2024 is just around the corner. It will mark the eightieth anniversary of the momentous 1944 Butler Act, considered a ‘triumph for progressive reform’. Yet, even though times have changed, in many respects education continues to operate around the social and economic assumptions growing out of the post-war reconstruction.
First the assumption that for economic growth to continue and to keep up with other countries, there’ll always be a need for greater levels of education and by implication, new skills. Second and as a result, there’ll be increased opportunities for social mobility – more chances for individuals to move up into new jobs. Both these assumptions fitted well with arguments for comprehensive education – supported by reformers and large numbers of employers; even many Tories recognised that ‘mobilising talent’ wouldn’t take place under Butler’s rigid tripartite secondary system.
The situation couldn’t be more different now. The long years of educational expansion have been gradually displaced by a ‘great reversal’. Traditional labour market openings for young people have dried up, resulting in full time participation in education for much longer. But the growth of the service economy hasn’t produced the high skilled, high paid jobs that many assumed would happen and as education has continued to expand, thousands of young people are ‘overqualified’ for the work they end up in – surveys showing around 1 in 3 graduates in ‘non-graduate’ employments 6 months after leaving university. As a result, the only social mobility is likely to be downwards.
But there’s another aspect of post-war education, which is generally ignored, that’s crucial to understanding the success of post-war education and now, the current and continued crisis. Secondary education might have been extended in England and Wales, (it already existed in Scotland), but in reality, large sections of the post-war working class had little involvement (and arguably, despite changes in the curriculum, little interest) in formal schooling. At the start of the 1970s, over 40% of young people still left with no education qualifications, making relatively smooth transitions into employment invariably through local recruiting networks, including ‘time-serving’ apprenticeships (though mostly for boys).
Today the social and individual benefits associated with learning and education have been increasingly marginalised as qualifications have become ‘high stakes’ consumer goods, wanted for what they can buy. And by implication, sought at the expense of others. The 1944 Act provided free secondary schooling for all, but now thousands of parents fork out money for the ‘extras’ required to attend a ‘good school’ – even in some cases by moving house. Thousands more pay for out of hours private tutors to increase their children’s examination chances, meanwhile, in contrast to the post war years, as participation in mass higher education becomes a prerequisite, millions rack up huge debts.
While there are still campaigns for an end of grammar schools, competition for the high grades that improve chances of employment, means that new and more divisive types of differentiation have emerged between schools, colleges and universities Ofsted’s inspection regime, a top down and inflexible traditional academic curriculum and the ‘teach to test’ culture of public exams reinforce these; but are as much a consequence rather than a cause of education’s malaise. But these policies have effectively destroyed the ‘professional autonomy’ teachers enjoyed over learning in the post-war period, while Local Education Authorities which for years were considered to be their natural partners, have become powerless and increasingly irrelevant.
Young people have continued to experience a significant fall in their incomes relative to other groups, particularly in the years following the financial crash, but also suffering further from the effects of the pandemic. As a result, another pillar of post-war truism – that greater access to education will make each generation better off than the previous, is no longer tenable. As this blog has continued to argue, new policies are required. These need to go well beyond simply expanding and improving education – however important this remains – and must address major changes in the economy and the labour market; but also other inequalities confronting the young. The post-war education project has come off the rails.
Education, Economy and Society 