Revolutionising the education system

“I have had few worse hours in my life than those I spent watching the pupils being taken off in drizzling rain and gathering gloom to those unknown villages, knowing

I was powerless to do anything about it.”

Dorothy King, Teacher

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The plans for post-war secondary education in Britain aimed to remove the inequalities which remained in the system. The proportion of 'free places' at grammar schools in England and Wales increased from almost a third to almost half between 1913 and 1937. However, when poorer children were offered free places, parents often had to turn them down owing to the extra costs involved.

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Butler designed the Education Act as an expression of "One Nation Conservatism" which called for paternalism by the upper class towards the working class. The Act was repealed in steps with the last parts repealed in 1996.

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The Act sharply distinguished between primary and secondary education at age 11 and ended the traditional all-age (5-14) elementary sector, enforcing the division between primary (5–11 years old) and secondary (11–15 years old) education that many local authorities had already introduced. It abolished fees on parents for state secondary schools. It brought a more equitable funding system to localities and to different school sectors. The Act renamed the Board of Education as the Ministry of Education, giving it greater powers and a bigger budget.

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Raising the school leaving age from 14 to 15 was delayed until 1947, due to the impact of WW2. Critics claimed the post-war world had neither the buildings nor the trained teachers to cope with the extra pupils, who would then vote with their feet and truancy, especially the least enthusiastic pupils. Others claimed a better-qualified workforce would reduce unemployment, delinquency and crime.

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While defining the school leaving age as 15, it granted the government the power to raise the age to 16 "as soon as the Minister is satisfied that it has become practicable", though the change was not implemented until 1973. It also brought in a new system for setting teacher salaries.

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One of the results of the Act was to increase the openness of secondary schools to girls and the working class, educating and mobilising them. Another result was that the percentage of children attending higher education tripled from 1% to 3%.

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The Act provided both for nursery schools and Further Education programs through community colleges, offering education for both children and adults, a measure that was only followed through by a few Local Education Authorities such as the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges, Leicestershire Community Colleges and Coventry, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire community schools.

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Anglican schools were continued, but brought under increased state funding and control. Every state-funded school was required to begin the day with a nondenominational religious prayer. This clause was amended by the Education Reform Act 1988, which specified that the act of worship should be of a 'broadly Christian nature' unless such a message was deemed to be inappropriate for a particular school or group of children. The amendment also specified that the act of worship could now take place in classes, rather than the previous system of conducting worship in assemblies.

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The Education Act 1944 made it a duty of local education authorities to provide school meals and milk. The authority could remit the charge for the meal in cases of hardship. The separate School Milk Act 1946 provided free milk (a third of a pint a day) in schools to all children under the age of 18.

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In 1968 Edward Short, the Labour Secretary of State for Education and Science, withdrew free milk from secondary schools. His successor, Conservative Margaret Thatcher withdrew free school milk from children over seven in 1971, earning her (among her enemies) the nickname 'Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher'. Shirley Williams abolished school milk for children under seven in 1977.

Source: ukparliarment / Wikipedia

Images: Believed to be in the Public Domain or used with permission

A Modern Village School in Cambridgeshire, 1944

Tottenham Polytechnic, 1944

"Grammar Schools generated large numbers of Nobel Prize winners, and we were world leaders in science and other disciplines to a far greater

degree than a country of 60 million

has a right to expect"

Rt Hon David Davis MP

Grammer Schools

Great Britain has some of the oldest and most well established Universities in the world.

Universities