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")
chief education officer was to call, with considerable prescience, perhaps ‘the last grand flourish and fanfare of local government’.3
However, not only was the school leaving age to be raised to fifteen on 1 April 1947, but the birth-rate (one of Bevan’s banes in housing and health) had been rising since 1942. That year it was up 73,000 to 652,000. In addition, the infant mortality rate was falling sharply under the influence of improved treatment and better wartime diets for the poor. Between 1942 and the end of 1947, no fewer than a million more children were born in England and Wales than in the previous five years. These all had to be found school places at the age of five, on top of the extra 200,000 places and 13,000 teachers needed to raise the school leaving age.4 The victims of this demographic shift in the school population proved to be the plans for nursery education and the major restructuring of secondary education that had been envisaged in the more enlightened parts of Butler’s White Paper and Act.
To get the show on the road, wonderful Nordic-sounding acronyms were enlisted. To achieve ROSLA (Raising of the School Leaving Age), HORSA and SFORSA (Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School Leaving Age and School Furniture Operation for the same purpose) came into being. In addition an emergency scheme, drawn up by the coalition, put 35,000 ex-servicemen and recruits from business and commerce through a crash twelve-month teacher-training course. Although it took over-long to get up to speed, it leavened the traditional teacher intake with people who had healthy experience of the outside world.5 Most, however, went to the primaries and the secondary moderns, where the birth-rate and the new school leaving age were chiefly increasing the numbers. The effect, unwittingly, was to reinforce the status distinction between grammars, with their better educated and better trained staff, and the secondary moderns.6
Such was the pressure and the competition elsewhere in the economy for raw materials and manpower (it was manpower shortage, not unemployment, which was Labour’s recurrent problem), that the Cabinet twice debated postponing ROSLA. In August and September 1945, Ellen Wilkinson achieved agreement easily enough that the date should stick. It was seen, in her words, as ‘a political necessity’ and in Herbert Morrison’s as a ‘test of the Government’s sincerity’. The date held even though it was realised that for a time it would mean makeshift accommodation and over-large classes. But in late 1946, Dalton, in all else the welfare state’s generous, even over-generous, friend, panicked. It would mean ‘a direct loss to the national labour force which will reach 370,000 by September 1948 … at a time when the whole economy is badly overstrained,’ he argued. A five-month postponement would also allow preparations to be much more complete.7
This was a battle that Ellen Wilkinson’s Permanent Secretary, Sir John Maud (later Lord Redcliffe-Maud), judged she had to win, or the already limited resources for education would go elsewhere.8 She arrived at Cabinet issuing barely veiled threats of resignation. Postponement would deprive 150,000 children of a whole year’s education, and ‘the children to suffer most would be precisely those working-class children whose education has already been so seriously interrupted by the war. They would all be children of working-class parents; and parents in better circumstances would remain free to keep their children at school,’ she told the Cabinet. If it was put off, the same intensity of effort to hit a date would never again be achieved. The country needed higher levels of skills immediately, not less skilled workers. Whenever governments hit trouble, she said, education was the first casualty.9
In a sense, the same argument that had kept children out of school in the nineteenth century, the need for their work, was being heard again. Ellen Wilkinson won, Dalton recording in his diary that he did not mind. ‘I had never been keen on this.’10 Barely a week later she ventured in the great freeze to an icy meeting to open the Old Vic Theatre School, its roof blitzed open to the sky, the room without heating. She caught pneumonia and on 6 February, at the age of 55, she died.11 ROSLA was her memorial, George Tomlinson, a Lancashire weaver who had left school at ten, her successor.
Red Ellen’s and George Tomlinson’s reputations have suffered heavily in the hands of Labour critics for their failure to bend the permissive nature of Butler’s Act to Labour goals, particularly over secondary education and comprehensive schools. The new Ministry of Education officials were still firmly in the grip of the idea that there were gold, silver and iron children. Neither minister, it is argued, did enough to challenge that assumption.12 Ellen Wilkinson, like so many other players in the welfare state’s story, was the product of a strong Methodist background. She was schooled at Ardwick Higher Elementary Grade in Manchester and fought her way to that city’s university in 1910, when women undergraduates were a rarity. She used to claim she had been born into the ‘proletarian purple’.13 Her memories of her own schooldays were that ‘the top few pupils were intelligent and could mop up facts like blotting paper … but we were made to wait for the rest of the huge classes … we wanted to stretch our minds but were merely a nuisance.’14 This was hardly the background likely to produce an automatic champion of mixed ability or multilateral schools, and her biographer Betty Vernon, while firmly defending her reputation, concedes she was ‘in no way … an educational expert’. Like many Labour MPs, she respected the grammar schools and had no intention of destroying them. She believed that Butler’s ‘parity of esteem’ in the tripartite system could be achieved, and reflected the same confusion that even her fiercest Labour critics sometimes displayed over the need to preserve grammar-school standards while seeing comprehensives as an ideal.15 In addition, for twelve of the last eighteen months of her life – her period at education – she was ‘desperately ill’ with chronic bronchitis and asthma.
Wilkinson had inherited The Nation’s Schools, Butler and Ede’s May 1945 circular advising local authorities on how plans for the new secondary system should be drawn up. It argued strongly for the tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, and discouraged multilaterals. ‘It would be a mistake to plunge too hastily on a large scale into a revolutionary change … innovation is not necessarily reform.’16 A circular Ellen Wilkinson approved six months after Labour took office opened the comprehensive door fractionally wider, but The New Secondary Education, issued in June 1947 after her death, again heavily reflected the ministry’s view that a tripartite system should be maintained. She had read the pamphlet, which indeed eventually carried her foreword, in March 1946 and had exploded in anger. ‘This pamphlet’, she had declared, ‘is fundamentally phoney because it subconsciously disguises the real question that has to be answered, namely, “What shall we do to get miners and agricultural workers if a hundred per cent of the children able to profit from it are offered real secondary education?” Answer … give the real stuff to a selected 25 per cent, steer the 75 per cent away from the humanities, pure science even history.’
Her anger came in part because, however astonishingly in hindsight, the intention was actually to reduce the intake of grammar and technical schools combined to 25 to 30 per cent of the school population to avoid diluting standards,17 while the secondary modern curriculum, responsibility for which was left heavily with the schools themselves, was assumed to be essentially concrete and practical.
‘Can’t Shakespeare mean more than a scrubbing brush?’ Red Ellen raged. ‘Can’t enough of a foreign language be taught to open windows on the world a bit wider – I learnt French verbs saying them as I scrubbed floors at home.’ It was suggested merely that ‘something of the sciences, maths and arts might be taught’ while history was ‘banished as too difficult … or was it possibly too dangerous if an intelligent child asked awkward questions? (Don’t worry how we got India, let’s go and do some nice work at the forge!)’18
Whatever her personal stance, as Margaret Thatcher was to find fifteen years later, tough-minded ministers with strong personal views cannot always shift the education department’s official mind. Ellen Wilkinson’s criticisms seem to have changed the pamphlet little. Two months after her outburst a circular which she approved confirmed in even starker terms what she was railing against.
With the school leaving age due to rise to fifteen, some secondary moderns, many of which were converted higher elementary schools, were proposing to enter suitable children for the School Certificate,