Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present.

(2016) - Ken Jones

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Abstract

Notes

Education in Britain 1944 to the Present

Post-war Settlements:

-   The Labour Government, despite its nationalisation of several large and inefficient sectors, ‘’showed a lack of interest in planning that was quite startling’’ (Hobsbawn 1994: 272)

-   Between 1944 and 1947 the education systems of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland were substantially changed, via a series of Education Acts – in England and Wales in 1944, Scotland in 1945 and Northern Ireland in 1947.

-   Butler noted the absence of any sharpness in parliamentary debate about the 1944 Act – was that the new laws delivered for which reformers had long been pressing, secondary education for all

-   In 1926 the Hadow report had called for the raising of the school-leaving age to 15, and the general establishment of a post-primary education. At the end of the 1930s, repeating the call, the Spens Report had argued that ‘’the  existing arrangements… for… education above the age of 11+… have ceased to correspond with the actual structure of modern society and with… economic facts’’ (Spens Report 1938: 353)

-   In establishing secondary education for all, neither the 1944 Act nor its Scottish and Northern Irish counterparts specified the institutional forms that secondary schooling should take

-   The Spens Report had sketched a system based on a tripartite division into modern schools, grammar schools, and technical high schools. The Norwood Committee in 1943 had decided that these distinctions corresponded to the facts of social existence. Individuals had ‘enough in common as regards capacities and interests’ to justify the separation of individuals into ‘certain rough groupings’ (Norwood Report 1943: 1)

-   Formally speaking, secondary moderns were introduced in 1945, and the school-leaving age, everywhere except in Northern Ireland was raised to 15 in 1947

-   All-age schools continued to exist – especially in rural areas until the early 1960s

-   Education was assigned a role in relation to industrialisation and economic development – the ‘deadening routine of much industrial work’ is how one Ministry pamphlet described it (Central Advisory Committee – England 1947: 58)

-   Repeatedly, in the late 1940s, the Labour conference – against the arguments of Wilkinson and Tomlinson – reiterated its commitment to multilateral reform

-   Sociological research carried out in the early 1950s demonstrated a continuing pattern of class-based advantage and disadvantage that ‘secondary education for all’ had not very much disturbed. In 1953, Floud et al investigating grammar school admissions in two parts of England, found that the son of a ‘skilled manual’ father had a 14-18 per cent change of entering grammar school, compared with the 59-68 per cent change enjoyed by the son of a professional/managerial father (1956: 42-3)

-   Himmelweit, researching London schools in 1951, reached similar conclusions: the proportion of working class students in grammar schools had risen, but in absolute terms their numbers were small; the middle class ‘continued to be over-represented (Himmelweit 1954)

-   the centre of the system, the Scottish Education Department, was created in 1872, and its powerful centralising influence allowed subsequent development to occur along distinctively Scottish lines

• The Scottish Education Department had established over the previous fifty years a system based on clear differentiation between different types of secondary course. ‘Senior’ secondary students followed a predominantly academic line of study and took examinations at 17-18 that enabled access to higher education. The rest - the 70-80 per cent who were designated ‘junior’ secondary schools - took no national examinations (McPherson and Raab 1988: 248)

• Just as sternly as the reports of the early part of the century (Newbolt Report 1921) it demanded that schools ‘war unceasingly against’ the mass of ‘debased and incorrect speech’, in a ‘campaign against the speech of the street, the cinema and the illiterate home’ (Scottish Education Department 1947: 63)

• T.S. Eliot, whose Notes Towards the Definition of Culture shaped the thinking of manywho staffed the grammar schools of the next two decades. ;In our headlong rush to educate everybody’ wrote Eliot, ‘we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture… are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in the mechanised caravans’ (1949: 111)

• Others thought that the welfare state was complicit in ‘the increasing mechanisation of life’ and the ‘impersonality of human relationships’ (Bantock 1947: 171)

• ‘’If we have traded our freedom for the material advantages of democracy we have made a bad bargain [for] there is plenty of evidence that democracy is incompatible with freedom’’ (Law 1950: 180-4)

• As MiKibbin puts it, ‘denied the right to buy places at grammar school by the 1944 Act, the middle class won them instead by examination’, so that the proportion of ‘free places’ won by working-class children was no higher in 1950 than in 1914 (McKibbon 1998: 260-2)

• Grammar schools had become the jewel in the middle-class educational crown

The Golden Age

• Eric Hobsbawn calls the 1950s the start of capitalism’s golden age, ‘when even weak economies like the British flourished and grew’ (1994: 274)

• Governments throughout the ‘developed’ world worked in the belief that ‘more and better education was both desirable in itself and at the same time one of the most important factors in economic growth’ (Papadopoulos 1994: 38)

• Education spending increased at an unprecedented speed - between 1951 and 1975, roughly the period marked out by Hobsbawm, spending on education rose from 6.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent of public expenditure, from 3.0 per cent to 6.2 per cent of GDP (Lowe 1993; Simon 1991)

• The proportion of professional and semi-professional occupations among the workforce was growing - a development whose implications for education were frequently recognised (Crowther Report 1959: 123)

• In 1965, midway through the golden age, Scotland’s growth rate was running at half the British level (Harvie 1993). Northern Ireland - more particularly, its eastern part - entered the last stage of its transformation from a core industrial area to a peripheral region (O’Dowd 1995). Wales, though it benefited greatly from government support for industrial start-up and relocation in the 1950s and 1960s, was by the end of the period once again under economic pressure, especially in the valleys of a southern coalfield that each year became more derelict (Morgan 1981)

• Changed in the occupational structure created a greater demand for higher levels of education and certification

• As jobs and industry migrated from the city, so a split occurred that separated blighted urban areas from suburban sites of growth (Cohen 1997)

• (Plowden Report 1967: 76) rising standards of literacy (Newsom Report 1963) - lay an unyielding, urban-located worry about continuing social and cultural division. ‘Some schools have everything’ noted the Newsom Report, ‘and some virtually nothing’ (1963: 250)

• The British nationality act of 1948 recognised citizens of the commonwealth as British subjects, entitled to enter, work and settle in the country. The lower paid regions of the service sector, and older industries like textiles, drew in many such workers, as well as many from Ireland

• In the 1960 Albemarle Report on the Youth Service his influence is clear, and the distinctive note of post-war social interpretation is struck: ‘’the society which adolescents now enter is in some respects unusually fluid. Old industries change their nature as new processes are adopted; new industries appear and help shift the location of industry itself… A series of Education Acts are causing some movement across class and occupational boundaries… British society is beginning to acquire greater mobility and openness… As the changes develop, old habits, old customs, old sanctions, old freedoms and responsibilities will be called into question… In such a world young people are between conflicting voices. They can sense a contradiction between what they are assured at school are this society’s assumptions, and much they are invited… to admire once they leave [this] sheltered environment’’ (Albemarle Report 1960: 260-1)

• The start of the ‘golden age’ then, was a time not only of economic and educational expansion but also of difficulties both continuing and emerging around social polarisation, cultural and generational difference and nationality

• In 1961, for instance, 73 per cent of students in England and Wales left without having ever attempted a public examination, and over 90 per cent of Scottish school leavers left at 15, without qualifications (Aldcroft 1992: 36; Harvie 1993: 79).

• Although the ‘graduate output’ of each social class was rising, in relative terms inequalities remained ‘remarkably stable’ (Halset et al 1980: 205)

• The inability of the 1944 settlement to make inroads into established patterns of a large pool of untapped educational ability, much of it located in the working class (Robbins Report 1963)

• Selection mechanisms had presupposed that children possessed a fixed quantity of intelligence and that testing accurately measured this quality

• White Paper of 1958, ‘in which it has not yet been possible to give… the secondary modern schools the resources they need

• If the secondary modern could be revitalised, though ministers - if it could be better funded, if its students could be encouraged to stay on to take public examinations - then perceptions of the school would change, so that parents would come to believe that their children would have a fair start in life (Ministry of Education 1958: 11)

• Labour was responding to a rising level of demand for certification - but without significantly reshaping the existing pattern of institutions

• The devotion to the grammar school wrecked the Conservatives’ capacity to construct a modernised, substantial system of technical education

• In 1955, the Minister of Education, David Eccles, decided that no new technical schools would be approved in England and Wales, ‘unless there was a very strong case’ (Simon 1991: 184)

• A.J.P Taylor advised students to ‘run away to sea rather than go to secondary modern’ (Carter 1962: 5)

• Looking back from the vantage-point of the late 1960s on this whole experience of low status, examination failure, under-resourcing and parental discontent, the Conservative educationalist Kathleen Ollerenshaw concluded that it had all been a ‘disaster’ (McCulloch 1998: 139)

• ‘The 1944 Education Act’ Crosland wrote, ‘set out to make secondary education universal. Yet opportunities for advancement are still not equal’ (Corsland 1956: 188) (Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all)

• Labour’s 1964 election promise that it would provide a ‘grammar school education for all’ was not just a deft piece of rhetoric, but an expression of the intentions and confusions of its leaders (Labour Party 1964)

• ‘Education is a vital part of the nation’s capital investment’ stated the Crowther Report (1959: 108). The Newsom Report likewise believed that the ‘economic argument’ for investment was compelling (1963: 7)

• So when in 1962 the Ministry of Education set up a ‘Curriculum Study Group’, intended to ponder and influence questions of curriculum and pedagogy, the intuitive was defeated by opposition both from teachers’ organisations and from local authorities

• The Schools Council, set up by the government in 1964 to disseminate ideas about curricular reform in England and Wales, was dominated by representatives of teachers and it was teachers - through their organisations and as individuals - who has a leading influence on curriculum change

• The Scottish Consultative Committee on the Curriculum, established in a stipulative approach; but it was much more closely connected to the Scottish Education Department, and much less likely to promote the ‘process of experimental trial’ that characterised its English counterpart (Ross 1999: 187)

• From 1955, new kinds of teacher education provided a cadre of teachers toi work in special education (Warnock Report 1978); from 1960, the length of initial courses of teacher education was expanded to three years

• A central theme, which ran through official reports, educational research, media commentary and teachers’ practice, was the relationship between class and academic success and failure, and this relationship was treated almost as much in cultural terms as in economic

• A grammar school, the Central Advisory Council’s 1954 report on Early Leaving in England discovered, those children of ‘semi-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers who were academically successful at 11 were likely to be much less successful than their peers at 16 (Maclure 1979: 238)

• The proportion of migrant children at a school was not allowed to rise above 30 per cent - and accompanied by an insistence that ‘a national system cannot be expected to perpetuate the different values of immigrant groups’ (Commonwealth Immigrant Advisory Council (1964), quoted in Grosvenor 1997: 50)

• The public sector teaching force grew in size - in England its numbers rose from 175,000 in 1946 to 294,000 in 1964 (Simon 1991: 579)

• The year 1961 saw the first substantial strike action since the 1920s, organised by teachers in the west of Scotland. Their protests concerned pay - which was always a central focus

Expansion, Experiment, Conflict

• Education's share of the national income was 4.1 per cent in 1965, more than double what it had been in 1940 (Halsey 1988:241). For the next ten years, it continued to rise, faster than ever. In real terms, education spending in 1975 was three times higher than in 1948 (Aldcroft 1992: 22).

• In 1965, 92 per cent of students in state secondary education were in schools organised along tripartite lines; by 1976, comprehensive schools accounted for 76 per cent of the secondary population

• All advanced capitalist economies experienced in the mid-1970s a ‘second slump’, as powerful in its long-term effects as that of the 1930s. Rates of profit and growth declined, while rates of inflation rose. Against a background of social turbulence, governments cut public spending and imposed policies which sought to restrict the ris in income which workers had achieved in the 1960s; unemployment increased, especially among youth, and in most Western countries the slow rundown of heavy industry increased in pace, as governments presided over the eradication of unprofitable sectors

• Britain and Italy were the only advanced economies in which public expenditure as a percentage of GDP was lower in the mid-1980s than it had been twenty years earlier (Aldcroft 1992: 23)

• Howear Glennerster noted that public spending on education fell as a percentage of GDP from 6.7 per cent in 1975-6 to 4.7 per cent in 1987-8, before rising to 5.2 per cent in 1995-6 (Glennerster 1998: 318)

• By late 1976, Labour was signalling a decisive shift away from its own right wing, James Callaghan’s government agreed to the terms of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, and moved to cut public expenditure in ways guaranteed to worsen provision and to increase unemployment

• ‘’We used to think that you could just spend your way out of recession… I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists’’ (Callaghan 1987: 425-6)

• Education policy should be guided by economic imperatives; students should be prepared for the ‘world of work’; existing classroom practice should be subject to critical scrutiny; central influence over educational change asserted (Callaghan’s speech to foster Education for Economy. ((Could binary this time and see it education post 1976 has produced more economically effective workers))

• The interventions began in the form of spending cuts and developed into a strategy for relating education to a large-scale programme of social and economic restructuring: the education revolution of the 1980s and 90s had its origins in the conflicts, crises, and realignments of the 1970s

• ‘’What would be created would be a ‘Britain based on public service, not a commercialised society where everything has a price’’ (Thompson 1996: 185; Wilson 1964: 10-14)

• Thus the sterling crisis of 1966 led to a deflationary turn in economic policy and the collapse of attempts at co-ordinated and directive economic planning

• In Northern Ireland, what was ruled until the early 1970s by a Unionist administration with little interest in change, Labour’s programme was blocked, even after the introduction of direct rule from Westminster in 1974

• The Cowan Report of 1976 talked of the government’s ‘national commitment’ to comprehensive schooling, but also of the need to ‘govern Northern Ireland’ in the interests of its people, and in doing so to take full account of its particular and special characteristics (Cowan Report 1976: 1)

• As in Wales, the neglect of the majority who were not academically successful was shrinking: there was no examination below GCE level established in Northern Ireland until 1973, nearly a decade after the introduce of the CSE in England

• The Scottish Education Department recommended, throughout the second half of the 1960s, that secondary students in their first two years should be taught in mixed-ability classes, and by 1972 this had become a norm (McPherson and Raab 1988: 393)

• In 1966, the proportion of Welsh 17-year olds still at school was 17 per cent; the figure for England was 12 per cent, and even in the south east it was only 15 per cent. By 1977, the Welsh advantage had been eroded: 21.7 per cent of 17-year olds now stayed on, but this compared with 19.2 per cent for England as a whole and 23.9 per cent in the south-east (Rees and Rees 1980)

• The Certification of Secondary Education (CSE) introduced in England and Wales in 1965, was an equivocal initiative

• After 1962 the introduction of a Standard Grade exam, taken at 15, extended the opportunity of certification to about half the year (McPherson and Raab 1988: 308)

• Between 1968 and 1974, the relative social peach of the golden age came to an end: across western Europe a series of working-class protests and emerging social movements challenged inequalities, claimed rights of participation and recognition, and asserted militant identities

• The 1966 Local Government Act made resources available for schools with significant numbers of ethnic minority pupils. Plowden made similar recommendations; it was critical of previous assimilation policies, such as the dispersal of ethnic minority students across the schools of an LEA, and wrote of the ‘cultural enrichment’ which such students brought to their schools (Plowden Report 1967: ch. 6)

• As the Swann Report noted, ‘’integration’ began to replace assimilation as a policy goal, and references to diversity, tolerance, and equal opportunity began to punctuate policy texts, which now ‘’attempted to give at least some recognition… to the backgrounds of ethnic minority children’’ (Swann Report 1985: 191)

• The 1968 speeches of the Conservative politician Enoch Powell, asserting Britishness against the alien cultures of migrant populations, had politicised the question of race

• It was partly as the result of its pressure that Lbaour introduced a Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 that - inter alia - made it unlawful for schools directly to discriminate against students, by barring them on gender grounds from taking particular subjects

• When the Bullock Report into language and learning declared that ‘’no child should be expected to cast off the language and culture of home as he crosses the school threshold’’ (1975: 75)

• There were, said the Government Green Paper which followed Callaghan’s Ruskin speech, ‘’hard and irreducible economic facts’’ that dictated change (Department of Education and Science 1977a: 24). The educational system was ‘out of touch with the fundamental need for Britain to survive economically in a highly competitive world (1977a: 2)

• In speaking so, Labour inaugurated an as yet unbroken process of ‘economising’ educational discourse (Kenway 1994)

• Labour attempted to complete the work of comprehensive reform in England, and, after unsuccessfully attempting to use existing procedures to force comprehensivisation in all LEAs, eventually legislated to compel comprehensive provision. (The legislation as immediately repealed by the incoming Conserviatve government in 1979)

• The Labour party conference called for its eradication of private education and Roy Hattersley, Shadow Education Minister, warned headteachers of ‘’our serious intention initially to reduce and eventually to abolish private education’’ (Rae 1981: 13)

• Halsey recognises, between 1960 and 1980 the proportion of 17+ students at public schools declined from 29 per cent to 19 per cent, but nearly a third of students obtaining three or more A-levels were from the private sector

• After Bullock in 1974, there were no more official reports to argue that relations between home and school should be central to educational practice

• Margaret Thatcher, as Secretary of State for Education, continued against her will to approve local schemes for comprehensive reorganisation, though wherever possible she preserved in them some degree of selected education (Simon 1991)

• The Government’s (Cons) main statement of strategy reiterated Labour’s commitment to expansion, and notably lacked an interest either in a more directive style of policy implementation, or in linking education to the economic objectives which were beginning to be reasserted by other governments (Department of Education and Science 1972; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1974)

• Thatcher’s programme took the form of a war against the post-war settlement, the economic and social policies on which it rested and the labour movement and public-sector influences which had don so much to bring it about

• In Scotland a more powerful and coherent approach to curriculum change expressed itself in the Munn and Dunning Reports (1977) which, anticipating by several years English attempts to rethink curriculum and proposals to strengthen differentiation between students of different ability groups

• In 1969 the first of a series of essays was published on the perils of educational reform  - Fight for Education: A Black Paper

• Gripped by a ‘’bankrupt romanticism’’, they forgot that teachers must be above all ‘’exponents of the great achievements of past civilisation’’ and urged them instead to ‘’decode the radical critique of the young’’ (Cox 1992: 144-6)

• The cultural transformation of his West Midlands constituency was in some ways worse than the experience of war: ‘’acts of an enemy, bombs from the sky’’ people could understand, but now they faced ‘’an invasion which the Government apparently approved’’ and which left them bewildered (Powelle)

• Multiculturalism - according to the Black Paper contributor Edward Norman, Dean of Peterhouse College, Cambridge - rested on the myth that England was a pluralist society

Conservatism: Triumph and Failure

• Conservatism normalised the use of unemployment as a strategy against inflation: the number of unemployed doubled between 1979 and 1981, and rose to 3 million by 1982

• It declined to 1.8 million by 1989, by which time a substantial occupational shift had occurred. Accelerating the trends of the 1970s, manufacturing employment fell and employment in the service sector rose. In the first four years of the 1980s, Britain lost 25 per cent of its manufacturing capacity: by 1988 just over 5 million were employed in industry, compared with 15 million in services, one-third of them part-time and the majority female (R.K.Brown 1990). In the process of this restructuring, Conservatism lowered wages to the point where British labour was significantly cheaper than that of other major European economies, and where for a long period in the 1980s the youth labour market scarcely existed (Cohen 1997)

• Home-owning, private health provision, and higher education all experienced significant growth in the 1980s. For others, it had an opposite meaning: millions were relegated to an insecure existence on the margins of employment

• ‘Society’, wrote Will Hutton in 1995, ‘’is dividing before our eyes, opening up new fissures in the working population’’. It had split into three groups- the 30 per cent who were absolutely disadvantaged, the 30 percent who were marginalised and insecure, and the 40 per cent whose market power had increased since 1979’’ (Hutton 1995: 107-8)

• In Wales and Scotland, national movements had grown stronger in the 1970s as a result of the perceived failure of the centrally directed post-war settlement to safeguard jobs and social welfare- ‘’evidence that the state was no longer working in the interests of the nation’’ (Paterson 1998: 60)

• Harvie notes that the recession of the early 1980s created ‘’instant post-industrialisation’’ in Scotland, carrying away most of the ‘’industry expensively induced to settle there’’ by the development of grants of the 1960s and 70s (Harvie 1993)

• Similarly in Wales the decline of traditional industry set off a chain reaction of economic, political, and social consequences, which undermined both local communities and habitual political allegiances (Rees and Rees 1980)

• Nothing that 70 per cent of Scots in the 1980s lived in public housing, Thatcher inferred that this was evidence of a ‘’dependency culture’’ which sustained ‘’socialist politics’’ (Rees and Rees 1993: 620)

• According to Glennerster, public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP had fallen under Callaghan’s government from a high point of 6.5 per cent in 1975-6 to 5.4 per cent in 1978-9. After a slight rise in the early 1980s it fell to 5.3 per cent in 1983-4 and remind below that level until virtually the end of Conservative rule in 1995-6 (Glennerster 1998: 37)

• In households whose income was less than half the national average; by 1993, the proportion had risen to 33 per cent (Oppenheim and Lister 1997: 24)

• Nearly all students in the fee-paying sector could be assured of entering higher education, whereas only one in four of state school systems in the mid-1990s gained a university place (Glennerster 1998: 38; Whilby 1997: 142)

• In secondary schools, for instance, statistics which demonstrated an overall rise in levels of attainment served to conceal a widening disparity between examination success rates in rich and porr areas (Smith et al 1997: 135)

• In OECD terms, Educations major role - was not seen more precisely, in terms of its capacity to assist or to hinder economic restructuring: its focus should be on ‘’updating skills and competencies of individual workers’’, an ‘’essential requirement for the development of flexible labour markets capable of responding to continuous change’’ (Papadopoulos 1994: 171)

• The number of 17-year olds attending schools and colleges full-time rose from elss than 24 per cent in 1979 to over 60 per cent in 1994-5 (Glennerster 1998: 46)

• Post-16 education and training thus  became the experience of the majority of students - especially girls, 75 per cent of whom were in 1995 taking full-time courses post-16 (Arnot et al 1999: 16). Higher education expanded rapidly: at the end of the 1970s, 12.7 per cent of the post-school age-group were in higher education; by 1990, age participation rates had topped 20 per cent (Ainley 1994)

• By 1987, the separate two-tier exam system at 16+ had been brought to an end, and a common examination, the GCSE, was introduced. In 1988, the Education Reform Act established the national curriculum, a universalistic form of provision which ensured that the curriculum provided for girls no longer denied them access to scientific and technological education

• Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education - created in 1992 - was in one sense the produce of two decades of Conservative critiques of state education, but in another it was the very reverse of their ideals

• Pierson writes that ' ‘the original and ‘’authentic’’ aspiration of the new right was to replace states with markets’’ (Pierson 1998: 168) (already helped along by labour there no?)

• Following the failure of Labour's tentative plans for universal comprehensivisation, some 10 per cent of pupils in England in the 1980s continued to be educated in grammar or secondary modern schools (Simon 1991: 587)

• The private sector was strengthened in 1980 by the Assisted Places Scheme, which subsidised places for 30,000 students at ‘independent’ schools

• Education Reform Act of 1988 that did most to increase diversity of provision. It allowed schools to ‘opt out’ of the locally-controlled system and to become ‘grant-maintained’ - that is, administratively self-governing, and funded, with striking generosity, by the central state. By 1997, 16 per cent of secondary schools in England and Wales had become grant-maintained, with intakes that were notably more middle-class than those of LEA comprehensive schools (Benn and Chitty 1996)

• In the 1990s, other categories of school were created: specialist schools, permitted to select 10 per cent of their intake on grounds of ability; technology schools, funded at a higher level than the norm (Halpin 1997)

• By 1997 that the number of locally controlled comprehensive schools - that is, schools recruiting from across the ability range - had been reduced to only 40 per cent of the overall total (Fitz et al 1997)

• After 1988, schools managed their own budgets, with their income depending in part on the number of students they attracted, as ‘customers’ of their services

• ‘’By far the most distinctive feature of the education system in Wales’’ wrote Rees and Rees in 1980, ‘’is its ability to turn out over a quarter of its pupils with no tangible benefit from their five years or so of secondary schooling’’ (1980: 77)

• Scottish policy, meanwhile, had moved swiftly via the Munn and Dunning reports of 1977, to address questions of curriculum and assessment reform (Pickard 2000)

• It was in areas like London that market effects were strongest: in mid-1990s London one-third of parents did not obtain their first choice of secondary school (Audit Commission 1996)

• The real significance of Thatcher’s Conservatism for education was clearer elsewhere - in the implications for spending of its declaration that ‘public expenditure is at the heart of Britain’s economic difficulties (White paper 1979)

• Labour's agenda retained a place- most notably in the insurance of the Warnock Committee, embodied in the 1981 Education Act, on the integration of children with ‘special needs’ into the mainstream education system

• As it took shape after the general election of 1983, the overall programme of Conservatism under Thatcher emerged as a design for the destruction of the post-war settlement and the ways in which in organised social, economic, and political life

• They also required victory in what Stuart Hall called ‘’ a battle of hearts and minds’’ through which a Conservative hegemony could be established (Hall 1988)

• Education - or the educational space - was one of the main sites on which these battles were fought out. What happened in education had importance not only for the preparation of the workforce and citizenry of the future, but also for the ways in which social ills might be explained and social futures imagined

• By the early 1980s, it had become plain that the school system was failing large sections of ethnic minority students. The Rampton Report of 1981 identified considerable underachievement on the part of ‘West Indian’ students compared with whites and Asians

• Rather than explaining this failure as earlier documents had dont (Department of Education and Science 1971) in terms of the linguistic deprivation of learners, it attributed it in part to the - often unintentional - racism of teachers, inappropriate curricula, and the discouraging effects of discrimination the labour market (Rampton Report 1981). Another government report (Swann Report 1985) confirmed the finding of underachievement, and again attributed it in part of ‘unintentional racism’

• The 1986 Education Act gave school governors, rather than local authorities, power to determine the nature of sex education

• The 1988 Local Government Act prohibited local authorities from promoting teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship

• From 1985 to 1987, teachers in England and Wales organised a pay campaign that depended for its effect not only on strike action, but also on a refusal to cover for absent colleagues. In this latter respect, in involved therefore a struggle with managements for control over conditions of work

• The 1987 Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Act provided such control: it abolished national pay negotiations, replacing them with a review body on which the unions had no say; it also specified in considerable detail the duties of a teacher, and made ‘cover’ for absent colleagues, along with attendance at after-school meetings, a compulsory part of teachers’ work (Pietrasik 1987)

• Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987

• The ERA was part of a set of changed, in housing, education, health, and social security, that between 1988 and 1990 effected a ‘decisive break’ with post-war social policy (Glennerster, Power and Travers 1991)

• To put things more strongly, it destroyed the educational culture which had developed between 1944 and 1979, and began the work of creating a different one, in which old ‘social actors’ were marginalised and new ones rendered powerful. What it created was successful: it established enduring ground rules for schooling in the 1990s and beyond

• All students between eh ages of 5 and 16 in state schools were to follow the same ‘broad and balanced’ subject-based curriculum; the curriculum would be specified by government-appointed committees and approved by the Secretary of State

• Conservatism made no attempt to apply a national curriculum north of the border

• Alongside LMS, the Act introduced another form of autonomy: parents could vote on whether to take schools out of LEA control together

• The Standard Attainment Tests (SATs) established by ERA thus served both to supply government with information about levels of performance, and to facilitate the development of local markets’ - in which of course some schools, by reason of their intake and already-established status, were particularly advantaged

• Up until the 1970s, most students elgt school with low levels of certification, but with a confidence in the strength of the youth labour market. The collapse of this market, the decline of apprenticeships and continuing presence of radical influences on school cultures had produced turbulent results

• Walkouts in support of Militant-organised strike gains the Youth Training Scheme; 1985-7 (Richards 1992: 93)

• In higher education, the proportion of women entrants rose from 30 percent in 1970 to more than 50 per cent in 1998 (Mackinnon et al 1996: 177; DfEE 1998a: 77). These achievements were strongly class-related - working class girls still had only the most limited changed of access to university (plummer 2000) - but they meat all the same that Conservatism had presided over a historic rise in the achievement of girls

• Raising achievement for all did not necessarily entail reducing inequality, and using test and exam performance as indicators of success meant a tacit abandonment of broader curriculum reform in favour of an acceptance fo ‘’limited and culturally specific’ understanding of educational value (Hatcher 1998; Slee and Weiner 1998:6)

• In 1992 the conservatives won their fourth successive election victory which was quickly overshadowed by a currency crisis, a prolonged conservative schism over the European Union and a succession of corruption scandals

• In 1993-4 a boycott of the SATs, instigated by English teachers and supported by teachers’ unions, brought the testing system to a halt