The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
![The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins](limg_read341088.jpg "The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State - Nicholas Timmins")
Butler inherited it, looked broadly like this. Schooling up to fourteen was compulsory and free, with the great bulk of pupils staying in elementary or ‘all age’ schools until they left at fourteen (although many of the schools had developed junior and senior sections). Some stayed in the ‘all age’ schools until eighteen. In 1938, the last year for which there are pre-war statistics, 88 per cent of all pupils were in such schools.23 A small group of brighter children, selected by examination at eleven, went on ‘special place’ scholarships to local authority secondary schools, many of which had been modelled on the independent grammars. Overall, just under half of their places (45 per cent) were free, the remainder being taken up by fee-payers arriving at ages between eleven and fourteen. The proportions in individual secondary schools varied enormously, however.
Independent of the local authority maintained sector were the public schools and the old endowed grammar schools; many of the latter now being direct grant schools, receiving financial help from the Board of Education in return for a proportion of free places. A variety of other types of assisted school also existed including commercial, trade, nautical and junior technical schools, and the ‘central’ schools, a mix of selective and non-selective municipal schools for eleven- to fifteen-year-olds. Private tutoring still flourished.
Very broadly – and it can only be very broadly – elementary schools catered for the working class up to the age of fourteen, a small proportion of these children escaping on scholarships into secondary education. Fees tended to exclude the working class who did not win scholarships. The secondaries mainly absorbed the lower middle-class children who stayed on either through scholarships or because their parents could pay, while the middle class and above could afford the independent grammars and public schools if their children did not win free places. Schooling reflected the gradations of society. The view of the Schools Inquiry Commission of 1868 that’… the different classes of society, the different occupations of life, require different teaching’24 could still be seen in practice.
What all this meant has been chronicled by Corelli Barnett – ‘that tireless enumerator of Establishment failings’, in Peter Hennessy’s phrase25 – and by Brian Simon, the equally tireless educational historian. The vast majority of children left school at fourteen with no formal qualifications, exam passes or failures, of any kind. They ‘were pushed off the plank straight into the job market’.26 Of roughly 3.5 million children aged between thirteen and eighteen, only 470,000 or one in seven were in maintained schools, the great bulk of these leaving at sixteen. In 1938 a mere 19,000 stayed on until they were eighteen. Of these ‘only 8000 emerged with the Higher School Certificate, the potential passport to university or other higher education’ and just over half those actually got to university.27 This ‘half-cock’ education system, in Barnett’s phrase, most neglected the talent of working-class children, for all too few of them hurdled the obstacles into secondary education and then on to university.28
Of the 50,000 students in universities, just over half had started life in elementary schools. But overall it was calculated that one in 150 of the children in elementary schools reached university, against one in twenty for secondary schools and one in eight for the public schools.29 Not only was class structure vividly reflected in British education, the nation’s overall educational record had slipped against its competitors. In the mid-1930s, even if Scotland and Wales did much better, England had only one student at university for every 1000 of the population. In Germany the figure was 1:604, in France 1:480 and in the United States 1:125.30 In addition, British university education remained heavily arts-dominated. Imperial in London was the only science and technology based college, and science and technology courses accounted for only 25 per cent of university students.31 There were 149 technical colleges, but their full-time as opposed to part-time tally was only 9000 students. Of nearly three million fourteen- to eighteen- year-olds who had left school only one in twenty-five was on even a part-time course.32
This was the unimpressive educational record which Butler confronted in 1941, the war having only compounded the situation. School building had halted, while the evacuation programme had left 500,000 children in January 1940 getting no schooling at all.33 Butler inherited, however (and Beveridge exploited), powerful movements for reform. In the Labour movement, R. H. Tawney’s role was critical. Peter Hennessy describes him operating as ‘a kind of tweedy one man pressure group, producing ideas through a haze of herbal tobacco smoke pushing them gently in one forum after another until they caught on’.34 As early as 1922, under his influence, Labour published Secondary Education for All. In 1926 he was a member of the Board of Education’s consultative committee which in the Hadow report produced the same target – secondary education for all from the age of eleven and the raising of the school leaving age to fifteen (legislated for in 1936, but defeated by the outbreak of war); in other words the creation of something much closer to modern primary and secondary education.35 Secondary schools should be divided into selective grammars, promoting a ‘literary or scientific curriculum’, and non-selective secondary modern schools which would provide a more ‘realistic or practical trend in the last two years’. Hadow was followed in 1938 by Spens, another Board of Education report, which recommended an end to fees in all state schools and a tripartite division of secondary education into grammar, secondary modern and technical schools.
So while little happened to change the pattern of education in the 1930s, the pressure for growth in provision, and for a change in its nature, was on. And as Butler took over there was one other factor. The public schools were in crisis both conceptually and financially. They had been under attack since the First World War. In 1929, Robert Graves in his autobiography Goodbye to All That excoriated Charterhouse and the ‘fundamental evil’ of ‘what passed as the public school spirit’. By his account that included bullying, violence, adolescent homosexuality and a profound philistinism, despite a classics-based education, that left him with ‘an oppression of the spirit I hesitate to recall in its full intensity’.36 Graham Greene’s symposium The Old School joined the assault in 1934 and demand for the type of education offered by public schools began to decline. In the summer of 1939, Harrow decided to close a boarding house, cutting its size from 600 to 500 pupils, and the Journal of Education predicted that some newer public schools would find it difficult to survive. They were being challenged by the ‘improvement in the quality of instruction at ordinary secondary schools’, and were in trouble. Their claim to ‘a special fitness to rule’ was attacked by Charles Douie, a former assistant principal of University College London and old boy of Rugby, who said: ‘I cannot believe that the England of tomorrow will tolerate privilege in education’.37
Faced by a mounting financial crisis, the public school heads turned for help to Sir Cyril Norwood, a former headmaster of Marlborough and Harrow, now chairman of the Secondary Schools Examination Council. He identified Harrow, Marlborough, Lancing, Tonbridge and Repton as public schools whose future was either under threat or in serious doubt38 and began to explore with the Board of Education the possibility of public funding in return for access. In the Spectator in late 1939 and early 1940 he acknowledged the ‘growing hostility’ to public schools. ‘It is hard to resist the argument that a State which draws its leaders in overwhelming proportions from a class so limited as this is not a democracy, but a pluto-democracy,’ he said, ‘and it is impossible to hope that the classes of this country will ever be united in spirit unless their members cease to be educated in two separate systems of schools, one of which is counted as definitely superior to the other.’39 The defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France brought forth powerful internal as well as external criticism. T. C. Worsley, a master at Wellington, railed: ‘We are where we are, and shall be where we shall be, owing, largely, if not wholly, to the privileged education which the ruling classes have received in the last forty years.’ He added: ‘If the public schools are national assets because of their leadership training qualities, what are we to think of those qualities when we survey the mess into which their leadership has brought us?’40 To achieve a ‘common elementary education for all’ would be a great advance. David Low’s Evening Standard cartoons of Colonel Blimp, the epitome of the old school tie that had brought Britain through Munich to a war in which the early days saw nothing but defeat or the grimmest