Part Two in a new series of articles looking at Britain's crumbling education system and how we fix it.
Author: Gary Hammonds
Britain's education system is in disrepair, in a new series of articles, Gary Hammonds explores how we got to this point and how we can fix Britain's education system.
Stig Abell describes the development of England’s educational landscape as a “muddle of restructures and embellishments” and “an endlessly shifting mess.” It is essential, therefore, to ask how we got to where we are now. Butler didn’t design a system from scratch in 1944; neither did Baker in 1988. As such, we cannot attempt to design a new system from scratch today. Any education reform is an act of making the pre-existing system more closely resemble the system you believe it can and should be. The pre-existing system is a product of all such previous reforms, as well as other forces which shape and distort the practices and structures of the sector.
What follows is a whistle-stop tour of English educational reform efforts, focusing on the conflicts and tensions that have typified the process. It stops with the 1988 reforms, which were an effort to find a middle ground between statists, who pursued centralised funding of and control over the sector, and free-marketeers, who wanted little more than a system of vouchers used by parents-as-informed-consumers. 1988 sought a compromise position between these two camps, but in reality, it satisfied neither, and the unresolved tensions at the heart of this failed compromise have lingered ever since. This unresolved question about where decision-making power should lie has prevented proper progress where it matters: children’s well-being and learning. It is a question that has defined education in England for at least a millennium.
A cursory understanding of pre-industrial schooling will be useful only because the tension between church and state so neatly exemplifies the battle for control that defines the English education policy arena. King Ethelstan, in 936 A.D., granted special privileges concerning criminal law to those who could read. This incentivised people to pursue an education. The church responded to this systemic incentive and stepped up to provide the desired service.
From then on, for centuries, education remained in the hands of the church, with priests offering schooling to young children amongst their congregation, and with parents often being required to pay fees for the service. “For close to 1100 years… all educational institutions were under exclusively ecclesiastical control. The law of education was a branch of Canon Law… until 1580 all schoolmasters and scholars were clerks, or clerics, or clergy…” During the 12th and 13th centuries, the church began to issue licences for instruction – effectively creating, for themselves, a monopoly in this lucrative sector. It was not exclusively the fees which incentivised education provision, though. Church schools were primarily founded to train clergymen, so they had to teach Latin, not merely the language of the Church, but the one language of educated Christendom. Latin, therefore, was not merely a subject; it was the subject – it was, in fact, the whole curriculum. If not to provide the personnel of the church, education was viewed as essential to the creation of a mass population open to Christianization and who could, and were willing to, take part in the church’s services. This system and the way it developed exemplify how – even absent a state machinery, political discussion or a developed market – the English education system has been one which has been shaped by the pursuit of wealth, power, and control, and how these forces have determined what was taught, by and to whom, and how.
Whilst education was rife with inequity, the feudal system was broadly functional, with elementary schools which fed grammars, which in turn fed the universities. Every class of society had access to each layer of the offered provision, though it was still the case that the circumstances of birth would broadly determine a child’s fate. An act of 1406 decreed that:
“every man or woman, of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth them within the realm.”
Whilst it was not often realised, the system of ecclesiastical control over education at least theoretically allowed for equality of opportunity.
Following the Restoration, though, this ecclesiastical control was increasingly challenged, as can be seen in several important cases. Bates’ Case of 1670 saw that a teacher could no longer be ejected from a school setting simply for lack of the bishop’s licence. Cox’s Case of 1700 ruled that the church had no control over elementary education. Douse’s Case of 1701 decided that it was not a civil offence to run a school absent the bishop’s licence. The judiciary had effectively broken the church’s monopoly over education. The number of endowed, non-church schools exploded in response to this development. There were around 3000 of them by 1842, and more than a third of this number were founded between 1660 and 1730. The state had asserted itself and denied ecclesiastical control over the sector.
That very condensed summary of English schooling before the Industrialisation process began in earnest serves only to outline that control over education has been long contested, that it has throughout its history been seen as a source of financial profit and political power for whoever did control it, and that the state has long had an interest in exerting its control - but also that forces beyond political actors and decision-makers also contribute to the shaping of the system.
One of the most important of the forces which has shaped the sector is Industrialisation. From the late 18th century, population and population density both grew at rates which grossly outstripped the concurrent growth of education provision. The Sunday School Movement was a large part of the initial response, where volunteer teachers offered several hours of free tuition each week to the children of parents whose parents could not afford school fees. 500,000 children (in England and Wales) were accessing such provision by 1818. This was 1.5 million by 1833, and 2.4 million by 1851. This was partly a product of the societal shifts, which both created and geographically concentrated the demand, but also reflected the changes to prevailing views. Evangelicalism eschewed self-interest and gave primacy to a sense of social responsibility. “To social conscience was added fear.” Here, the rationale for the provision of Sunday schools was to properly incorporate the newly self-conscious working classes into ‘the system’. Some argued that the altruism was feigned: “It is not for the sake of imparting secular instruction that members of the various Churches voluntarily every week assume the teacher’s office; but to inculcate religious truth and exert a religious influence.”
Even accepting the argument that the Sunday School Movement was driven by religious and social altruism and a will to incorporate the disadvantaged into the system, it was not an all-inclusive panacea. Sunday Schools often included rules around hygiene and cleanliness, which effectively excluded the most disadvantaged children from accessing the provision. The Children’s Employment Commission of 1842 reported children as claiming they had no education because “they won’t have us in, for we ain’t got no clothes or shoes.” Whatever the motives, intended or otherwise, the educational offer was exclusive, and increasingly so. Inspectors during the 1840s and 1850s argued that, despite efforts to raise the age and duration of school attendance, the situation had worsened.
Some arguments explaining the expansion of education are more pernicious. For some, the education of the working classes was a means of social control. “Independently of all higher considerations and to put the necessity of properly educating the children of the working classes on its lowest footing, it is loudly called for as a matter of police, to prevent a multitude of immoral and vicious beings, the offspring of ignorance, from growing up around us, to be a pest and nuisance to society; it is necessary, to render the great body of the working class governable by reason.”
Robert Lowe in 1867, similarly, said:
“If the lower classes must be educated, they must be educated that they may appreciate and defer to a higher civilisation when they meet it.” Andy Green has argued that the education offered to working-class children in the eighteenth century was “different in every conceivable way from the ideals of middle-class education. Rather, it was a way of ensuring that the subordinate class would acquiesce in the middle class’s own aspirations.”
Whatever their motivations for offering education, the voluntary providers were resistant to intrusion into the sector by the state. For example, some argued vehemently that education should remain free from state intervention, saying such freedom “is the air we breathe, if we do not have it, we intellectually die.” When, in 1833, the government began routinely making grants to educational charities and extended this, in 1839, and introduced conditionality on the satisfaction of government inspectors (HMI), the voluntary sector was fiercely opposed. Their opposition was broadly successful because the only way a child whose family couldn’t afford the fees for school to get an education outside of their provision was to join the army, get sent to prison, or attend the workhouse.
The grant system, established in 1833, was not solely about financing school building. It also allowed for state-funded teacher training, and the newly formed Committee of the Privy Council, which focused on education, informed by the teams of inspectors, allowed for the government to have a clearer line of sight over this policy area. The Inspectors and the Committee shaped the nature of schooling by identifying and sharing good practice, and encouraging some approaches whilst criticising others. There is no reason to assume anything other than the best of intentions: one commentator, at least, viewed the role of the Inspectorate and the Council as finding and creating the opportunities offered by education to harness the benefits of proper social mixing, ‘by bringing the children of the employers and the employed into the same school to humanise both and create a right feeling between them’.
To strengthen the argument that tensions and conflicts that plague the system today are simply unresolved tensions and conflicts from earlier iterations of the system, consider the concerns evidenced here that HMI was shaping school practices without being properly accountable to the elected officials.
“Complaints arose in the Commons that the constitutional position of the Committee (able under the discretion allowed to the executive to extend its activities so long as no statute forbade it) rendered its activities and expenditure difficult for the House to examine in detail.”
For a century and a half, the democratic deficit of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations – often created by government and tasked with improving standards – has plagued policy-makers. And to further the connection, the work of the council – or the Education Department, as it became in 1856 – focused on financial efficiencies, collapsing several funding streams for schools into “a central grant based on attendance, and a local grant financed from rates based on the achievements of pupils.” The Revised Code, introduced in 1862, combined a flat fee payment for pupils on roll, and a supplementary payment for each pupil a school successfully got to meet certain standards of literacy and numeracy. In phrasing which would not have been out of place more than a hundred years on, Lowe told the Commons that he was willing to use payment-by-results as a “productivity reward” and that, having allowed standards to stagnate, he now wanted “to have a little free trade” in the sector. He also said, “I cannot promise the House that this system will be an economical one, and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one, but I can promise that it shall either be one or the other. If it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient, it shall be cheap.” The real premise of the argument was that “where the teaching is inefficient, the schools should lose.” And they did. Regardless of performance-related pay being an instrument which failed to improve outcomes for children, and one which narrowed the curriculum and resulted in more test-focused teaching, it did reduce the expenditure – the grant fell from over £800,000 in 1861 to just over £600,000 in 1866.
By 1870, there were at least 1.5 million young children with no access whatsoever to education. As the situation worsened over the nineteenth century, there was a concurrent rise in concern from the political class. In 1807, Mr Whitbread attempted to legislate for the establishment of schools and the appointment of teachers in every district in England that lacked them. It also sought to provide all children with a minimum of two years of education between the ages of seven and fourteen. The Bill failed to pass – and one of the speeches against it is worth quoting at length:
“For, however specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching then subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident the in the manufacturing counties it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors and, in a few years, the result would be, that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrates with much more vigorous laws than were now in force.”
The lingering ecclesiastical control over the education sector is evident enough in the refusal to educate the whole of the working class for fear of their newly-gifted literacy being used to read “seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity.”
Mr Brougham spoke in 1818 of a select committee engaged in collating evidence for the House of Commons into the provision of education for the poor, which had noted an increased – and increasing – appetite for it, lamented the state of provision offered, and recommended “some proceedings which the committee believed to be taken to remedy the want of education in different parts of the country…” being “of the opinion that assistance ought to be given by the public towards the erection of schools in different places where it might be deemed advisable to have them…” In 1820, he formally proposed a bill to legislate for the universal establishment of parochial schools where secular instruction would sit alongside non-denominational religious instruction. Catholic opposition to the removal of denominational worship as an option saw the Bill abandoned.
Despite the repeated failure, the repeated attempts highlight the march towards support for, and belief in, a statist response to the public policy problems posed by education. Had the statists of the nineteenth century been operating in a vacuum and designing a school system from scratch, there would likely have been a coherent offer which accommodated the most disadvantaged in society, and where government was the prime actor. But the reality was that they inherited a mixed sector, where some children were educated wholly privately in the boarding schools like those which became the Public Schools in 1868, other children were educated by the church, yet more by the state, a further group by (often religious) volunteers, and a final, sizeable cohort were still in receipt of no education whatsoever.
These were the conditions which saw the passing of W.E. Forster’s Elementary Education Act in 1870.
In 1870, W. E. Foster secured the passing of the Elementary Education Act. Existing local government authorities were required to compare census data with school population data. Where there existed insufficient provision for the school age population, the local authority had to create a democratically elected school board who would be responsible for ensuring there was sufficient provision, through using locally sourced public money to issue grants to existing ‘voluntary’ schools (the church schools, who had seen their finances topped up via such grants since the 1830s), or – and this was the novel part – opening wholly new board schools. The Act aimed at schooling for all children between the ages of five and twelve.
The Act enabled school boards to create and award places for free “to parents who they think really cannot afford to pay”, and also allowed the boards to compel families to participate in the offered education. By 1876, half the population was under compulsion; by 1880, school was made compulsory for everyone aged between five and ten. Schools in receipt of top-up grant funding, or who were wholly funded by the state, had to open themselves up to government inspectors so that the central government could assure itself that the conditions for funding were being met. As much as the state had increased its involvement in and funding of education, the provision past the age of ten still varied widely. Fees excluded the vast majority of working-class children from secondary education, other than a small minority who managed to win a scholarship. Working-class children had been brought closer to a position whereby the majority of them would be functionally literate and numerate, but the material and tangible benefits of the education evaded some.
The nineteenth century had seen a huge increase in the level of responsibility taken for education by the state. So, when an 1884 Royal Commission report on technical instruction, having toured Europe to gather evidence, concluded that the schooling in Germany was “overwhelmingly superior”, the state felt compelled to respond. The report suggested that on the continent, “the dense ignorance so common among workmen in England is unknown.” And so, a pursuit of excellence in technical education, particularly for the working class, and particularly to close a perceived gap with Germany, was begun. It was particularly for the working class because the view of the 1868 Schools Inquiry Commission that “the different classes of society, the different occupations of life, require different teaching” was still alive and well. In 1889, newly created counties and county boroughs were empowered and required to provide a technical education.
Arthur Balfour’s Education Act of 1902 created a new Board of Education, headed by a central government minister. 2500 elected school boards were turned into Local Educational Authorities, given powers to fund technical education, and shifted the funding from a centralised to locally sourced model. As a response to the perceived failure to educate English workmen as well as their European counterparts, the Act was unsuccessful, in that the high-quality technical education aspired towards was never realised. As an extension of the 1870s provision for state elementary education to cover secondary schooling, though, the project was a clear success, with over 1000 schools opened by 1914. It also tightened links between the church schools and the state, because the new LEAs were charged with paying teachers, even in the church schools.
The 1902 Act ended the era of the School Boards. Their lifetime was short, just over thirty years. But they did ensure that free and compulsory education was an embedded concept. It has been described as:
“one of the most remarkable applications of the principles of state intervention… a dramatic change in the relationship between the state, the individual, and the family.”
The developments in the coming decades, both within and without education, led to the creation of the welfare state, an even more dramatic change in the state’s relationships with its citizens.
The true innovation behind the 1902 Act was that it unified education into one good, capable of being delivered by one provider. The board schools could only provide elementary education, and the county councils only technical education. “Now, for the first time, education may be dealt with as a whole, without limitation or restriction.” The specifics of the act also required that the councils running the LEAs had to appoint an education committee, and that the committee must be constituted so that a majority of their members were locally elected politicians, though there was provision for the appointment of non-political experts where appropriate. So, one of the provisions of the 1902 Act was to ensure that those running schools in receipt of public money and providing a public good were, in fact, answerable and accountable to the public. In line with this accountability, each council was supposed to have at least one Inspector (HMI) of its own, to not only assess the amount and appropriateness of government grants, but to participate in the decision-making processes.
The increased government control over and funding of education brought with it more scrutiny and attention. Sir William Henry Hadow was charged with chairing a committee that investigated and reported on the state of the sector. The Hadow committees produced several important reports, some of which were adopted as government policy, but some of which were not. ‘The Education of the Adolescent’, published in 1926, and ‘The Primary School’, published in 1931, advocated for child-centered, collaborative pedagogies, discovery learning and stressed that effective schools are “not a place of compulsory instruction, but a community of old and young, engaged in learning by cooperative experiment”. Whilst this progressive recommendation was largely ignored by the political establishment, others, such as the division of schooling into ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’, with a division at age eleven, were eventually adopted. In that same report, claims were made regarding “the desirability of bringing the curriculum into relation with the local environment” and the suitability of “a certain amount of work bearing in some way upon their probable occupations”.
The links between Hadow and the Plowden reports which followed are clear. Hadow encouraged nursery provision, saying, “In districts where the housing and general economic conditions are seriously below the average, a nursery school should, if possible, be provided.” And Plowden, nearly fifty years later, noted that “nursery education on a large scale remains an unfulfilled promise.”
In the early twentieth century, 5.3 million children were accessing elementary education, but only around a quarter of a million of those went on to access secondary education. Allowing for the legal provision was not the same as ensuring families accessed that provision: over the 1920s, less than 10 per cent of children aged eleven to fifteen were going to school. This ‘failure’ was one of the driving forces behind the scope and shape of Rab Butler’s Education Act in 1944.
Early movements towards a proper, comprehensive system enjoyed cross-party support. The Spens Report, published in 1938, found, though, that “the existing arrangements for the whole-time education of boys and girls… have ceased to correspond with the actual structure of modern society and with the economic facts of the situation”. The report advocated for the raising of the school-leavers’ age to sixteen, and for the abolition of fees for all state-provided or funded education. It also considered multilateral schools, consistent provision for all for at least a few years after the age of eleven, and a streaming system to allow for course selection post-14 that met the needs of individuals. But it also included advocacy for a tripartite system of technical schools, grammar schools, and secondary moderns.
Rab Butler was not opposed to comprehensives. In the 1943 White Paper that led to his 1944 Education Act included this:
“There is nothing to be said in favour of a system which subjects children at the age of eleven to the strain of competitive examination on which not only their future schooling, but their future careers, may rely.”
The White Paper referenced grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools but did not mandate them. The requirement was simply for an educational offer in line with “age, ability and aptitude” – but, of the three school types, “it would be wrong to suppose that they will necessarily remain separate and apart”. Further, it specifically stipulated that any diversity of educational offer “must not impair the social unity within the education system which will open the way to a more closely knit society.”
However Butler felt, and whatever the wording of the White Paper, Sir Cyril Norwood, commissioned to produce a report deemed the ‘sequel’ to the Hadow reports, chaired a committee which published ‘Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools’ in 1941, which came out strongly in support of the creation of a tripartite system. His influence won out, and that was the system given life by the 1944 Act.
The real travesty behind this move lies in the story of another Cyril – Cyril Burt, the “father of the 11-plus”, whose work as a psychologist claimed to find that intelligence was hereditary and fixed. These findings – influential at the time, and contributory factors to the creation of the grammar school system in the Butler Act – were, after Burt’s death, found to have been falsified. The scientific underpinning for the post-war tripartite system was demonstrably and provably false.
The system of selection age of eleven and the ‘sorting’ of children onto different educational tracks retains high-profile and influential friends, with Theresa May arguing that parents like grammar and that they can act as a socially levelling force. Research conducted in response to her proposals found that:
“only as high as the 90th percentile of SES do more than half of the students in selective areas attend a grammar school, whereas in the top percentile, 80% of pupils attend. This shows clearly that academic selection is a policy that only benefits the very affluent.”
This contemporary objection to the expansion of grammars is well borne out when the tripartite era is examined in any depth. Research from the 1930s to the 1970s found that “school inequalities of opportunity have been remarkably stable… Throughout, the [middle] class has had roughly three times the chance of the working class getting some kind of selective secondary schooling.”
The tripartite system, then, was a grossly unequal one. Within one catchment, the issue is obvious: the creation of educational winners by necessity creates losers, and allowing for a system whereby one school is allowed to cream off the high-attaining pupils whilst the neighbouring schools are inspected and judged based on how well they work with the other pupils is unfair – on children, and educational professionals. Michael Young argued that “every selection of one is a rejection of many”. Whilst the Sutton Trust has argued that the impact on academic results is only negligible, it notes “a widespread, low-level impact on pupil enrolments” and found “non-selective schools do see a significant proportion of pupils ‘lost’ to nearby grammars”. But the system was grossly unequal across different regions, too. Only 10% of children in Sunderland or Gateshead accessed grammars; this was 40% in the more affluent Westmoreland.
As well as being typified by disparities across regions, the system’s hoped-for parity of esteem between the grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools failed to materialise. Technical schools never taught more than 2% of the population. Correlli Barnett, who referred to secondary moderns as “mere settling tanks for academic failures”, judged that the tripartite system “had led to the very opposite of the equal status and opportunity which [it] had intended, perpetuating the educational class divide” and argued it was evident in “three different school leaving ages – 15, 16 and 18 – all steeped in class values.” He particularly lamented the country’s failure to properly conceptualise and then build its technical education offer to allow for Britain to become industrially competitive. He criticised the Norwood report and accused Sir Cyril Norwood of “twittering on about the classics, Christianity and eternal values” whilst excluding from the secondary modern curriculum “any topic relevant to education for capability in a working life.”
A series of studies highlighted in Melissa Benn’s ‘School Wars’ chart the concerns people increasingly had with the selection process during the tripartite era. In 1957, the British Psychological Society were critical of the concept and practice of intelligence testing. In 1957, the National Foundation for Educational Research came out as opposed to selection. The 1963 Robbins Report rejected the idea that only some children had talents worth cultivating, and in the same year, the Newsom Report found that “intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work, but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches.”
The disparities plaguing the tripartite system could be seen across schools of the same type, as well as between school types. Douglas, Ross and Simpson found that, as well as grammar school pupils receiving 170% the per-pupil-funding available to secondary modern pupils throughout the 1950s, there was a marked tendency for secondary moderns attended by primarily working class children to struggle to compete in terms of the quality of staffing and resources with other secondary moderns attended by primarily middle class children.
Ellen Wilkinson and George Tomlinson – Labour Ministers for Education between 1945 and 1951 – failed to use the flexibility of the Butler Act to query the appropriateness of selection and division during those early years. They toyed with the idea of pushing for a comprehensive system, but when Labour left office in 1951, there were fewer than twenty such schools. The first was in Westmoreland in 1945, and Anglesey became the first wholly comprehensive county in 1950 – but the political will or capital to push for a universally comprehensive system was lacking whilst Labour were in power. It found its way into the Labour manifesto for the 1951 General Election – but this was an election the Labour Party went on to lose. Sir David Eccles was the Conservative Education Minister during the 1950s, and he was the first to particularly successfully argue for the viewing of education as an investment rather than a cost. He oversaw the building of more than 2000 new schools over the period 1954-63, embedding the tripartite system.
It wasn’t until the Wilson government of the 1960s that Labour were in a position to push against this. Tony Crosland swore that “if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England.” The growing dissatisfaction with the tripartite system, as outlined earlier, enabled him to make efforts to do so. A government motion in favour of comprehensives passed in January 1965; July 1965 saw circular 10/65 issued to local authorities requesting them to convert their systems of secondary schooling to a comprehensive one. Facing some backlash from the harder left of the Labour Party, the government made cash for new school buildings in 1966, conditional on an agreement by the authority to make that transition. The Education Act of 1976 insisted on comprehensives, and by 1979, over 90% of pupils were being taught in comprehensives. By the time Labour left office, only a handful of local authorities were still refusing to submit plans to complete the transition from the tripartite to the comprehensive system.
There was consistent Conservative opposition to this change. In 1967, right-wing critics of comprehensives and advocates of the grammar schools forced a conference ballot at the party conference. They won, and the Conservative backbench education committee chair was replaced by a champion of grammar. The day Margaret Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education, the press reported that “Mrs Thatcher is known to be less enthusiastic about comprehensives than Sir Edward.” Whilst her tenure indeed saw the greatest number of grammar schools closed and the greatest number of comprehensives opened, she remained ideologically opposed.
Thatcher was not alone in her suspicion of the comprehensive system. In 1977, Panorama aired a documentary on BBC1 called ‘The Best Days?’, focusing on the chaotic conditions at Faraday School, in East Acton. The public and press reaction to the documentary, and the reaction to the progressivism of the profession as typified by the Plowden report, caused worries that the comprehensive experiment was failing. This criticism of comprehensives was not only from ‘the right’ and not only focused on traditional values: those who believed the system could do better in terms of social justice also had cause for concern. There was evidence that comprehensives simply amended the nature, without challenging the existence of, selection via social class. Schools, based on patterns of residential segregation, were similarly segregated, and some schools were simply more working-class than others.
“All of this added up to a new comprehensive system of education that, like the tripartite system, mirrored wider social inequalities rather than compensating for them.”
The growing concerns were broadly those left unresolved by the 1944 Act: what should be taught, to whom, and how, and why? Callaghan readied himself to respond to these questions by challenging the profession’s autonomy and aimed to require it to focus more on the future economic roles of the young people with whom it worked. His Secretary of State for Education, Fred Mulley, wrote ‘The Yellow Book’, which outlined the government’s plans. It remained unpublished, but leaked sections saw Callaghan attacked by the education sector as ignorant and meddlesome. He responded that “public interest [in education] is strong and legitimate and will be satisfied. We spend £6 billion a year on education, so there will be a discussion.” He also used the speech to express his belief that there should be “a basic curriculum with universal standards”, and though he did note that those working in the sector best “have the expertise and the professional approach” ultimately stressed that they “must satisfy the parents and industry that what [they] are doing meets their requirements and the needs of our children.” Note here the return to the refrain of the system’s failure to provide technical education.
Callaghan had intruded on “the secret garden of the curriculum”, and whilst there was some pushback – notably from Robert Cook, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, who said “I was teaching in Nazi Germany in the thirties and I saw what happened where the curriculum was nationally controlled. My history books were taken out and replaced.” Having introduced the idea that central government should have more of a say over what happened in schools, and explicitly discussing questions of curriculum and national standards, Callaghan had paved the way for the reforms of the Thatcher government.
Between 1975 and 1978, Norman St John-Stevas served as the Shadow Spokesman for Education. He managed to frustrate efforts from some to the right of the Conservative Party, who, in line with Sir Keith Joseph’s Centre for Policy Studies, were calling for a system of vouchers as a means of achieving freedom in the education system. There were those arguing that education, as with all welfare state provision, was problematic in that “family responsibility for young people has been substantially eroded by the growth of state secondary education” and that “a radical challenge to the schools’ [i.e. the state’s] monopoly of power is required.” This argument culminated in the conclusion that “In the longer run, a substantial expansion of independent education, with schools having to regard their pupils’ parents as customers and clients, will be necessary…”. The language here is – in line with the rest of the Thatcher project – entirely about reducing the size of the state, and marketising as many aspects of public life as possible. As mentioned, St John-Stevas managed to avoid the inclusion of a voucher system from the Conservative manifesto and subsequent legislation, but the reasons he succeeded in doing so are not necessarily proof of a lack of support for them ideologically. Stuart Sexton said of vouchers that “politically and financially it would not be desirable to make a sudden change.” The problem with a voucher system was only perceived, by the Conservatives advocating for it, to be the schools’ inability to cope with receiving a set sum per pupil. “You can’t have vouchers unless the school is accustomed to handling its budget.” Sexton’s approach to privatising the education sector was one of gradualism, slowly eroding local authority control of the schools and making them incrementally more aligned with the voucher system.
Everything the Thatcher government aimed towards and achieved was premised on the belief that market forces were good. What St. John-Stevas did propose was a parents’ charter, allowing for parental choice over schools, empowering them to make appeals, providing them to control school governance, and the mandatory publication of exam results. He also proposed a core curriculum, strengthened processes of inspection, and national standards of reading, writing and arithmetic. By the time the manifesto for 1979 came to be written, the core curriculum had been dropped, and the testing of national standards had been delegated to the LEAs. Whoever was set to monitor these standards, the idea was that for parents to properly act as informed consumers, full information, a cornerstone of free market thinking, must be aspired towards.
What the Thatcher government did do, early, was reverse the requirement since 1976 for LEAs to ‘go comprehensive’, and to make some provision for parent governors. They also reduced public spending on education as a share of GDP over 1980-86, including via the removal of an obligation for LEAs to provide meals, milk and transport for the pupils – provisions in place since 1944.
Despite the gradual movement towards consensus around the merits of nationalising some elements of the curriculum, and Conservative desire to create the conditions for a properly functioning market-place via establishing a state of full information, the Conservatives’ 1985 White Paper – ‘Better Schools’ – said that whilst it was right for the government to share an agenda, it would be wrong to formerly legislate a national curriculum.
Thatcher wanted a return to selection and the return of partial fees, whereby parents could top up the funding provided for them by the state and access private/independent education. Baker – her Secretary of State for Education during the 1980s – wanted neither. He was instead focused on technical education provision, and the creation, implementation and monitoring of a national curriculum and set of standards.
The compromise position pursued and which resulted in the 1988 Education Reform Act pursued the benefits, absent the mechanics, of a voucher system. It provided for competition between schools, parents-as-informed-consumers, and weaker control over standards by the profession itself. It allowed for these things through parental choice, formula funding and grant-maintained status for schools. Grant-maintained schools, and even more so City Technology Colleges, laid the groundwork for the academisation process which followed, by reducing the level of control over schools wielded by the LEAs and giving more control over finances and admissions to the schools themselves. In a move that would move schools closer to a position whereby Sexton would be happy, they could accept a voucher system. Baker said he was aiming for “all secondary schools and the bigger primaries” to be running their budget within four years. Baker himself argued that the provision for schools to ‘opt out’ of LEA control would rarely be used, and would instead achieve improvements by acting as a threat to the LEAs, which would make them perform better. There were only seventy such opt-outs by 1991. Ted Heath objected to what the Thatcher government, and the Baker Act, would lead to – the ‘undermining and destruction’ of the educational system. The vehemence and foresight of the objection make it worth quoting at length:
“We shall see that schools will opt out. The next development will be that those schools can choose who they take. They will not take from their areas, but will take the bright pupils wherever they find them. The next stage will be, ‘Yes, you can charge fees for doing that.’ We will move right away from our educational system to a who-pays system of independent schools of choice.”
Ken Clarke – having mastered the art of marketisation at the Health department – finished the neo-liberalisation and marketisation of education by legislating for published league tables, and an expansion (and part privatisation) of the inspection system. League tables began to be published in 1992, and Ofsted began to inspect and report in 1993. Regardless of the objections – even at the time – that raw outcome data and inspection judgements would be little more than functions of the demographics served by a school, it became increasingly clear that parents would, as was intended and hoped for, begin to respond to these market signals when choosing a school for their children.
The historical charting of developments to the educational system is left here, because the 1988 Education Reform Act endures as the chief framework that defines contemporary education. Grant-maintained schools and CTCs were precursors for academies, which define the current landscape, with schools exercising increasing freedoms from local (if not central) political control. Arguments over the national curriculum, standardised testing, league tables and the role of the inspectorate remain unresolved, and these forces exert enormous pressures on school leaders and teachers, and accordingly define what children are taught and how. The inspectorate and other systems of accountability are still all premised on the creation of full information to enable parents to act as consumers and clients, with little political time given over to discussing the extent to which that is appropriate or desirable. The most alarming concern is the idea that control over the system is still with gradualists whose longer-term objective is a full market system, with parents purchasing education for their children.
The system as it stands is the product of a broadly Conservative project of marketising and atomising the education system and shaping it along neoliberal lines, subjecting it to the workings of ‘New Public Management’. For anyone offering suggestions or policy solutions to the problems resultant from Thatcherite reforms, it is worth returning to how this piece began and noting that education policy is a process of reform, rather than blank-slate design. The current systems and structures must be the starting point when making suggestions for how the sector could better operate. It was 1988 that gave us those systems and structures. Everything since then has been tinkering within that paradigm.
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The publisher is Citizen Network. Britain's Crumbling Education System. Part Two: Education in England up to 1988 © Gary Hammonds 2025.
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