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The creation of a comprehensive system of elementary schooling was for long held up not only by a reluctance to foot the bill for such a large public project but also by upper-class fears.
Elementary education's eventual introduction in 1870 owed much to concerns that British industry and military were falling behind Prussia's due to insufficiently educated workers and soldiers. Furthermore, with the expansion of voting rights, that is, the increasing equality of British citizens, elementary education came to be seen not as a threat but as a necessary instrument to instill loyalty to the state in the lower classes. In any case, it provided the basis upon which the national education system we know today developed in the following 100 years.
Economic, military and financial concerns all continued to play a considerable role in educational policy. But in the twentieth century they were overshadowed in importance by the changing definitions of equality. The latter provided the real impetus for educational reforms. To demonstrate the central importance of evolving attitudes to equality in this matter, I will examine chronologically the essential documents, books, reports and Parliamentary Acts which shaped Britain's educational policy in the 20th century. For this analysis I will focus on class equality since this was by far the most important and contested issue in educational policy. Yet, it should be noted that equality of gender and ethnicity also played a role, and an increasingly important one as the century progressed. However, a detailed examination of these issues is beyond the scope of this essay.
The first great educational reform of the century was the 1902 Education Act. It was very much a product of the recommendations of the 1895 Bryce report which had found that”…it is not merely in the interest of the material prosperity and intellectual activity of the nation, but no less in that of its happiness and its moral strength, that the extension and reorganization of Secondary Education seem entitled to a place among the first subjects with which social legislation ought to deal.”
The Act established the office of a Minister of Education and transferred the function of the traditional school boards to the new Local Education Authorities (LEAs). These were given powers to establish new secondary and technical schools as well as to develop the existing system of elementary schools. However, the Act was still very much in the spirit of the 19th century. Secondary education was expanded, but opportunities for lower class children continued to be extremely limited. The system remained largely a two-tier one. The great majority of children received elementary education only, even if an increasing number of well-off pupils went on to secondary and higher education.
The first change in law to break with this de-facto class-segregation in education was the so-called Free Place Regulation in 1907. It obliged all secondary schools receiving grants from the Board of Education to provide 25 percent of their places to elementary school pupils who passed a qualifying examination. The Free Place Regulation introduced some mobility between the dead end road of common elementary school and the track that led up to secondary and university education. However, such mobility remained the exception. When the First World War broke out in 1914, only 56 out of 1000 elementary school pupils aged 10 to 11 went on to secondary education. Lower class children going to university were still an abnormality capable of causing quite a stir.
The Great War spurred on educational reform in two ways. On the one hand it reinforced fears of falling behind other nations, notably Germany whose fighting power and industrial capacity once more astonished Europe. Even more important, however, was the social solidarity created by the war. The 1918 Education Act introduced major reforms. It strengthened the local authorities, reformed the grant system so that not less than 50 percent of the cost of education was paid for with central government funds, it abolished all fees in elementary schools, raised the school leaving age to 14 and eliminated all exemptions from this rule. However, the two-tier system remained essential in place and despite the beginning change in attitudes, the Act contained strong remnants of the old thinking. Fisher, himself an Oxford graduate, was sure that [The poor] do not want [education] in order that they may rise out of their own class, always a vulgar ambition, they want it, they want it because they know that in the treasures of the mind they can find … a refuge from the necessary hardships of a life spent in the midst of clanging machinery in our hideous cities of toil. What is more, the economic difficulties of the interwar years led to a period of educational retrenchment which showed itself in the half-hearted implementation of the Fisher Act. Social class continued to determine most children's education. University intake rose, but remained the privilege of a small, largely socially selected minority.
Universal secondary education certainly was a great advance over previous policies that had excluded the majority of children from any systematic instruction between 11 and 15. However, social problems persisted and the dream of a society where class did not hinder individual development remained elusive. The secondary technical schools failed to fulfill earlier hopes placed in them and were soon abandoned by government planners. Furthermore, it emerged that the educational quality offered in Grammar schools was greatly superior to that in most secondary modern schools, the latter often being little more than a 'depository of the unsuccessful - the rag bag into which children who have not made the grade are put'. In this context the 11+ examinations which seemed to favor children from middle- and upper-class background became increasingly controversial. What made matters worse and more complicated was that even those working-class children who qualified for Grammar schools were on average less successful and dropped out of the education system earlier than their middle class peers.
In a sense the driving force behind the comprehensive school experiment was different from that which had motivated earlier reforms. No longer was the definition of equality changing, thereby pushing educational reform ahead. The aim - equality of opportunity for all - was the same in 1964 as it had been in 1944. Thus, the motivation behind the introduction of comprehensive schools was the attempt to find a new structural solution to the persisting problem of social disadvantage in education. But again it failed. Not only were comprehensive schools clearly outperformed by the private 'public school' sector, but in addition a hierarchy emerged within the comprehensive school system. Because pupils were mainly recruited from the neighborhood of the school, wealthy areas soon boasted more successful schools than underprivileged regions such as the inner cities. Studies in the early 1980s found a resilient pattern of low achievement on the part of working-class pupils. Thatcher's government did not address these problems in any fundamental way. Educational reform in the 1980s did not make any substantial structural changes but instead focused on educational content and the reduction of costs
In this essay I have argued that twentieth century British educational policy was crucially determined by perceptions of equality and the way in which these evolved. Education, initially seen as a means to enforce a corporatist social structure was fundamentally transformed by a change in attitudes that culminated in the emergence of the 'equality of opportunity' ideal by the mid-twentieth century. Educational policy in the remaining decades consisted mainly of various attempts to realize this aim in the secondary and higher education sector. It thus seems fair to conclude that, indeed, changing definitions of equality lay at the heart of educational policy during the twentieth century.
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