tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/1944-education-act-11748/articles1944 Education Act – The Conversation2016-09-09T16:03:39Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/636792016-09-09T16:03:39Z2016-09-09T16:03:39ZWhy the ghost of grammar schools keeps on haunting us<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135381/original/image-20160824-30222-b8xp8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Denis Lett/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>So the cat is out of the bag, and months of rumour and speculation have borne fruit: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-37311023">grammar schools are back on the agenda</a>. In her major <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/britain-the-great-meritocracy-prime-ministers-speech">speech</a> on the subject, Theresa May went further than many had expected – and claimed that selection by ability might be adopted by any school in the state system. </p>
<p>Grammar schools – state secondary schools which select pupils by ability, traditionally using an entrance exam known as the 11+ – are the ghost which has never really been laid to rest in debates about contemporary British education. Institutions described as “grammar schools” have existed for centuries in the UK, but the version often remembered so fondly is the child of the <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/educationact1944/">1944 Butler Education Act</a>.
These grammar schools, created by the Conservative Rab Butler in the wake of his 1944 Act were abolished in most parts of the country with the arrival of comprehensive education in the 1960s. New selective schools were then banned by law under the Labour government of 1998. But grammar schools never truly died and still remain in pockets around the UK such as Kent. So why the perennial cries for their resurrection?</p>
<p>It’s worth disinterring the history in order to answer that question. The 1944 Act introduced secondary education for all children in the UK, replacing the previous patchwork provision of state secondary education, but it generally did so along stratified lines. The 11+ exam, widely adopted by local education authorities, was intended to sort academic from non-academic pupils, and to spot those with an aptitude for technical education. </p>
<p>To serve this end, a tripartite school system was established in most of England and Wales – with grammar schools for academic children, secondary moderns for those who were not, and technical schools for those with a particular aptitude for technical pursuits. But as the social historian Michael Sanderson noted, technical schools were costly an in age of austerity <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aX9qCgAAQBAJ&pg=PR4&lpg=PR4&dq=Michael+Sanderson+missing+stratum&source=bl&ots=aWZ7c8sArB&sig=sy1hdFAtsYtXGlxgy-Rl-8V7Z8g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjK8bjUh9rOAhUpCMAKHfPbAjIQ6AEILTAD#v=onepage&q=Michael%20Sanderson%20missing%20stratum&f=false">and so were seldom built</a>. As a result, in most parts of the country it wasn’t a tripartite system at all, but a bipartite one – a youth divided between 11+ “successes” at grammars and “failures” at secondary moderns.</p>
<p>Historians argued that this became unsustainable due to public discontent. For instance, historian of psychology Adrian Wooldridge <a href="http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511660351&cid=CBO9780511660351A005&tabName=Chapter">has shown</a> that the 11+ came under severe attack from sociologists who showed that it was a test which over-promised and under-delivered.</p>
<p>Its advocates, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/genetics-what-it-is-that-makes-you-clever-and-why-its-shrouded-in-controversy-56115">the psychologist Cyril Burt</a>, had argued it could differentiate between nature and nurture, that it could show which children had innate ability and those which didn’t. They believed the test and the grammar schools which deployed it could provide equality of opportunity to children of all classes – and so could be seen as vehicles of social mobility.</p>
<h2>Opposition mounts</h2>
<p>But as Wooldridge outlined, the evidence <a href="http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511660351&cid=CBO9780511660351A023">didn’t back this up</a>. Instead, the 11+ was an engine of gross social injustice, fostering an education system sharply-divided on lines of social class. It was the case then, <a href="http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/CASEpaper164.pdf">as now</a>, that parental wealth and status were the key indicators in predicting a child’s life chances. </p>
<p>Places were not allocated across social classes in the proportions which were expected, a fact compounded by regional differences. More grammar school places in certain parts of the country meant that <a href="http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511660351&cid=CBO9780511660351A023">in some places</a> children with considerably lower IQs went to grammar school while in other parts of the country those with higher scores went to secondary moderns. Even why 11 had been chosen as the cut-off point was open to question. Anthony Crosland, who was later to become Labour education secretary, wrote in the 1950s that the “<a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ioep/clre/2015/00000013/00000002/art00009?crawler=true">whole process has a distinctly arbitrary air</a>”.</p>
<p>As the historian of education Gary McCulloch has shown, the Labour Party <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0046760X.2015.1076067">gradually adopted comprehensive</a> secondary education as a policy in the 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1964 general election, and the advent of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, the battle-lines of the debate between tripartism and the comprehensive alternative were clearly drawn. Labour knew that the prestige of the grammar school was real: <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0046760X.2015.1076067">comprehensives were advertised</a> as “grammar schools for all”. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/135378/original/image-20160824-30209-1ye3cy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A local comp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/disley/4239899529/sizes/o/">aldisley/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>It was Crosland, education secretary from January 1965, who issued the now famous <a href="http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/des/circular10-65.html">Circular 10/65 document</a> to local authorities requesting them to change their school systems – or, in its own words, to “submit … plans for … reorganisation on comprehensive lines”. In most places, grammar schools were on the way out.</p>
<p>Ever since there have been calls to bring them back, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_making_of_Tory_education_policy_in_p.html?id=g9CeAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">most notably from the right of the Conservative Party</a>. Partly this has been due to a scepticism about comprehensive education, but mostly it is anchored in differing visions of the relationship of the individual to society. </p>
<p>With <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679391?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">the revitalisation of Conservatism in a neoliberal direction</a> from the early 1970s onward, grammar schools have become an emblem of a strain of Conservative thinking which emphasises that what the left sees as unjustifiable inequality is in fact simply individuals reaping the benefits of hard work. According to this reading, at face value, comprehensive education emphasised the good of the collective and grammars that of the individual. </p>
<h2>A myth that will not die</h2>
<p>But the evidence undermines such a reading. It is not enough to claim, as the prime minister <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/britain-the-great-meritocracy-prime-ministers-speech">has done</a>, that the debate on grammars “get[s] lost” in discussing the social mobility question. Evidence matters. She is also wrong to claim this is merely a historical issue: contemporary research on areas where grammar schools outlasted the 1960s has clearly shown their culpability in maintaining social inequality. One <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03054985.2013.776955">2013 study</a> documented how in Buckinghamshire – one of the counties which retained selective state education – children eligible for free school meals because of the wealth of their parents were significantly underrepresented in grammar schools. So why, in the face of the evidence that grammar schools do not promote social mobility, is the argument still made?</p>
<p>Part of the answer is that grammar schools <a href="https://www.tes.com/news/tes-magazine/tes-magazine/anti-grammar-camp-must-heed-brexits-lessons">did work</a> for some people. Yet the key issue is that they did so at the expense of the community as a whole. Despite May’s claims that they will be but one part of a “diverse” new system, the restoration of a general process of selection by ability implies that such a diverse system will be an unequal one in practice.</p>
<p>It is significant that Michael Gove – <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Gove_Legacy.html?id=Dgm4BgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y&hl=en">who set his face against new grammar schools in his time as education secretary</a> – agreed with supporters of grammars that comprehensives had failed. But he did not share their enthusiasm for a return to selection, favouring instead the academies and free schools which are his legacy. May’s proposals for the return of selection answer a populist Tory <em>cri de coeur.</em> But as Gove knew, it is an answer rooted in myth rather than history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63679/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mike Finn is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>The history of a policy that will not die.Mike Finn, Principal Teaching Fellow, University of WarwickLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/581792016-04-28T11:31:04Z2016-04-28T11:31:04ZFuture of religious education under threat from drive to make all schools academies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120375/original/image-20160427-30967-p620eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The rules for schools could change. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Skalny/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Religious education is no stranger to controversy. Determining which religions should be studied, and how and why, is often a fraught process, particularly where the teaching of certain religious beliefs over others is concerned, or if children are being indoctrinated into a particular faith. </p>
<p>Despite the importance of making sure young people today have a good level of <a href="https://theconversation.com/schools-need-to-do-more-to-improve-childrens-religious-literacy-51926">religious literacy</a>, the recent Department for Education white paper, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/educational-excellence-everywhere">Educational Excellence Everywhere</a>, makes no reference to religious education (RE). But its proposal that every school in England should become an academy by 2022 has important ramifications for the subject. </p>
<p>Since 1944, local education authorities (LEAs) have been required to produce agreed syllabuses for RE in state-maintained schools without a religious affiliation. These are agreed unanimously by representatives of different religious persuasions, alongside teacher associations and the LEA. Since 1988, LEAs have also been required to establish Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education (SACRE) to advise the local authority on matters connected with RE.</p>
<p>But academies and free schools, whether with a religious affiliation or not, do not currently have to follow an LEA-agreed syllabus for RE. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many such schools are continuing to do so, even though there is no statutory requirement. It is possible, however, for other schools to exploit the available freedom and develop their own syllabuses. In such cases, we would not know what aims, methods and content for RE each school is selecting for its lessons. This presents a risk.</p>
<p>The white paper calls for the establishment of a clearly defined role for local government in education more generally, but says nothing about RE. This is a glaring omission.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120377/original/image-20160427-30982-10ax2lv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Still at the centre of British life?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John D F/www.flickr.com</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Religious powerbroking</h2>
<p>For more than 150 years, the position of religion in publicly-funded schools has been a matter of profound controversy – so much so that a dual system of church and state schools emerged. When the 1902 Education Act created LEAs and gave them responsibility for funding church schools through local rates, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Shifting_Alliances.html?id=F-qeAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">it met with opposition</a> from non-conformists and secularists. This was vociferous enough to dissuade the government from attempting significant educational reform for the next 40 years.</p>
<p>Later, in the period between the two world wars, when LEAs sought to establish secondary schools, they met with opposition from Anglicans who were <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Church_and_state_in_English_education_18.html?id=yCY1kJyWZBUC&redir_esc=y">worried about</a> the RE that secondary school pupils would receive. In certain areas of the country, the support of Anglicans was obtained once they had been given the opportunity – alongside non-conformists, teachers and local councillors – to determine the RE syllabus provided in LEA primary and secondary schools. So locally agreed syllabuses emerged as a political means of managing religious sectarianism to enable educational reform to occur.</p>
<p>This was never more appreciated than in World War II, when the population <a href="https://www.routledge.com/products/9780754666929">became galvanised</a> around a vision of social, educational and spiritual progress. It was in <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10036/16633">this context</a> – in fear of communism, fascism and Nazism abroad – that daily collective worship and weekly RE lessons were made statutory in LEA schools in the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/7-8/31/contents/enacted">1944 Education Act</a>. </p>
<p>A lot has changed since that act was passed. England <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0046760X.2011.620013#.VyDqRD-PBWc">has experienced</a> religious pluralisation and a <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0046760X.2012.761733#.VyHKqj-PBWc">de-Christianisation of society</a>. At the same time, there has been a centralisation of educational policy, devolution of powers to schools and the establishment of non-Christian faith schools.</p>
<p>But there have also been continuities in the form of the established Church and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10770425/David-Cameron-says-Christians-should-be-more-evangelical.html">political rhetoric</a> around “Christian Britain”. Nor has religious controversy disappeared, especially around the powder keg of religion in schools – as the allegations over extremist teaching at schools in Birmingham in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/trojan-horse">Trojan Horse affair</a> illustrated. So it is still vital that politicians negotiate religious differences with caution and careful consideration.</p>
<h2>Risk of alienating faith groups</h2>
<p>If agreed syllabuses and SACRE are now to be replaced by a new statutory structure for determining the RE curriculum, then those responsible for planning these new arrangements will have to show the same political nous and fervour as the architects of the 1944 Education Act. If no such statutory structures are put in place – to provide checks and balances for the RE curriculum – then there is a risk that individual schools might ignite religious controversy in the way they teach the subject. </p>
<p>Even if religious groups no longer continue to have a statutory voice in determining the RE curriculum, it is probably wise to develop a new local or national mechanism. Through this, religious and other communities with a vested interest in the subject could enter into dialogue with those with responsibility for determining the subject’s aims, methods and content. </p>
<p>The alternative is to disenfranchise and marginalise faith communities, creating less mutual understanding and more disagreement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58179/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rob Freathy has received funding from a variety of organisations: The British Academy; History of Education Society (UK); Esmée Fairbairn Foundation; Culham St Gabriel’s Trust; Westhill Endowment Trust; Bible Society England and Wales; All Saints Educational Trust; Hockerill Educational Trust; Sarum St Michael Educational Charity; and The Challenger Trust.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen G. Parker has received funding from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, Westhill Endowment Trust, St. Peter's Saltley Trust, Culham St Gabriel's Trust. </span></em></p>Local education authorities have mediated the RE syllabus for decades. Now, there might be a free-for-all.Rob Freathy, Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research and Deputy Director of the University of Exeter Doctoral College, University of ExeterStephen G. Parker, Professor of the History of Religion and Education, University of WorcesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/294412014-08-01T05:09:57Z2014-08-01T05:09:57Z70 years after the Education Act, debate still rages on the school leaving age<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55425/original/jzm3chmb-1406805283.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C73%2C784%2C579&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Here 'til we're 16? Really, sir? </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Technical_School-_Training_at_Tottenham_Polytechnic%2C_Middlesex%2C_England%2C_UK%2C_1944_D21390.jpg">Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy years on from its passage into law, the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/7-8/31/contents/enacted">Education Act of 1944</a> is often remembered as a monument to political consensus – the art of the possible, in the words of its chief architect, R A “Rab” Butler. It achieved cross-party support under a coalition government which had a military victory over Adolf Hitler in World War II as its principal objective. The Education Act probably seemed a limited, compromise measure, but also just a sideshow to the momentous events that were taking place on the world stage.</p>
<p>Yet the Education Act, which was given Royal Assent on August 3 1944, was also the product of a genuine debate about the future of education in a postwar society. Many of the measures that it included had long attracted controversy and often bitter opposition, even if they have now found general acceptance.</p>
<p>For instance, the act ushered in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/25751787">secondary education for all</a> children for the first time. This was a proposal that had been supported by the <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_politics_of_educational_reform_1920.html?id=j-wMAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Labour Party since the 1920s</a> but denounced by many politicians and business leaders, on the grounds that it was not only too expensive but also educationally unsound and socially problematic. </p>
<p>Even in 1943, as part of the preparations for the act, <a href="http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/norwood/">a committee set up by the Board of Education</a> argued forcefully that there were three different groups in society that therefore required three different types of secondary school – an approach that underpinned the postwar development of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern schools.</p>
<h2>Raising the school leaving age</h2>
<p>A closely related provision of the 1944 act, <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/7-8/31/section/35/enacted">in section 35</a>, was its support for an increase in the school leaving age, which had stood at 14 since the end of World War I. It proposed the leaving age should be raised immediately to 15, and that it should be increased again, to 16, as soon as this became practicable. </p>
<p>Such an idea had been anathema to business interests. In the aftermath of a war and with a lack of teachers and schools it also raised serious practical difficulties. Nevertheless, the first instalment of this reform was delivered under Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government from 1947, disfigured though it was by the <a href="http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/11845/">prefabricated huts</a> that were brought in to house the extra secondary school children.</p>
<p>It was still unclear in the postwar period whether raising the leaving age had won over public opinion as a popular cause. The second stage in this reform, an increase to 16, was actually delayed for a further 25 years, until 1972, when Margaret Thatcher finally presided over this additional step as education secretary. </p>
<p>Even then, however, it remained a controversial measure, partly because of the resources needed to put it into practice, but also because a number of teachers were unwilling to retain unruly and alienated pupils, some of whom they felt would learn little more in an additional year at school than they had managed in the previous ten.</p>
<h2>Lessons for today</h2>
<p>What are the lessons of this delayed provision of the 1944 Act after 70 years? <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/?k=9780230340398">Recent research</a> on the history of raising the school leaving age in this country by Tom Woodin, Steven Cowan and myself at the Institute of Education in London, argues that despite all the obstacles and opposition, increasing the leaving age was a crucial achievement that has led in turn to the further expansion of post-16 education and also higher education over the past decade.</p>
<p>This is a particularly important issue for the present day because the 2008 Education and Skills Act provided for further increases in what is now called the education participation age, making participation in education or training <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/increasing-opportunities-for-young-people-and-helping-them-to-achieve-their-potential/supporting-pages/raising-the-participation-age">compulsory for all</a> up to 17 from 2013 and 18 from 2015. </p>
<p>Many economists, industrialists and educationists continue to raise objections to this policy on a number of grounds. Arguing in The Guardian, former editor Peter Preston called the extension “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jan/15/comment.politics2">Two more futile years</a>”, while Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15146240">argued instead</a> that the school leaving age should be cut to 14 instead, and former trade minister Digby Jones that the age rule <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14338977">should be relaxed</a> to connect getting a skill with earning money. </p>
<p>The protracted debate over implementing the 1944 act provisions in this area is again highly instructive. The extended period that was needed for the 1944 Act to come into full effect highlights the slippage that can so often take place between the policy and the practice. It was a matter of high policy, with agonised discussions taking place at cabinet level within governments throughout the 1960s as the treasury warned of dire economic consequences if it were ever allowed to come into force. </p>
<p>The Conservative government of the 1950s <a href="http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/11712/">toyed with the idea</a> of returning the leaving age to 14. From the 1960s, the Guardian newspaper, once so strongly in favour with the <a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/historians/tawney_richard.html">educational reformer R H Tawney</a> writing its leading articles, became conspicuously ambivalent.</p>
<p>Raising the school leaving age, a crucial move towards equality of opportunity, remains a significant example of the struggle and controversies involved in educational change over the longer term. It reveals the close connections between politics and economics on the one hand, and curriculum and educational structures on the other. The 1944 act was no mere sideshow, but a vital reform in the making of a modern society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29441/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gary McCulloch receives funding from ESRC. </span></em></p>Seventy years on from its passage into law, the Education Act of 1944 is often remembered as a monument to political consensus – the art of the possible, in the words of its chief architect, R A “Rab…Gary McCulloch, Brian Simon Professor of History of Education, UCLLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.