English schools. At the same time the Centre for Mental Health charity was warning that ‘putting challenging pupils in isolation for long periods … could ruin their mental health’ and that young people who had already suffered trauma were particularly at risk.73 Once again, it was the most vulnerable who were most gravely affected. In much the same vein of imposing tougher oversight of the secondary sector, new GCSE examinations were introduced in 2015 with a renewed focus on unseen end-of-course testing, and, in several subjects, a return to more traditional syllabi. Introducing these reforms in Parliament, Gove claimed that he was making GCSEs ‘more demanding, more fulfilling, and more stretching, so that we can give our young people the broad, deep and balanced education which will equip them to win in the global race’.74 Two years after its introduction the Education Policy Institute reported that in these examinations the gap between the performance of disadvantaged pupils and their wealthier classmates was widening, with the most persistently disadvantaged students now falling almost two years behind their peers as measured by GCSE results.75 Despite this, the Government pressed ahead with similar reforms to ‘A’ level, introduced in 2020. Both developments drew howls of protest from within the profession. The Guardian newspaper has recently brought to light several of the less welcome implications of academy schools. In 2017 it reported that police were investigating the Wakefield City Academies Trust, which had moved millions of pounds of its reserves into private funds before seeking to transfer to new

156 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism sponsors. This school had also outsourced £440,000 to clerking companies owned by its chief executive, despite facing a budget deficit.76 Five months later it was reported that almost a half of all academies were engaged in ‘related party transactions’ (payments to individuals involved in running the school) to the tune of £140 million per annum. At the same time the Commons Public Accounts Committee revealed that over 100 chief executives of Academy Trusts were paid salaries of over £150,000 per annum, depriving their schools of ‘vital funds for their children’s education’, yet the DFE had little power to control such practices.77 At the beginning of 2018 it became clear that almost half of academy trusts were operating under severe financial constraints and needed emergency help from the public purse.78 The consequence was that by 2019 the NAHT was drawing attention to over 400,000 secondary school students who were being taught in oversized classes, accusing schools of increasing class size for financial reasons, and calling it evidence of the seriousness of the funding crisis they faced.79 As schools found themselves in growing financial difficulties, it fell increasingly to parents to make up the shortfall. An investigation by the Observer newspaper, published in July 2019, showed that ‘huge sums’ were being raised by Parent Teacher Associations to augment school budgets. Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park, London raised £631,000 through an appeal to parents, many pledging regular donations. The head teacher, Paul Stubbings, commented that ‘the choice is stark: we have to cut provision or raise funds’.80 Predictably, it was the schools in affluent areas that profited most from this. While the 30 most successful state schools raised in total over three million pounds in a single year, and two-thirds of state secondaries were assisted in this way, the schools in the poorest areas, which had the highest percentage of pupils on free school meals, often had no parent association whatever and little or no chance of any effective support. Thus, this backdoor privatization drove another wedge in the deepening rift between the schools of the well-off and the poor. Increasingly, head teachers resorted to the use of suspensions to deal with the most difficult children. In September 2018, an enquiry by OFSTED revealed that over 19,000 students had been excluded from academy schools. At Outwood Academy in Middlesbrough, 41% of the students had received either short-term or permanent exclusions at some point in their school career.81 In November the attack on this practice shifted to the large number of academies which were ‘losing’ up to 7% of their pupils in the final year before GCSE in order to massage their external examination results. In the case of one school in Norfolk (the Hewett School) the figure was 20%.82 If students were being taught in referral units or at home their performance did not count in the schools’ returns: hardly surprisingly, the vast majority of these excluded students were low achievers. Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, commented that ‘some schools are gaming the system, offrolling some of the most vulnerable children, including some with special educational needs and disabilities, in an attempt to improve the school’s examination results’.83 At the beginning of 2019 the attention of the Guardian shifted to the inability of parents and local interest groups to have any say in decisions relating to a school being granted academy status by the DfES. It reported the local demonstrations

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

157

provoked by the decision to give the contract for Barclay School in Hertfordshire to Future Academy Trust. The Guardian revealed that this Trust had been set up by Lord Nash, a venture capitalist and major donor to the Conservative Party, who in 2013 had been appointed as a Minister for Education by Michael Gove with a brief to oversee the establishment of academy chains. In response to a freedom of information request, civil servants confirmed that there had been no formal process in the making of this decision, nor had the conflict of interest been declared.84 Six months later the continuing increase in the numbers of highly paid executives within academies was highlighted. Kevin Courtney of the National Education Union commented that ‘this is not just poor management by Government, it is a sign that the system itself cannot be run transparently and in a way that is accountable … the academies project is becoming increasingly unstable and impossible to manage’.85 As a final twist, the Guardian reported in 2019 that ‘women working in schools run by multi-academy trusts experience some of Britain’s starkest gender pay gaps’.86 In this context, it is hardly surprising that increasing numbers of both pupils and teachers have decided that enough is enough. Student absenteeism has increased dramatically in the decade since 2010. By 2018, 11% of pupils in secondary schools were absenting themselves persistently (for at least four weeks in each school year). The loss of teachers from state secondary schools was even more dramatic. On the one hand, by 2018 there were over 10,000 unfilled posts, due in part to the growing perception that teaching was not an attractive career route and the number of new entrants was in decline.87 But, at the same time, teacher retention was proving a problem in itself. By 2012, 12% of secondary school teachers were quitting annually.88 Since then the number has increased. A poll by the National Educational Union taken in 2019 showed that one on five secondary schoolteachers were hoping to leave the profession within the next five years. The Guardian revealed that ‘thousands who honed their skills in English state schools are heading overseas to teach’.89 Mary Bousefield, the Union’s general secretary, commented that ‘the reality is that we are making teaching just too hard to do’.90 In brief, academization has transfigured the schooling of adolescents in England, as did the 1944 Education Act or comprehensivization during the 1960s and 1970s. But this attempt to generate a drastic improvement in standards has simply resulted in a much greater focus on the core curriculum, a more bureaucratized workplace placing increased stress on both pupils and teachers, heightened competition between schools, and an irreversible weakening of the local authorities. Since this coincided with a period of austerity in which the number of civil servants has been drastically reduced, it has left central Government understaffed to take on its new supervisory role and the enfeebled local authorities as helpless bystanders. The ensuing ‘free for all’ can hardly be seen in this context as a surprise. Equally, in the context of this book, established educational disparities, between rich and poor, males and females, and between regions, have been intensified. At a time when every politician in town has been claiming that education is the key means to ‘bridge the gap’, the reality has been that it has deepened the chasm. This has been one of the most ironic political tragedies of the recent past.

158 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

The private sector It is hardly surprising that the most recent 40 years has been a golden age for the so-called public schools. Increasing affluence and the growing contrast between the extremes of wealth and poverty has generated more families able to afford private schooling. At the same time, the increasing difficulties confronting the maintained schools have done nothing to enhance their attractiveness to aspiring parents. The fact that successive governments have advocated choice as a driver of improving standards has only made the decision as to which school to send children to appear uncontroversial, downplaying any ethical implications. Globalization has generated an unprecedented international demand for a British public school education, which remains widely admired around the world. Britain’s membership of the European Union also enhanced their catchment. Repeated attempts at reform of the private sector have had very little practical impact, so that the schools have never felt seriously threatened. What makes this situation even more challenging is the simple fact, as was pointed out by the well-known historian Simon Szreter, in an unpublished lecture given at Manchester University, that to distinguish between a ‘maintained’ sector, funded by the State, and an ‘independent’ sector, relying on private finance, is disingenuous. Whilst the maintained schools are largely dependent on Government funding, the private sector also benefits very significantly from the public purse. The schools pay no tax on parental fees as a result of charitable status (on this see Chapter 3). Most parents who pay fees can afford them in part ‘through a wide range of untaxed assets and income gained through tax avoidance schemes’.91 This is partly facilitated by offshore banking, which is also supported by the State. And, as Szreter points out, this State support of the private sector means that less is available for the State schools. Without this hidden support, many private schools would be unsustainable. This means that the private sector is ‘maintained’ by the State, perhaps to a level that is comparable with the maintained schools, but in ways that are not widely acknowledged and very difficult to quantify precisely. The outcome has been that, since 1979, these schools have continued to grow. The most recent figures suggest that there are now 617,000 Students in receipt of private education in England. This represents around 7% of the school population, although at sixth form level fee paying students make up 18% of the total. Equally striking, a census conducted by the Independent Schools Commission in 2019 revealed that over 55,000 foreign students were enrolled in their affiliated schools, representing almost one-third of the total, the largest numbers coming from China and mainland Europe.92 In the same year it emerged that these figures were being boosted by the £91 million per annum that the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office were using to fund the children of senior military officers and diplomats stationed abroad through public schools.93 In combination, these factors made it possible for the private sector to reinforce its position by a significant increase in fees during this period. Since 1992 the cost of a public school education has grown by a multiple of five while inflation has

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism 94

159

been at half that level. In 2018 the average annual fee for a day pupil at a private school topped £17,000 for the first time, while fees for boarders at the best public schools were in excess of £30,000, well ahead of the average wage for the country as a whole.95 In that year Eton’s basic fee stood at £40,668.96 Other reasons for the growing attractiveness of the private sector are not hard to find. Much of their extra revenue has been dedicated to sprucing up already often impressive facilities, or as Ben Chu put it recently in the Independent, ‘spending ever greater sums each year on fancier sporting and music facilities and the like, not so much to give pupils a better education, but to attract super-rich parents from abroad’.97 Financial security has enabled these schools to intensify the disparity in staffing ratios between the private and public sectors. At the extreme, Eton College advertises a staffing ratio of eight students to each teacher, far ahead of the wildest dreams of any state school. This, in turn, enables the school to attract some of the best qualified teachers. One outcome is a stark disparity in the distribution of qualified teachers. In 2020, the majority of pupils in state secondary schools are being taught, for at least part of the time, by teachers who are not trained in the subjects they teach. The President of the Association of School and College Leaders, Allan Foulds, has recently described what he calls ‘a national crisis’, with particular problems in the core subjects, ‘in maths (where 78 per of schools are having to make do with staff not trained in the subject), science (75 per cent) and English (57 per cent)’.98 At the other extreme, Eton is able to appeal to potential parents with the claim that 70 professional musicians are employed part-time to coach a range of instruments, with similar advantages across the curriculum. Hardly surprisingly, this is reflected in the external examination results of the schools and in access to elite universities. During the most recent 40 years, examination reform has played into the hands of the public schools. The GCSE examination was introduced in 1986 to merge CSE and GCE examinations, and was based in part on assessed coursework. Two years later the International GCSE was introduced for schools overseas whose students would have difficulty submitting coursework for assessment. Then, in 2008, Cambridge University introduced its own PREU, a series of subject by subject pre-university aptitude tests, and these became very familiar to the public schools, many of which began to coach their students for them. Oxford quickly became the only other university to rely extensively on these tests. Following his appointment as Secretary of State in 2010, and determined to reform external examinations, Michael Gove modelled his new GCSE on the widely recognized International GCSE, but insisted that it should become more rigorous. But then, shortly after initiating the reform, Gove announced that the IGCSE itself would no longer be recognized by the Schools Inspectorate as a legitimate qualification for the assessment of a school’s performance, since it had not been through the same vetting as his new examination. It immediately became ‘out of bounds’ for state schools, whose head teachers could not risk being downgraded in inspection reports simply because their external examination results were being disregarded. However, the public schools, suspicious of Gove’s new examination, and not caring about league rankings of schools,

160 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism turned increasingly to the International examination. The outcome has been that there are now, to all intents and purposes, two systems of examinations for university entry, one taken by state schools and the other by the private sector. And there is evidence that the elite universities continue to favour the older, established route. It comes as no surprise that this set of developments has generated furious opposition. Angela Rayner, then Shadow Education Minister, called it ‘an education system with different rules for a privileged few … putting state school pupils at a disadvantage’.99 When official figures showed that in 2018 over 90% of the entrants for the IGCSE papers were private school students they were accused by Labour MPs of ‘gaming the system’.100 Toby Helm commented in the Observer that ‘Tory education reforms are giving private school pupils a huge additional advantage in the hunt for university places and jobs … allowing them to sit easier GCSEs than the more rigorous ones being forced on state schools’.101 A DfES spokesperson admitted that ‘the new exams were tougher than the ones being used in private schools’.102 A few months later Robert Halfon, the Conservative chairperson of the Commons Select Committee for Education called it ‘extraordinary … that pupils in private schools, who start with many advantages, are able to take inferior exams’.103 As a final twist, it emerged in June 2020 that some elite schools (Sevenoaks School was named as one example) were engineering access to the best universities by instructing staff to exaggerate their predictions of student performance in the International examination in order to encourage the universities to offer either unconditional places or an offer that it would be relatively easy for the student to achieve in the examination, for fear of losing that student altogether. The 2019–20 Teachers’ Handbook for Sevenoaks School specified that this might be done in order ‘to facilitate an application to a more selective university course’.104 All of these factors help to explain why the most recent 40 years have seen little progress towards the widely shared long-term aspiration that the elite universities would become more accessible to those of talent from all social backgrounds and less the reserve of the rich and privileged. It is hardly surprising, given the advantages that have been bestowed on them, that students from Independent Schools’ Council schools are awarded an ‘A’ or an ‘A*’ grade in almost half of their results at Advanced Level, nearly double the national figure. Over 90% of the students from these schools proceed to university, over half of them to one of the elite Russell Group universities. A recent report from the Sutton Trust claims that pupils from eight schools (all major public schools) filled 1,310 Oxbridge places over three years, leaving only 1,220 places for other schools.105 In 15 of the most prestigious universities the proportion of public school pupils is more than 30%, according to recently released figures.106 Alarmingly, the Independent newspaper revealed in 2019 that at some of these universities (most notably Exeter, Imperial College and Durham) the proportion of students from state schools was falling. Several specialist university institutions had particularly low state school participation, most strikingly the Royal College of Music, where only one-third of students had been through the maintained sector. For Oxford the figure was 58% and for Cambridge 63%.107

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

161

This issue of university recruitment was but one aspect of what might be termed loosely as entry to the ‘Establishment’. In a visceral recent survey, Robert Verkaik has shown how several elite London gentlemen’s clubs, dominated by ex-public schoolboys, have helped generate a situation in which ‘people who went to private school dominate almost all walks of public life, including the media, the City, the “magic circle” law firms and the Bar’. A report published in 2019 by the Sutton Trust, Elitist Britain, painted a bleak picture of ‘a country whose power structures remain dominated by a narrow section of the population’, attributing this very largely to the influence of the private sector schools. It should be added that although all schools, even the most privileged, are now open to female students, especially at sixth-form level, they remain in a small minority, so that one side effect of this situation is the continuing domination of the upper reaches of public life by males. Whilst there is nothing new about all this, what is alarming is that the power of this self-replicating system has increased in the most recent period to such an extent that it seems unlikely to be challenged in any foreseeable political scenario. The ability of the education system to sustain social distance is not diminishing: it remains as great in the early twenty-first century as it has ever been, and the private sector secondary schools are one key reason for this.

How higher education was marketized The period since 1979 has seen the emergence of a mass system of higher education in England. This has developed against a background of constant governmental efforts to ensure that universities and colleges became more closely attuned to the demands of the economy, seeing the keys to this as an expansion based on restructuring, closer oversight, a revised funding system and fairer access. Yet at the same time the determination to preserve the best features and the position of the elite institutions has meant that cataclysmic change involved little or no improvement, and in some cases a deterioration, in the chances of the poor and underprivileged aspiring to a higher education that would equip them to enter the major professions and high earning jobs. This was in no small part a consequence of the rising costs of a higher education, which were occurring during a period when a growing proportion of the population was finding itself in financial difficulty. From the moment they returned to office the Conservatives had the universities in their sights. Initially this looked and felt to those involved like a familiar costcutting exercise. In October 1979, subsidies to overseas students’ fees were withdrawn. A month later, a White Paper announced a cut of £411 million per annum in governmental support for the universities. The UGC was told to act selectively, by imposing the greatest economies on those institutions whose graduates had the lowest employment rates. By imposing cuts of only 5% on Oxbridge and over 40% on some of the technological universities, whose graduates found it relatively easy to enter employment, the UGC wrote its own death warrant, marking arguably the last moment that those within the upper echelons of academe were able to impose their value system on Government.

162 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism Despite a major demonstration by university staff in November 1981 and a formal petition two years later, Thatcher’s Government pressed ahead, imposing strict limits on recruitment and in 1988 ending staff tenure. Edgar Page, of the University of Hull, became the unfortunate test case in which the power of universities to dismiss staff was made clear. The chair of the UGC, Sir Peter Swynnerton Dyer, warned his fellow vice-chancellors of the way the wind was blowing and their response was to compile the 1985 Jarratt Report, which showed some readiness to compromise. It acknowledged ‘a need for change throughout the university system’, which would mean a greater degree of ‘selectivity’. To enable this a vice-chancellor should be recognized as ‘not only … academic leader but also as chief executive’. Meanwhile, it called on the Government to fund future staffing reductions and for a programme of staff development, appraisal and accountability.108 Two years later, the UGC was replaced by a smaller Universities Funding Council, and Swynnerton Dyer, who was also an international bridge player, took on its chairmanship as an attempt to continue finessing a quickly changing situation. But the Government insisted that it include ‘a strong element of people from outside the academic world’,109 and thereafter control quickly slipped away from the universities themselves as their power to self-regulate had gone. At the same time, a Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council was set up on similar lines to oversee the local authority colleges. In 1992, when the Polytechnics were awarded university status, this was merged with the UFC. The Government announced this as ending ‘the increasingly artificial distinction between universities on the one hand and polytechnics and colleges on the other … removing the barriers between the academic and vocational streams’.110 At a stroke the university sector had been doubled in size, but at the cost of being subjected to much tighter controls and financial constraints. For the first time it became possible for almost a third of the population to aspire to a university education. But, once again, as had happened repeatedly during the twentieth century, Government had facilitated an expansion of higher education by incorporating what had started out as local or specialist colleges into the university sector. And once again the outcome was an intensification of the sense of a ‘pecking order’. One reason for this was that these changes were facilitated by the introduction of a new financial regime. At this time, local authority grants to fund the living expenses of university students, which had been made mandatory in 1960, disappeared almost completely and were replaced by loans, to be funded by a new Student Loans Company. In 1997 the Dearing Report took this a step further by recommending that students should begin to contribute directly to the costs of a university education. In response, the 1998 Teaching and Higher Education Act stipulated that students must pay £1,000 towards the cost of their course. This was to prove only the first step towards the complete marketization of university courses. Defended on the grounds that this was the only way to finance greater access to a university education, these developments ignored the plain reality that they were also conferring further advantages on those who could afford to take loans or to self-fund. At this time the wealth gap was growing inexorably. It was

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

163

inevitable that one consequence would be that higher education would become increasingly the reserve of the better off. This new financial regime was given teeth through the introduction of a quinquennial Research Assessment Exercise introduced in 1986. This has proved particularly controversial, not least because it places a premium on the amount of funding won by university departments from outside sources for research; a development which many see as influencing the nature of the research conducted and in many cases the preferred outcomes. This scepticism has been reflected by the AUT which claims that the RAE has had a disastrous impact on the UK higher education system … It has been responsible for job losses, discriminatory practices, widespread demoralisation of staff, the narrowing of research opportunities through the over-concentration of funding and the undermining of the relationship between teaching and research.111 Further, by enabling a ‘league table’ of results, this exercise has given an extra criterion to potential students, exacerbating the advantages enjoyed by the more successful university departments. While this may have been in some ways a good thing, it has also worked to confirm existing hierarchies, since the older universities have consistently done well in this exercise. These developments can all be seen in retrospect as paving the way for the massive hike in student numbers which was precipitated by the 1997 Dearing Report. Rejecting ‘the notion that more students will mean a reduction in academic standards’, the Report identified several priorities that should feature in any expansion programme. Although females were by the late twentieth century much more fairly represented in universities, they remained ‘under-represented in engineering and technology; and more than proportionately represented in the arts and humanities and in the natural sciences’. Equally, the Report pointed out that the children of the managerial classes remained over-represented in universities. Accordingly, they recommended that any governmental expansion programme should ‘give priority to those institutions which can demonstrate a commitment to widening participation … particularly among women, ethnic minorities, and students with disabilities’.112 Sadly, although Blair’s Government did commit to a rapid further expansion of the university sector, these noble aspirations were among many which were to hang in the gallery of unrealized intentions. At the time of writing, the issues which Dearing highlighted have still not been effectively addressed by any administration. Hardly surprisingly, the cuts programme initiated during the 1980s, allied to this increase in student numbers, has resulted in a steady erosion of staff/student ratios. For much of the post-War period the universities had been able to claim that this stood at six students per tutor, a staffing level that quickly proved unsustainable in this more straightened financial atmosphere. Since then there has been a continuing erosion, resulting in only three universities (Oxford, University College London and Buckingham) being able to claim a staffing ratio of 1:10 in

164 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism 2019 and, at the other extreme, there were seven institutions with more than 20 students per tutor. During the same period there has been an increasing casualization of university staff with growing numbers on part-time or short-term contracts. Inevitably, this has impacted on teaching, with the tutorial giving way increasingly to the mass lecture, on the model of several other European systems. It is probably fair to say that, during the most recent period, what little legislation there has been in respect of higher education has done little to moderate these trends. Government has been as willing to operate through exhortation and statements of intent as through direct intervention. During his decade in power, Tony Blair’s Government produced what one historian has called ‘a plethora of initiatives, statements and policies’ on higher education, but only one piece of legislation, in 2004, enabling universities to increase the charges to students for an undergraduate course to £3,000 per annum.113 To oversee this, an Office for Fair Access was set up to monitor higher education institutions in England through ‘access agreements’, which must be in place before universities were allowed to increase fee charges. Charles Clarke, as Secretary of State, made it crystal clear that increased access to the universities would involve change: ‘I argue that what I described as the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth is not in itself a justification for the state to put money in’. What society needed was not ‘medieval seekers after truth … as an adornment to our society’.114 For Clarke, Tony Blair’s aspiration that 50% of the age cohort would aspire to university was only justifiable if expansion extended to ‘the talented and best from all backgrounds. In Britain today too many of those born into less advantaged families still see a university place as being beyond their reach, whatever their ability’. He demanded ‘better progress in harnessing knowledge to wealth creation’, adding that it was ‘reasonable to ask students to contribute to this’.115 This was echoed in a 2009 Report from the Department of Business Innovation and Skills on The future of universities in a knowledge economy. This boasted of unprecedented levels of investment in university research but stressed that the universities still needed to become more business oriented. Blair himself made 43 public pronouncements specifying his intentions for the universities and colleges of further education, constantly reiterating the claim that whatever was done would be fair, affordable, and would even up the opportunities for the underprivileged, although there is little, if any, evidence that this actually happened as a consequence of the policies his Government introduced. The change of Government in 2010 did not signal a major change in policy. The Browne Report of that year,116 calling for major reform of university funding and charges to students, went largely ignored. A White Paper in 2011 promised ‘A new, fit for purpose regulatory framework’ for the universities.117 It was, though, not until 2017 that a Higher Education and Research Act set about this particular ‘reform’, establishing an Office for Students and a new Director of Fair Access to Higher Education, whilst abolishing the Higher Education Funding Council. The new Office was given power to assess the quality and standards of provision across the higher education sector, all to be overseen by the Secretary of State for Education. In addition, a new Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework would be used from 2020 to determine whether state-funded providers would be permitted to raise tuition fees.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

165

This new regulatory framework was established against a background of governmental pronouncements. Much of this mirrored the tone and content of New Labour’s more aspirational proclamations. In 2016, for example, David Cameron, writing in the Sunday Times, under the challenging headline ‘Watch out, universities; I’m bringing the fight for equality in Britain to you’, outlined his Government’s plans to bring about real equality in Britain through the reform of higher education.118 Less disingenuously, during the Brexit campaign, Michael Gove famously commented that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’, adding the comment that it was ‘the natural tendency of academics to veer towards the left [which has] now led to a monoculture in some disciplines’. He firmly defended tuition fees, saying that If we have to fund higher education, and if people who get university degrees go on to earn well, they should pay something back … It’s wrong if people who don’t go to university find that they have to pay more in taxation to support those who do.119 Down to the present there is clear evidence that many of the old problems confronted by the university sector persist. In December 2017, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service announced that young people from the most advantaged backgrounds remain more than five times as likely to gain entry to the most selective universities than the children of the less privileged. Les Ebdon, the Director of Fair Access to Higher Education, described this as ‘an unforgivable waste of talent’.120 As a final touch, the announcement, in January 2020, by the Office for Students of plans to halve the access gap at England’s most selective institutions provoked outrage from the HMC (the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference). Chief Executive Mike Buchanan went on record as saying that it was wrong ‘to rob some students of a future to award it to others’. It would amount to ‘denying places to students based on their class’.121 There is every sign that the old battle lines remain firmly in place.

Notes 1 See for example R. P. Dutt, Problems of contemporary history, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1963, L. Hunt, ‘Against presentism’, Perspectives on history, May, 2002 and P. Nora, ‘Recent history and the new dangers of politicization’, Eurozine, 24 November, 2011. 2 See R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 147–63, C. Chitty, Towards a new education system: the victory of the New Right?, Falmer Press, Lewes, 1989 and D. Richards and M. J. Smith, Governance and public policy in the UK, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 92–121. 3 M. B. Steger, Globalisation: a very short introduction, fourth edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017. 4 C. Mudde and C. R. Kaltwasser, Populism: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017 and ‘Right-wing populism and the popular press in Britain and the Netherlands’, Journalism, 12, 8, 2011, pp. 931–45. 5 A. Saini, The return of race science, HarperCollins, London, 2019.

166 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism 6 C. Murray and R. Herrnstein, The bell curve, Free Press Paperbacks, New York, 1994. 7 K. Joseph, Speech to the Edgbaston Conservative Association, 19 October 1974, https:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830. 8 Guardian, Journal, 2 March 2018, p. 10. 9 G. Evans, Skin deep: journeys in the divisive science of race, Oneworld Publications, London, 2019, p. 234. 10 Ibid. 11 E. W. Clayton, ‘Ethical, legal and social implications of genomic medicine’, New England Journal of Medicine, 7 August 2003. 12 The figures in this section are largely drawn from recent reports of the Office of National Statistics. See https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksec toraccounts/compendium/economicreview/april2019/longtermtrendsinukemploym ent1861to2018. 13 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukprivater entedsector/2018. 14 Observer, 8 March 2020, p. 56. 15 Guardian, 2 April 2018, pp. 1–6. 16 Ibid. 17 Guardian, 2 February 2020, p. 22. 18 National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Immigration: what’s it doing to our schools?, online paper, posted 21 February, 2012. 19 N. Shaxson, The finance curse: how global finance is making us all poorer, Bodley Head, London, 2018. 20 N. Shaxson, ‘The finance curse’, Guardian, Review, 5 October 2018, pp. 5–11. 21 The Equality Trust, How has inequality changed? (https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/ how-has-inequality-changed). 22 K. Joseph, Speech to the Edgbaston Conservative Association, 19 October 1974, https:// www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101830. 23 A. West, ‘Education policy and governance in England under the coalition government’, London Review of Education, 13, 2, 2015, pp. 21–36. 24 A. Palmer, ‘Nursery schools or nursery classes? An analysis of national and local policy in England 1918–1972’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Roehampton, London, 1913. 25 B. Simon, ‘The primary school revolution: myth or reality?’, in B. Simon and J. Willocks, Research and practice in the primary classroom, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, p. 27. 26 Department of Education and Science, The school curriculum, HMSO, London, 1981, sections 34 and 35. 27 A reference to the Plowden Report, Children and their primary schools, HMSO, London, 1967. 28 R. Alexander, J. Rose and C. Woodhead, Curriculum organisation and classroom practice in primary schools, Department of Education and Science, London, 1992. 29 Literacy Task Force, The national literacy strategy, 1997, see www.educationengland. org.uk/documents. 30 Independent review of the primary curriculum, DCSF Publications, Nottingham, 2009. 31 J. Rose, Independent review of the teaching of early reading, Final Report, DES Publications, Nottingham, March, 2006. 32 Lord Bew, Independent review of Key Stage Two testing, assessment and accountability, 2001, www.education.gov.uk. 33 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, State of the nation 2013: social mobility and child poverty in Britain, HMSO, London, 2013, p. 3. 34 Guardian, 2 August 2013. 35 J. Dickens, ‘Regional Schools Commissioner league tables, 2014–15’, Schools Week, 3 April 2020.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

167

36 N. Pereira, J. Andrews and P. Sellen, The implications of the National Funding Formula for schools, Education Policy Institute, London, 2017, p. 25. 37 Audit Commission, Financial sustainability of schools, HMSO, London, 2016. 38 Guardian, 30 September 2019. 39 J. Andrews and T. Lawrence, School funding pressures in England, Education Policy Institute, London, 2018, p. 18. 40 Guardian, 23 October 2018, p. 1. On this see also Observer, 26 May 2019, p. 16. 41 Guardian, 5 March 2020, p. 1. 42 Guardian, 13 May 2018. 43 National Audit Office, Investigation into the Education Funding Agency’s oversight of related party transactions at Durand Academy, HMSO, London, 2014. 44 Guardian, 22 March 2016. 45 House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, Training new teachers: third report of session 2016–17, HMSO, London, 2016, p. 3. 46 Sunday Times, 13 October 2019, p. 15. 47 Guardian, 15 December 2017, p. 27. 48 Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2019. 49 Education, 24 August 1979. 50 Guardian, 5 November 1979. 51 For details see B. Simon, Education and the social order, 1940–1990, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1991, pp. 492–3 and R. Lowe, Schooling and social change, 1964–1990, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 60–5. 52 Ibid., p. 502. 53 Hansard, House of Commons debate, 27 November 1986, columns 437–48. 54 M. Morris and C. Griggs, Education: the wasted years? 1973–1986, Falmer, London, 1988, p. 20. 55 Guardian, 15 February 2011, p. 5. 56 Ibid. 57 House of Commons Education and Skills Committee, Secondary education: fifth report of the session 2004–2005, HMSO, London 2005, p. 15. 58 Ibid., p. 19. 59 House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, The Academies Programme, HMSO, London, 2007, p. 9. 60 Ibid., pp. 10–14. 61 Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, Learning behaviour (The Steer Report), DfES, HMSO, London, 2005, pp. 45–9. 62 Report of the expert group on assessment, DfES, HMSO, London, 2009, p. 22. 63 Ibid., p. 5. 64 New Statesman, 22 March 2012. 65 House of Commons Select Committee, Academies and free schools, HMSO, London, 2013, p. 26. 66 Ibid., p. 3. 67 House of Commons Select Committee, Academies and free schools, HMSO, London, 2015, p. 11. 68 House of Commons Education Committee, Extremism in schools: the Trojan Horse affair, HMSO, London, 2015, p. 5. 69 Ibid., p. 3. 70 Ibid., p. 24. 71 Guardian, 14 December 2017, p. 13. 72 Department for Education, Behaviour and discipline in schools: advice for headteachers and school staff, HMSO, London, 214. 73 Guardian, 18 January 2020, p. 1. 74 Guardian, 11 June 2013. 75 Guardian, 30 July 2019, p. 5.

168 Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Guardian, 7 December 2017, p. 19. Guardian, 30 March 2018, p. 23. Observer, 4 February 2018, p. 28. Sunday Times, 13 October 2019, p. 15. Observer, 14 July 2019, pp. 10–11. Guardian, 1 September 2018, p. 1. Guardian, 6 November 2018, p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Guardian, Journal, 30 January 2019, p. 4. Guardian, 28 July 2019, p. 22. Guardian, 29 March 2019, p. 12. Observer, 4 February 2018, p. 6. Guardian, 30 October 2018, p. 16. Guardian, 13 November 2018, p. 4. Guardian, 13 November 2019, pp. 4–5. S. Szreter, Rethinking inequality in a historical perspective: educational provision and inequality, unpublished lecture, University of Manchester, 23 May 2012. ICEF Monitor, ‘One third of foreign students in British independent schools come from Europe’, https://monitor.icef.com/2019. L. Buchan, ‘Top diplomats and military personnel receive £91 million in private school subsidies’, Independent, 3 November 2019, p. 15. B. Chu, ‘The charts that show how private school fees have exploded’, Independent, 10 May 2016. Guardian, 22 April 2019, p. 10. F. Green and D. Kynaston, Engines of privilege: Britain’s private school problem, Bloomsbury, London, 2019, p. 2. Independent, 10 May 2016, p. 15. Independent, 1 March 2016, p. 14. Guardian, 31 December 2018, p. 5. Ibid. Observer, 30 December 2018, p. 1. Ibid., p. 9. Observer, 25 August 2019, pp. 1–2. Guardian, 25 June 2020, p. 11. S. Coughlan, ‘Oxford over-recruits from eight schools’, BBC News, 7 December 2018. Independent, 7 February 2019, p. 6. Ibid. CVCP, Report of the steering committee for efficiency studies in universities (The Jarratt Report), HMSO, London, 1985. White Paper, Higher education: meeting the challenge, HMSO, London, 1987. White Paper, Higher education: a new framework, HMSO, London, 1991, p. 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Assessment_Exercise. National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education, Higher education in the learning society (The Dearing Report), HMSO, London, 1997, pp. 101–10. I. Lunt, ‘Beyond tuition fees? The legacy of Blair’s Government to higher education’, Oxford Review of Education, 34, 6, December 2008, pp. 741–52. Times Higher Education Supplement, 16 May 2003. DFES, The future of higher education, HMS, London, 2003. Securing a sustainable future for higher education: an independent review(http:// www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/2010-browne-report.pdf). Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Higher education: students at the heart of the system, HMSO, London, 2011. Sunday Times, 1 February 2016.

Neo-liberalism, globalization and populism

169

119 Higher Education Policy Institute, What will the next Prime Minister think of higher education?, 28 May 2019 (https://www. Hepi.uk.2019). 120 Guardian, 14 December 2017, p. 5. 121 Guardian, 29 January 2020, p. 8.

Conclusion

Schooling and social class There are two points to be made in conclusion. The first is, quite simply, that I believe there is enough evidence laid out in these chapters to justify the bold claim that I made at the start of the book. At no time in the most recent 250 years has the English education system, its schools, colleges and universities, really worked to iron out the deep-seated inequalities which are a marked feature of British society. Rather, I would suggest that the overall impact of this system has been to retard social levelling. Whether we are talking about gender, social class, ethnic groups, regions, suburbs or access to positions of power and influence, education has done more to sustain existing inequalities than it has to erode them. It is beyond dispute that education has been central to economic and social change, shaping it and, in turn, being shaped by it. But my argument rests on making a clear distinction between social change and social mobility. Some might argue that the transformation of society has been so profound that it has necessarily generated a kind of social mobility, and that schooling has played a large part in facilitating this. Whole new industries and modes of employment have appeared. Others have declined or disappeared completely. Much of this has involved the generation of new workforces and social groupings, as changes in modes of production and in the physical distribution of the population, in both conurbations and rural locations, have played a key part in class formation. But given the abiding sense within Britain of a social hierarchy, every new suburb and every new town was saddled with a widespread understanding of its ‘desirability’, which might evolve over time, but was a clear marker of its place in a well-established social order. Every new mode of production quickly developed its own power hierarchies. There can be no better evidence for this than the way in which a multitude of enterprises in the growing tertiary sector of the economy quickly established contrasting roles for females and males, with the women always in the subordinate role in any pecking order. Whether it was female secretaries and male executives, female counter assistants and male bank managers, female operatives and male supervisors in factories, the picture was the same right across the economy and has largely remained so. Contrasting gender roles have therefore been a key part of this stratification. And schooling has played a key part in

Conclusion

171

sustaining this continuing hierarchy. In primary school, one of my daughters wrote a piece of work on medicine. Her teacher, a woman, wrote on it: ‘Well done Susan, perhaps one day you will be a nurse’. She is now a GP. I doubt there are many women educated in Britain in the last 100 years who could not give examples of this kind of unconscious stereotyping from their own lived experience of schooling. Gender is only one aspect of this phenomenon. The expectations that teachers have placed on children have been and remain an important element in sustaining social hierarchies of every kind. It might be argued that the simple fact that their schooling enabled many young people to enter professions and workplaces that their parents could not have aspired to pre-empts this claim. Successive phases of economic growth generated thousands of first-generation entrants to, first, secondary schools and, later, universities. Many of these went on to first-generation employment in the professions. In our context the implications were twofold. First, many of these expanding professions developed their own new internal hierarchies, which preserved the best rewarded and most powerful posts for those who came from established backgrounds. Secondly, the external perceptions of these professions were subtly modified. As they grew and adapted to new recruits they were often seen as becoming slightly less prestigious. It is interesting to note that when I became a university lecturer, having been a firstgeneration entrant to both secondary and higher education, university teachers were ranked as being in social class one by the Registrar General. Long before I retired, one of the consequences of expansion was that they had been downgraded to social class two. In one sense this matters not a jot. In another it says it all. All such expansions carried their own sense of hierarchy, placing limits on the chances of those from relatively humble backgrounds and reaffirming the grip of an established elite on positions of power and influence. And with these social hierarchies came power, which was, and remains, unevenly distributed both nationally and locally. Every city and region has its power elite, as does the nation. The two interrelate as individual agents move between local and national seats of power. Much of that power is maintained through political structures and organizations, but much of it also resides in particular modes of employment, social contacts and informal networking. Whether it is through the Masonic movement, the Rotary Club, the sports club or the Old Boys’ Society (all exclusively male or male-dominated), both local and national elites are formed and sustained through contact networks, with the schools and universities being a key part of this informal system. One of the most complex and intractable issues around this is the role of land ownership, of landed wealth, and its interplay with wealth earned through wages, profits and investment. For much of the period covered by this book, land ownership was the key determinant of elite membership. But this has been steadily eroded. The purchase of land enabled successful businessmen to gain access to power elites. Where social mobility did occur as ‘new wealth’ was absorbed into the English aristocracy, it often took place over two or three generations, and buying into land was one key avenue towards that. Marrying into wealth or land was an important element, too, and this played its part in determining the forms of

172 Conclusion schooling and the attitudes imparted in school to students of both genders. Although several historians have explored this phenomenon,1 more research remains to be done on how exactly this impacted on education, both in terms of policymaking and practice. But there can be no doubt that the education system, and the public schools in particular, played a key role in these processes by instilling the attributes of a gentleman into the sons of the newly wealthy and of a lady into aspirant females. Thus, the first major point that I have tried to establish in this book is that schooling and formal education are one of the key weapons by which those in power seek to sustain their position intergenerationally. The outcome is that, just as wider society has its social hierarchies, so does schooling. An education system with differing routes is one that is singularly well-fitted for a hierarchical society. At any moment during the past two and a half centuries, those working in any educational institution would have had a pretty clear idea, not simply of where their school or college stood in a social hierarchy, but also of the most appropriate and likely career destinations and social roles of their future alumni. For much of the time they were busy preparing those under their charge for just those roles, whether or not the courses they taught were strictly vocational in the narrower sense of that term. Schooling has been, and remains, a key element in the stabilization and maintenance of social hierarchies, and that is what I have tried to show in this book.

Children as victims The second point that I wish to establish in conclusion is that all this has involved children in becoming, in a very real sense, the victims of the education system as much as its beneficiaries. This victimhood has taken two forms, one patent and one more subtle. The first form is the physical and mental abuse that thousands of children have suffered as part of their education, much of it widely practiced and seen as acceptable by the vast majority of the population and of those working in schools. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this could be extreme, in both the public schools and the new monitorial schools. John Keate, the chief master at Eton at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was renowned as ‘the flogging headmaster’. In 1832 he beat more than 80 boys on the same day and he once told some ex-pupils that his only regret was that he had not flogged them more. In 1825, during his time as headmaster, a dispute between two boys was settled by a boxing match between the two, as was sanctioned at Eton, and the younger boy, Ashley Cooper, died after 60 rounds of bare-knuckle fighting. This was extreme, and the public schools catered for only a small minority of the population. Most heads and parents saw the use of physical violence simply as part of the necessary toughening of future leaders. But the monitorial schools themselves were not exempt. Sarah Trimmer left a detailed account of the punishments inflicted by Joseph Lancaster after a visit to his school. She wrote:

Conclusion

173

Occasionally, boys are put in a sack or a basket, suspended in the roof of the school, in the sight of all the pupils, who frequently laugh at ‘the birds in the cage’ … frequent or old offenders are yoked together sometimes by a piece of wood that fastens round their necks … thus confined they parade around the school walking backwards … four or six can be yoked together in this way.2 She went on to describe a whole range of equally barbaric punishments regularly used. But the dominant weapon for punishment in schools became the bamboo cane, widely used in both elementary and secondary schools. This was so widespread that caning became known in France as ‘the English vice’. This form of punishment was still used well into the twentieth century. The author recalls that, as a schoolboy, when he became a prefect in a rural grammar school in the late 1950s, his duties included supervision of detention, by which pupils who had misbehaved were required to stay late to do homework under supervision. If they continued to misbehave, school prefects (themselves students) were allowed to use the cane, and one stood permanently in the corner of several teaching rooms. There is no reason to think that this was exceptional. Occasional incidents of sexual abuse of pupils by staff were widely known but went unremarked by authority. Students understood that some kind of omerta applied to this activity. This, too, may have been not uncommon, in boarding schools particularly. Physical punishment was eventually banned by the European Union in 1972, although it was not until 1978 that the United Kingdom complied formally with this injunction. As recently as 1987 a head teacher was taken to court for caning a pupil for poor examination results. Although the judge found in favour of the child, he commented that ‘if you get a beating you must expect it to be with force’.3 A census taken in 2008 found that almost a quarter of secondary school teachers in England, and one in five primary school teachers, regretted that they were no longer able to cane students.4 It was in this context that, in recent years, the exclusion of pupils and the use of isolation booths became the widely used devices to deal with misbehaviour and underachievement. But far subtler, and possibly far more pervasive, was what I describe as the second mode by which children became victims of the education system. This was the steady narrowing of their life chances, throughout their schooling, by the implicit suggestion of appropriate future lifestyles and career trajectories. This ran through every aspect of school life, not simply modes of dress, but involved things such as hairstyles and speech patterns, often involving the suppression of ‘unpopular’ regional accents, which carried social class connotations. I grew up in Wolverhampton and it was made clear to me in grammar school that I could not look forward to a professional career if I continued to talk as I did. This carried, of course, the implicit suggestion that a professional career was the preferred route. The distinctive speech pattern used in many public schools is itself an important social marker of elite membership in later life. In what was taught, how it was taught, the ways in which children were grouped in schools (gender being the obvious example), the explicit and implicit suggestions of appropriate career routes, the pastimes and sports that were encouraged; in all of these the schools

174 Conclusion played a crucial role in underpinning and sustaining the social distinctions that are a marked aspect of English society. In many cases this was sustained by parental ambitions, which played their part in steering children towards particular outcomes. Parental pressure is only one of the factors explaining the unprecedented stress levels experienced by schoolchildren in recent years. Whether it was to conform to parental ambitions (often reflecting their own failed aspirations) or to conform to wider social norms, for over 200 years schools have been the arena where children’s experiences have been determined as much by external influences (shaped largely by an enduring sense of a social hierarchy) as it has by their own wishes. The further a young person progressed through the education system, the narrower the likely career outcomes became. From one viewpoint this is all well and good, exactly what schools and colleges should have been aiming to do. From another, it may be seen as the unconscious maintenance of a hierarchical society. The central problem, which has plagued education in England for over two centuries, is that from a very early age children have been projected through a tracked system of schooling, with those from differing backgrounds having quite different and distinct experiences of school. What I have tried to show in this book is the steady evolution of this tracked system, its development and its maintenance. The inevitable consequence is that children are steered, whether they like it or not, towards different and separate lifestyles. In these ways the education system both reflects the divisions in society and maintains them. I believe the detail of the account that I have presented provides evidence of this happening throughout the two and a half centuries under review. It leaves children the victims of schooling as much as its beneficiaries.

Implications It is worth reflecting briefly in conclusion on the implications of all this. Is the stratification of schooling, and all that follows from it, part of a natural order, or could things have been, or could they become in future, different? There are certainly some countries where things are done differently, although the distinctions between them and England may be simply matters of degree. There was a brief period after the Second World War when redistributive social and economic policies, linked to educational developments that were more egalitarian than those of earlier periods, appeared to hold out the promise of some kind of social reconstruction, in which schooling would play a significant role. In the event the entrenched defenders of the status quo, backed by the Governmental policy shifts of the 1970s, held out, perhaps largely because of a perceived threat to vested interests. This may be seen as the one moment in the whole period under review when it looked as though the outcomes might have been other than they were. But the situation that holds today is different in several respects from previous eras, and any consideration of future policy, of what needs to be done, must be mindful of what has changed in the recent and immediate past. First, it seems very likely that, during the most recent 40 years, elite formation (and hence access to

Conclusion

175

the ability to exercise political power) has been irrevocably transformed. The coming of the internet has generated new modes of wealth creation and transformed the nature of political discourse. Economically, it has enabled the generation of exponential financial gain very quickly. Politically, it has facilitated direct appeals to the electorate and a new style of rhetoric. During earlier phases of economic development, the creation of new wealth was through the sale of a product, which was finite (the number of items a factory could produce, or the number of clients a professional could serve). But these constraints, placing limits on financial potential, do not apply to a whole range of services and advice that are marketed online. This enables, for some individuals, the generation of exponential wealth quickly from a very small investment base. Microsoft and Facebook are probably the leading examples of this new phenomenon, both putting their developers among the world’s wealthiest. But this is beginning to happen more widely as well on a much smaller scale. This has been one major driver of the global phenomenon that the disparities between wealth and poverty are increasing rather than being diminished. The relationship between this and elite formation, and the part played by education in this process (whether through formal schooling or informal agencies) will be of major interest to future historians of education. It raises questions about whether or not the State is the most appropriate provider of education, and whether privatized systems are necessarily more socially discriminatory. Related to this is the question of the extent to which this new wealth can influence education itself (and all political processes) through the manipulation of opinion. However one views these problems, they will surely lead to major changes in the form that schooling takes (particularly through online and distance teaching), and in what is thought most appropriate to teach. The second and immediate major factor to consider is the coronavirus pandemic. As I write, its impact is being felt worldwide, and in the United Kingdom particularly it has highlighted and magnified pre-existing social contrasts. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. By mid-May 2020, the Financial Times was reporting ‘huge gaps opening up both between the private and state sectors, and within the state sector between middle class students and those from less well-off backgrounds’.5 The Guardian newspaper reported recently that private school pupils were five times as likely as their counterparts in State schools to have received full-time online teaching during lockdown, with the poorest being the most neglected. Professor Frances Green of the UCL Institute of Education commented that the private schools’ spending per pupil (at least three times that of state schools) enables them to gain better academic grades in normal times … Their resources and parental pressure have ensured that many more private school pupils have received a proper home schooling alternative.6 She went on to claim that the poorest, particularly those on free school meals, were most at risk of being neglected by their schools during the pandemic. One

176 Conclusion key reason for this is that while almost all private school students possess their own laptop, there are many State pupils who do not. In many cases their home environment is not conducive to study, and grinding poverty also means that up to a quarter of a million children are living in destitution and going short on food. The economic impact of the pandemic can only increase this number. In brief, the current crisis has only intensified well-established social contrasts, and there seems little chance of this being righted in any foreseeable future. It is a bleak prospect with which to finish. But one salient fact remains. Without an understanding of the pervasive and enduring nature of England’s divided educational legacy, it will be impossible to work effectively towards a fairer society, in which all lives matter and matter equally. It is vital that a national discussion on these problems is kept open, and that it leads towards implementation of those policies that are likely to do most to rectify the situation. Among the first of these should be the rectification of the staggering imbalance between State and private schools, and also of the structural inequalities that have developed within the State education system. This must not be stifled by those who have most to lose. This book is my attempt to contribute to that debate by explaining, as I see it, how and why the English education system has evolved as it has over the most recent two and a half centuries.

Notes 1 See for example J. H. Goldthorpe, Social mobility and class structure in modern Britain, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, M. Beard, English landed society in the twentieth century, Routledge, London, 1989, D. Cannadine, The decline and fall of the British aristocracy, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1990. 2 S. Trimmer, A comparative view of the new plan of education promulgated by Mr Joseph Lancaster, Bensley, London, 1805, p. 44. 3 ‘Caning storm head is cleared’, The Sun, 21 July 1987. 4 ‘A fifth of teachers back caning’, BBC News Online, 3 October 2008. 5 Financial Times, 20 May 2020. 6 Guardian, 16 June 2020, p. 1.

Index

Academies Act, 2010 154 Acland, Arthur 78–9 Acts of Parliament, see under title or topic of act Adami, George 96, 101 Addison Act, 1919 95 Addison, Paul 114 Albert, Prince Regent 52 Alexander, Cecil Frances 12 Ampleforth College 3 Anderson, Gregory 86 Anderson, Robert 25, 50 Ardingly College 43 Armstrong, William Alexander 32 Armytage, W. H. G. 84 Arnold, Thomas 6, 41–2 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (Lord Ashley) 37 Assisted Places Scheme 142 Association of Headmistresses 54 Aston University 130 Atkinson, M. 121 Attlee, Clement 116 Auden, George 77, 96 Auld Report, 1976 (William Tyndale Schools Inquiry) 122 Austen, Jane 24 Aveling, Thomas 30 Baker, Kenneth 143, 151 Bakewell, Robert 1 Balfour, Arthur 80 Ballantyne, R. M. 44 Balliol College, Oxford 115 Balls, Ed 154 Bamford, T. W. 61 Bantock, Geoffrey 118, 121 Barclay School, Hertfordshire 157 Barker, Ernest 108

Barker, Rodney 107 Barlow Report, 1946 (Scientific Manpower) 129–130 Barwise, Sidney 81 Bath Royal High School 55 Bazagalette, Joseph 31 Beale, Dorothea 56 Bedford College, London 56 Bedford School 49 Bedford Girls’ High School 55 Beilby, George 107 Bell, Andrew xxi, 11, 15–16, 19, Bell, Ingress 48 Beloff, Max 131 Bennett Report, 1976 (Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress) 122 Bentham, Jeremy 20, 25 Berners Lee, Tim 136 Bessemer, Henry 31 Bevan, Aneurin 107 Beveridge, William 112 Binet, A. xxi Birkbeck, George 23 Blackett, John 51 Black Papers, the 128 Blackwood, William 10 Blair, Tony 136, 152, 163–4 Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency 97 Board of Health, 1830 35 Bodichon Barbara 55 Bolton School 106 Booth, Charles 76, 84 Bottisham Village College, Cambridgeshire 105 Bourdieu, P. xiii Bousefield, Mary 157 Boscawen, George (Earl of Falmouth) 68 Bourne, Sturges 63

178 Index Brewood Grammar School, Staffordshire 63 Brindley, James 2 British and Foreign Schools Society, the 17 British Museum, the 64 Broadclyst Community Primary School, Devon 149 Bromsgrove School 71 Brotherton, Joseph 66 Brougham, Henry (Baron Brougham and Vaux) 10, 23, 46, 64 Browne Report, 2010 (Higher Education Funding and Student Finance) 164 Bruce Castle School 20 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 31 Brunel University 130 Bruner, J. 121 Bryant, Sophie 79 Bryce, James 55, 89 Bryce Report, 1895 (Secondary Education) 79, 84, 86, 99 Buchanan, Mike 165 Burstall, Sarah 54 Burt, Cyril 77, 96–7, 120, 124, 126 Butler, Henry Montague 42 Butler, R. A. (Rab) 97, 112, 118–9 Butler, Samuel 5–6, 42 Cain, Peter 3, 33 Callaghan, James 122, 135 Cameron, David 154, 165 Campbell, Alastair 152 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry 80 Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School, Holland Park 156 Carlisle, Mark 142, 151 Carlisle, Nicholas 6, 63 Carnegie Trust, the 105 Carpenter, R .H. 43 Carr Saunders, Alexander 96 Catty, N. 121 Cavendish Laboratory, the 90, 129 Cecil, Robert Gascoyne (Salisbury, Marquess of) 80, 90 Chadwick, James 129 Chamberlain, Joseph 34, 53 Champneys, Basil 55 Chantries Act, 1547 5, 62 Charitable Trusts Amendment Act, 1855 69 Charitable Uses Act, 1601 62, 69 Charities Act, 2006 72 Charity Commission 60–72 Charity Organisation Society 63 Charterhouse School 48, 64 Cheap Repository Tracts 13

Cheltenham College 43 Cheltenham Ladies College 55–6 Chorley, Kathleen 78 Chrimes Edward 31 Chrimes, Peter 31 Christie, William 50 Christ’s College, Cambridge 51 Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham 48, 63, 65 Chu, Ben 159 Church, Archibald 96 Church Defence Institution 47 Church Schools Company 55 Churchill, Winston 111–2, 129 Circular 7/65 (The education of Immigrants) 126 Circular 10/65 (The organisation of secondary education) 125 Circular 10/70 (The organisation of secondary education) 125 Civil Service Examinations 52 Clarendon Code, the 7 Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford 129 Clarendon Report, 1864 (The Revenues and Management of Certain Colleges and Schools) 43, 69, 99 Clarke, Charles 164 Clarke, Fred 112 Clarke, Kenneth 145 Clay, Felix 81 Clayton, E. W. 139 Clegg, A 121 Clifton College, Bristol 42–3, 52 Clifton High School, Bristol 55 Clough, Anne 56 Cobbett, William 36 Cockerton Judgement, the 1899 83 Cockroft, John 129 Coke, Thomas, Earl of Leicester, (Coke of Holkham) 1 Cole, Henry 52 College of Preceptors, the 56 Commissions, see under name of chairperson Committee of Council for Education, the 1839 36 Committee of Vice Chancellors, the 108 Consolidation Act, the 1921 103 Cook, James 2 Cooper, Ashley 172 Copley, John (Baron Lyndhurst) 68 Council for National Academic Awards 130 Court of Chancery, the 68 Courtney, Kevin 157 Cowper-Temple clause, the 39

Index 179 Crewe Milne, Robert 100 Crewe Report, 1921 (Classics in the Education System) 100 Crichton-Browne, James 81 Croll, P. 105 Crosland, Anthony130 Crowther Report, 1959 (15 to 18) 127 Crook, David 123 Cross Report, 1888 (Elementary Education Acts: England and Wales) 39 Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, Manchester 65 Crowley, Ralph 97 Crowther, Anne 95 Cummings, Dominic 138 Cunningham, P. 121 Curtis, W. T. 104 Daglish, Neil 80 Dale, David 19 Daniel, M. V. 121 Daventry Dissenting Academy 7 Davies Emily 55 Dearing Report, 1997 (Higher Education in the Learning Society) 162–3 Defoe, Daniel 7 De Lissa, L. 121 De Mandeville, Bernard 10 Denison, Edward, Bishop of Salisbury 47 Dent, H. C. 114 Department of Science and Art, the 53 Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, the 94, 108 Dewey, J. xxi Diderot, Denis 19 Disraeli, B. xvii Donnison Report, 1970 (The Public Schools Commission: second report) 127 Downside School 3 Dulwich College 72 Dunkeley, Matt 148 Durand, Peter 31 Dyer, Elinor Brent 45 Ebdon, Les 165 Eden, Anthony 97 Edinburgh Magazine 10 Education Act, 1870 xxi, 39–40, 80–1, Education Act, 1880 39 Education Act, 1876 4 Education Act, 1891 40 Education Act, 1893 40 Education Act, 1902 80, 83–4 Education Act, 1918 97, 100

Education Act, 1944 xvii, 78, 111, 115 Education Act, 1980 142 Education Reform Act, 1988 143, 145, 151 Education Act, 1994 114 Education Act, 2002 144 Education Act, 2011 154 Education Development Trust, the 72 Education (Provision of Meals) Act, 1906 83 Educational Priority Areas 126 Elbaum, B. 117 Eldon Judgement, 1805 6 Ellison, Richard 63 Endowed Schools Act, 1869 48, 69–70 Endowed Schools Report (Taunton Report), 1868 (The Schools Enquiry Commission) 42, 47–8, 50, 54–5, 70, 84, 86, 99 Engels, Friedrich 30 Eton College 6, 42, 48, 64–5, 69, 72, 114, 159, 172 Eugenics Society 77, 96 Evans, Gavin 138 Exeter School 49 Eysenck, Hans (H. J.) 126 Factory Acts, 1802, 1819, 1833 21 Federation of School Masonic Lodges 49 Ferns, Harry 131 Fielding, Henry 42 Firmin, Thomas 4 Fitzroy Report, 1904 (Interdepartmental Report on Physical Deterioration) 76 Five Mile Act, 1665 7 Fleming Report, 1944 (The Public Schools and the General Education System) 114, 127 Floud, Jean 130 Forster, W. E. 38, 48 Foulds, Alan 159 Fox, William 14 Fraser, James 37 Freemasons Hall, Westminster 44 Frisch, Otto 129 Froebel, F. xxi Fulton, J. 129 Gagg, J. C. 121 Galbraith, J. K. 116 Galton, Francis 77 Galton, M. 105 Gardner, Philip 4, 40 Garrrett, John 118 Gathorne Hardy, J. 61 Geddes Cuts, 1921 98 General Enclosure Act, 1801 1

180 Index George III, King 17 Gibbon, Edward 7 Giddy, Davies 10, 22, Gifford family, the 63 Girls’ Public Day School Trust 25, 55–6 Girton College, Cambridge 56 Gladstone, W. E. 48, 79 Glass, D. V. 96 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 52 Gove, Michael 137, 138, 147, 155, 157, 159, 165 Government Enquiries and Reports, see under name of chairperson Graham, Sir James 37, 67 Graham, J. A. 46 Grand Tour, the 7 Grant Robertson, Charles 108 Grammar Schools Act, 1840 6, 47 Great Exhibition, 1851 31 Green, Andy 25 Green, Frances 172 Grey, Charles (Earl Grey) 22 Griggs, Clive 152 Gropius, Walter 105 Guest, Edwin 52 Hadath, Gunby 45 Hadow Report, 1923 (The Differentiation of Curriculum for Boys and Girls) 100–101 Hadow Report, 1924 (Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity) 101 Hadow Report, 1926 (The Education of the Adolescent) 83, 101 Hadow Report, 1928 (Books in the Elementary Classroom) 102 Hadow Report, 1931 (The Primary School) 102, 103, 120 Hadow Report, 1933 (Infant and Nursery Schools) 102 Hadow, W. H. 100 Haileyborough College 43 Halfon, Robert 160 Halsey, A. H. 131 Hancock, Thomas 31 Hardy, Keir 77 Harmsworth Alfred (Northcliffe, Viscount) 75 Harrow School 42, 51, 64, 87–8 Harvey, Daniel 66–7 Hayek, Freidrich 135 Hazelwood School 20 Headmasters’ Conference, the 42, 107 Headstone Road School, Pinner 104 Health and Morals of Apprenctices Act, 1802 21

Heath, A. F. 131 Heath, Edward 142 Heim, Alice 124 Hele’s Grammar School, Exeter 49 Helm, Toby 160 Henty, G. A. 44 Herrnstein, R. 137 Hetherington, H. 129 Heward, C. 61 Hewett School, Norfolk 156 Hill, Arthur 20 Higher Education Act, 2004 164 Highgate School 71 Hitchin College 56 HMI Report, 1978 (Primary Education in England) 122 Holmes, Edmund 83, 105 Holmes, Maurice 115 Honey, John 43, 61 Hopkins, Anthony 3, 33 Horn, Pamela 40 Howard, Ebenezer 75 Howley, Willam, Bishop of London 17 Human Genome Project 138 Hunt, J. McV. 124 Hurstpierpoint College 43 Huxley, Julian 96 Imperial College, London 160 Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire 105 Initial Teaching Alphabet, the 121 Institute of Economic Affairs 131 Interdepartmental Report on Physical Deterioration, 1904 (Fitzroy Report) 76 Ipswich School 71 Jackson, Dennis 124 James, Eric 118 Jarratt Report, 1985 (British Higher Education) 162 Jenner, Edward 2 Jensen, Arthur 126 Johnson, Boris 138 Johnson, Richard 9, 25 John Lyon School, Harrow 48 Joseph, Keith 137, 142–3, 151 Joynson-Hicks, William 103 Judd Commercial School, Tonbridge 48 Kay Shuttleworth, James 37 Keate, John 172 Keble College, Oxford 51 Keele University 129

Index 181 Keynes, J. M. 96 King, Sarah 107 King Edward’s Aston Grammar School, Birmingham 48 King Edward’s Camp Hill Grammar School, Birmingham 48 King Edward’s Five Ways Grammar School, Birmingham 48 King Edward’s Grammar School, Birmingham 48, 106 King George III 17 King George V School, Southport 106 Kings College, Cambridge 50 King’s Library, the 64 Klein, V. 117 Ku Hsaio-Yu (Jenny) 112 Kynaston, David 73 Lacey, Dan 119 Lacqueur, Thomas 4, 15, Lancaster, Joseph 16, 18–19,172 Lancing College 43 Lawrence Sherriff School, Rugby 48, 70 Lazonik, W. 117 Lee, H. C. 33 Lee, Jenny 131 Leeds Grammar School 71–2 Lever, William Hesketh 31 Levin, Michael 137 Lewis, Jane 78 Lewis, Sarah 54 Liddell, Henry 42 Lilian Baylis Technology School, Kennington 154 Lily, Samuel 5 Lincoln’s Inn 89 Lind, James 2 Lindemann, Frederick 129 Lindsay, A. D. 112, 129 Lindsay, Kenneth 106 Lindsey, Theophilus 11 Linton Village College, Cambridgeshire 105 Lloyd George, David 83, 93 Lloyds of London 32 Lockett Road School, Harrow Weald 104 Lodge, Oliver 89 Lodge, Sir Richard 89 London Corresponding Society 19 London School Board, the 83 Longfield, Anne 156 Loughborough University 130 Lowe, Robert 38 Lunar Society 19 Lyle, Abram 31

Lynn, R. 126, 137–8 Macadam, John Loudon 30 Macmillan, Harold 111, 116 Macmillan, Margaret 84 Madras School, the 15 Malthus, Thomas 63 Malvern College 43 Manchester Chamber of Commerce 65 Manchester Grammar School 65–6, 71, 106 Manchester High School for Girls 54 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 19 Mangan, J. A. 43, 61, 87 Mann, Horace xxi Marks, Percy 81 Marlborough College 43, 100, 114 Marsden, Brian 124 Martin, Greg Sir 149 Marwick, Arthur 94–5 Marshall, Stirrat (Johnson-Marshall, Stirrat) 119 Mason, S. 121 Masonic Movement, the 44, 49 Mason Science College, Birmingham 53, 88–9 Maxwell Fry, Edwin 105 May Report, the 1931(National Expenditure) 98 McCallan, James 32 McKormick, William 94 McIntosh, Neil 72 Meade, L. T. 45 Medd, David 119 Merchant Taylor’s School, London 69, 106 Metcalf, John, (Blind Jack of Knaresborough) 2 M’Gonigle, G. C. H. 95 Mill Hill School 7 Ministry of Health 111 Moberley, George 42–3 Money, Chiottza 76 Montagu, Lord Robert 48 Moorhouse, E. 121 Morant, Robert 79–80, 82–6 More Hannah 10–12, 14 Morris, Henry 105 Morris, Max 152 Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act, 1888 62 Municipal Corporations Act, 1835 34 Murray, C. 137 Murray, Lindley 7 Myrdal, A. 117

182 Index Nairn, T. 25 Nash, John (Lord Nash) 157 National Association for the Promotion of Social Science 55 National Curriculum, the 143 National Education League 38 National Society, the 17, 36, 39 National Society for the Promotion of Science 52 Newbolt, Henry 44–5 Newbolt Report, 1921 (The Teaching of English) 100 Newcastle Report, (The State of Popular Education in England) 1861 18, 37, 99 Newington Green Dissenting Academy 7 New Lanark School 19 Newman, George 84 Newnham College, Cambridge 56 Newsom Report, 1963 (Half our Future) 127 Newsome, D. 61 New Towns Act, 1946 116 Northcliffe, Viscount (Harmsworth, Alfred) 75 Northcote Trevelyan Report, (The Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service) 1854 89 North of England Council for the Promotion of Higher Education for Women 56 Norwood, Cyril 100, 112 Norwood Poor Law School 37 Norwood Report, 1943 (Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary School) xvii, 113–4, 124 Nuffield Foundation 121 Oakington Lane School, Wembley 104 O’Connell, Daniel 36 Office of Special Enquiries and Reports 79 Old Brentford Sunday School 14 Oliphant, Marcus 129 Open University, the 131 Outwood Academy, Middlesboro 156 Owen, Robert 10, 11, 19, Owen, Robert Dale 19 Owens College. Manchester 53, 56, 89 Oxford Movement, the 51 Oxford Polytechnic 143 Page, Edgar 162 Paine, Thomas 19 Pallmer, Charles 4 Palmer, Amy 145 Palmerston, Viscount (Temple H. J.) 69 Pankhurst, Emmeline 94

Peacock, Thomas Love 23 Pearson, Roger 137 Peel, Robert 35, 64, 67 Peierls, Rudolph 129 Pepys, Charles (Earl of Cottenham) 67–8 Percival, John 42, 52 Perkin, Harold 78 Percy Report, 1945 (Higher Technological Education) 129–30 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich xxi, 19 Peterloo Massacre 9 Peters, Ralph 4 Phythian, G. 46 Piaget, J. 121 Pinsent, Ellen 77, 97 Pioneer Fund, the 137 Pitman, Isaac 34 Plowden Report, 1967 (Children and their Primary Schools) 121, 126, 146 Polish Resettlement Act, 1946 117 Pollard, Sidney 115 Poor Laws, the 22 Porter, John 31 Porter, Richard 30 Potter, Richard 65 Priestley, Joseph 20 Prince Albert 52 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 136 Public School Lodges Council, 1936 44 Public Schools Act, 1868 70 Pupil-teacher scheme, 1846 37 Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Blackburn 48 Radley College 43 Raikes, Robert 10–14, Rathmell Dissenting Academy 7 Raynor, Angela 160 Reed, Talbot Baines 44 Reeve, Clara 11 Reform Act, 1832 35, 65 Reform Act, 1867 38, 48 Reid, Elizabeth Jesser 56 Reid, George 81 Relief Acts, 1778 and 1791 3 Religious Tract Society 44 Reports, see under name of chairperson Richmond, W. K.121 Rickett, Compton 80 Ridge, J. M. 131 Ringer, F. xiii, 88 Ritschel, Dan 63

Index 183 Roach, John 52 Robbins Report, the 1963 (Higher Education) 128, 130 Robinson, Wendy 80 Roebuck, John Arthur 36 Roedean School, Brighton 55 Romilly, Samuel 62 Rose, Jim 146 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 19 Rowntree, Seebohm 76 Royal College of Music 160 Royal Commissions, see under name of chairperson Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst 56 Royal Society 51 Royal Society for the Arts 56 Rubinstein, W. D. 33, 45, 88 Rugby School 41, 64, 70 Runciman, Walter 69–70 Rushton, J. P. 137 Ruskin College, Oxford 135 Ruskin Speech, 1976 122 Russell, Lord John 67–8 Sadler, Michael 78–80 Saint Edmunds College, Ware 3 Saint Omer College 3 Saint Hilda’s Hall, Oxford (now Saint Hilda’s College) 56 Saint Paul’s School, London 69, 88 Salisbury, Marquess of (Cecil, Robert Gascoyne) 80, 90 Sanderson, Michael 5, 53 Sandhurst (Royal Military Academy) 56 Sawston Village College, Cambridgeshire 105 Schiller, C. 121 Schools of Art and Design 52 Science and Art Department 79 Scruton, Roger 135 Selsea School, Sussex 104 Selwyn College, Cambridge 51 Sevenoaks School, Kent 160 Sewell, Elizabeth 54 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, 1919 94 Shaxson, Nicholas 142 Sherriffhales Dissenting Academy 7 Sherwood, Mary Martha 13, 14 Shockley, William 137 Shrewsbury School 5, 42, 48, 63, 69 Shrubsall, Frank 97 Sidgwick, Henry 89 Sidlesham School, Sussex 104 Siemens, Werner von 32

Simon, Brian 6, 25, 86, 99, 105, 114, 120, 122, 124, 151 Simon, Ernest 97, 112 Simon, Shena 112 Simon, T. xxi Singleton, Robert 43 Skinner, B. F. xxi Smiles, Samuel 54 Smith, Adam 7, 12, Smith, Francis Pettit 31 Smith, Sydney 9 Smith, W. H. 76 Snowden, Philip 69 Social Democratic Federation 77 Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor 4 Society for the Arts, the (Royal Society for the Arts) 56 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 64 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 4, 5, 62 Society for the Reformation of Manners 12 Southey, Robert 20 Southport National School 4 Spens Report, 1938 (The Education of the Adolescent) 102 Spens, W. 102 Spielman, Amanda 155 Stanhope, Spencer 22 Steer Report, 2005 (Pupil Behaviour and School Discipline) 153 Stephen, M. 61 Stillman, G. C. 104 Stone, A. L. 121 Stonyhurst College 3 Stopes, Marie 94, 96 Stuart, James 56 Stubbings, Paul 156 Sunak, Rishi 148 Sunday School Association 15 Sunday School Union 15 Sunday Times 66 Synnerton Dyer, Sir Peter 162 Szreter, Simon 158 Tate, Henry 31 Tawney, R. H. 77, 94, 97, 102, 105, 107 Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act, 1992, 61 Taxes Act, 1988 61 Taunton Report (Endowed Schools Report), 1868 (The Schools Enquiry Commission) 42, 47–8, 50, 54–5, 70, 84, 86, 99

184 Index Taunton Grammar School 63 Teachers Pay and Conditions act, 1987 143 Teaching and Higher Education Act, 1998 162 Technical and Vocational Initiative 142 Technical Instruction Act, 1889 79 Telford, Thomas 2, 20, 30 Temple, H. J. (Viscount Palmerston) 69 Temple, Frederick 49 Thatcher, Margaret 76, 125, 131 135–7, 139–40, 142, 145, 151, 162 Thompson, E. P. 25 Thompson, J. J. 99 Thompson, R. S. 60 Thompson, William 31 Thompson Report, 1918 (The Role of the Sciences in Education) 99 Thring, Edward 42 Times Educational Supplement 111 Tomlinson, George 119 Tonbridge School 71 Toomer, A. J. 105 Trades Union Congress 77 Tredgold, A. F. 97 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Programme (TIMMS) 136 Trevelyan, P. C. 98 Trevor, Arthur 68 Trimmer, Sarah 10–11, 13, 17, 172 Trojan Horse Affair 154 Turton, Thomas 22 UCL Institute of Education, London 175 Uffculme School, Birmingham 82 Ulster Institute for Social Research 137 Union of School Masonic Lodges 49 University College, London 64, 138, 163 University College School, Hampstead 87 University Grants Committee 108 University of Bath 130 University of Birmingham 89, 129 University of Buckingham 131, 163 University of Cambridge 7, 50–53, 56, 69, 88–9, 114, 159–60 University of Durham 50, 88, 160 University of Exeter 160 University of Hull 162 University of Leeds 88–9 University of Leicester 145 University of Liverpool 88, 96, 129 University of London 23, 53, 88, 130 University of Manchester 88 University of Newcastle 88

University of Oxford 7, 50–53, 88–90, 159–60, 163 University of Salford 130 University of Sheffield 88, 100 University Test Act, 1871 89 Valentine, C. W. 97 Verkaik, Robert 161 Victoria University 88–9 Vlaemincke, Meriel 85 Wakefield City Academies Trust 155 Warner, Francis 81 Warrington Dissenting Academy 7 Waterhouse, Alfred 53 Weaver, Toby 130 Webb, Aston 48, 53 Webb, Beatrice 77, 82 Webb, Sydney 94 Wedgwood, Josiah 2 Wellesley, Arthur (Duke of Wellington) 42, 51 Wellington College 43, 115 Wells, H. G. 96 Wesley, John 14 Wesley, Samuel 7 Westminster School 42, 64–5 Weston-super-Mare County School 105 Whitbread, Samuel 21–3 Whitby County Primary School, 119 Whitehead, Maurice 3 Whiteley Woods Open Air School, Sheffield 82 Widdowson, Frances 82 Wiener, M. J. 25, 32–3, 88, 108 Wilberforce, William 12, 22 Wilkinson, Ellen 97, 119 William Tyndale School 122 Wilmot, Eardley 47 Wilson, Harold 116, 130 Winchester College 42–3, 64, 69, 88 Wingfield Baker, Richard 71 Winterbotham. Henry 55 Wolverhampton Grammar School 48 Woodard, Nathaniel 43 Woodhead, Chris 137, 143 Woolwich Speech, the 130 Woolstonecraft, Mary 9, 24, Worker’s Educational Association 52, 77, 131 Wycombe Abbey School 55 Yorkshire College of Science, Leeds 53, 88 Young Report, the 1920 (Scholarships and Free Places) 99–100