2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the momentous 1944 Butler Act, considered a triumph for progressive reform. Though times may have changed, post-war assumptions about education remain. First, that for economic growth to continue and to keep pace with other countries, there is a need for greater levels of ‘human capital’ providing new skills for better paid professional and managerial work, particularly as economies have moved from manufacturing to services. Second and as a result, there will be increased opportunities for social mobility – in the post-war years there were chances for a significant minority of working-class children to move up into new types of 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. This period also saw the advance of teacher professionalism as the size of the workforce grew.
But another aspect of post-war education, is generally ignored and is crucial to understanding the apparent 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, significant sections of the post-war working class, despite changes in the curriculum pioneered by a new generation of committed teachers, saw little immediate benefit in formal schooling. Till the mid1970s for example, over 40% of young people left school with no education qualifications, making relatively smooth transitions into employment invariably through local recruiting networks, including ‘time-serving’ apprenticeships (though mostly for boys). With the jobless rate remained around 1.5% until the 1970s, you could be ‘out of one job on Friday and in another on Monday’.
But during the last quarter of the 20th century, as governments found it increasing difficult to continue to ensure ‘full employment’, working class school leavers also found it harder to move into disappearing ‘youth jobs.’ Disillusioned with increasingly draconian youth training schemes, they voted with their feet, returning to and participating in full-time education for much longer. (Though it took another 30 years until the ‘participation age’ was officially raised to 18, well before the end of the 20th century, ‘staying on’ had increasingly become the norm.)
A Great Reversal?
The rise of full -time ‘vocational’ courses in colleges, but also in school sixth forms, should be seen as a response to changes in the composition of school populations in the later secondary years. Though officially designed to improve and develop (generic as well as technical) skills required for a new world of work, which working class school leavers were said to lack (and thus considered ‘not work ready’) critics argued that like the youth training schemes preceding them, they represented Training Without Jobs, designed to disguise what would have been unacceptably high levels of youth unemployment and a much longer labour queue. Previously finding jobs without extended education, young people were now being pushed back into education without jobs. Reminiscent of earlier 1944 tripartite divides, it also represented the beginnings of a Great Reversal of post-war educational ideals.
The failure of Vocationalism
But employers continued to prefer young people with academic qualifications and increasingly found they could recruit graduates (many of those with vocational qualifications used them to enter HE). To improve their standing, vocational qualifications which had emphasised a ‘learning by doing approach’ increasingly took on some of the characteristics of academic ones – with more emphasis given to written assessment and exams. Nowhere was this more apparent than with the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) – the most prominent of the new round of vocational certificates which was relaunched as a Vocational, (then Applied) A-level, part of New Labour’s Curriculum 2000 reforms for post-16 education and as a result, alienating many of the students GNVQ was originally designed for Enrolments tapered away. In addition, evidence showed that the ‘middle jobs’ (white collar and technician level) that vocational qualifications were often associated with had been declining. This has been happening as a result of increased automation - robotics and AI can only intensify this. Rather than embodying real skills, vocational certificates have become ‘credentials’.
Adopting ‘education. education. education’ to try and make the UK economy more competitive, New Labour also ‘modulised’ the post-16 curriculum and seriously considered combining academic and vocational learning under one umbrella, only for Blair to U-turn at the last minute; but as vocational qualifications struggled, enrolments for academic A-levels have continued to increase with 800,000 plus entries. Michael Gove, taking over as Education Secretary in 2010, considered A-levels had become too easy and effectively limited numbers that could attain top grades. But despite assessment procedures being narrowed and with A-levels now resembling the grammar school certificates of old, teachers were able to coach their students through these new sets of hoops and so A-levels, once taken by a tiny percentage of 18-year-olds have become a qualification for the masses.
If there was a failure to cement academic and vocational divisions, attempts by both major political parties to impose new divisive types of differentiation between schools were more successful. While prevented from overt academic selection and continuing to see themselves as ‘comprehensives’, Academies and Free Schools had greater autonomy over who they admitted and what they taught – both Tory and then New Labour governments argued this would ‘raise standards.’ Ofsted was also given much greater power to punish schools (and colleges) considered to be failing.
Other assumptions behind post-war education began to be challenged. The 1944 Act provided free secondary schooling for all, but now thousands of aspiring parents continue to 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 secure and well-paid employment is more difficult to secure, approaching 40% of school and college leavers opt for higher education, racking up huge debts.
Mass higher education
It is the huge increase in participation in higher education that has probably been the most significant change, causing the biggest crisis in the post-war education project. Once an activity enjoyed by mostly middle-class students and paid for by working class taxation, it’s now estimated that 50% of young people experience some type of HE. Attempts to reverse this trend have not, (at least so far) succeeded.
On the one hand Tory politicians, publically endorse the increases in opportunity that have been created – it was Margaret Thatcher who engineered some of the most important changes, but on the other there is plenty of right-wing indignation about ‘universities not being like they used to be’, mixed with half-baked theories about too many young people being ‘overeducated’.
Tory education ministers assumed wrongly that the introduction of the £9000 fee, financed by loans would ‘price out’ poorer students. Also, their ignorance about declining graduate salaries led to large numbers of graduates never earning enough to pay back their debts during their working lives. Repayment thresholds have been lowered and the time length over which a loan can be repaid have been increased – but it is too early to see the effects of these. The Tories have also tried to police higher education numbers in other ways – drawing up ‘value for money’ criteria for those universities with poor course completion rates and a failure to place students in ‘graduate jobs.’
Despite T (Technical)-level qualifications not yet establishing themselves, new higher-level certificates are being introduced, delivered in further education colleges and designed to close an (illusionary) deficit in technician, rather than graduate level skills. But it is probably the failure to reintroduce apprenticeships as real alternatives (to continuing to HE) that is the most significant. Even though there are some very good ones, only a small minority of 18-year-olds start apprenticeships, while official figures show apprenticeship funding is being used to finance management trainees on MBAs.
Education without jobs
As argued, the post-war education project started to break down because of economic and labour market changes, not the failure of education. As noted, the disappearance of ‘youth jobs’ in the 1970s led to increased participation in full-time education and this has continued unabated since. Governments of both parties (the clearest example being the Blair-Brown initiatives referred to earlier) have continued to use the ‘human capital’ arguments, but the reality is that the opposite in true. Education, or at least the level of educational qualifications held by the population has expanded at a much faster rate than the number of well-paid jobs, with only 1 in 3 graduates in graduate jobs. As a result, rather than being ‘overeducated’ (how can anybody ever be!) young people are ‘overqualified and under employed’. The Great Reversal outlined above has not only failed to create the necessary divisions between learners, participation in education particularly higher education, shows no sign of declining. Another truism of the post war years, that each generation will be better off than the previous one, no longer exists. Instead, for many there is a risk of downward social mobility. Education has become like trying to move up a downwards escalator where you need to move faster and faster simply to stand still.
Reversing the Great Reversal
We should continue to campaign to reverse the policies of the Great Reversal, contesting New Right political ideas about the increased diversification of schools and restoring local democratic structures, reaffirming comprehensive principles with a broad and balanced curriculum for all – with the option of coursework in assessment as part of a more general reintroduction of ‘professional autonomy’ for teachers.
Issues of resourcing continue to be central. Education spending as a proportion of GDP has fallen below post-war levels. But in calling for increased expenditure a much stronger emphasis on the redistribution of educational chances would also be essential. There have been recent (though very mild) attempts at introducing a ‘pupil premium’ (where the size of school’s budget allows for a level of social deprivation amongst its students), but there would need to be a major transfer of resources away from (‘successful)’ institutions where performance levels largely reflect the privileged social and economic status of their students; to those with socially and economically deprived intakes further down the pile. Yet this could also be politically problematic. While most people (including it would appear, some of the very rich) are in favour of wealthier individuals handing over more of their income in tax, many would baulk at the suggestion that any young person (no matter how socially advantaged) should have restrictions placed on their education, considering it a form of ‘levelling down’ or ‘penalising success’. But if any semblance of social mobility is to be restored (but where the opportunities for some groups improve at the expense of others) it cannot be avoided.
But there will be other, more difficult issues to address – if school admissions become more uniform, what can government do to prevent parents moving into particular catchment areas? Secondly, the really ‘successful’ institutions do not rely on resources provided by the state. For example, while legislation could (and should) be introduced to abolish the charitable status of private schools (and increase their tax liability), in the decade before 2020, private school fees rose 23% above inflation. As a consequence, in 2009/10 private schools spent nearly 40% more per pupil than state schools. By 2020/21 this had risen to over 90% with their students in England twice as likely to achieve A or A* A-level grades as state pupils.
The universities that private schools want to send their students to (Oxbridge and those at the top of the Russell Group) are also, in the days of lucrative research projects, less dependent on public funding and in more than a few cases, could thrive without it; becoming private universities, forming a UK Ivy League, hiking fees to whatever they wanted. (In terms of their legal status, all universities are technically private businesses, but post-94 institutions cannot exist without state support.) while continuing to cultivate their links with top employers. A full-frontal attack on the ‘autonomy’ of elite universities is a difficult and risky strategy. Like a confrontation with top private schools, it would take even a radical government into unknown territory. It would see education being reorganised to ‘compensate’ for wider social inequalities. Post-war education unfolding in very different conditions, did not (and did not have to) do this, with more than a few warnings against.
Other policies are needed for young people in the 21st century
Improving the relative chances of more socially disadvantaged young people at the expense of others, would place them further up the labour queue, but education would continue to be a ‘consumer good’- just as it is now albeit one that was distributed more fairly. with qualifications sought for their ‘exchange value’ (what they can buy the holder) rather than gained for intrinsic reasons or reflecting individual intellectual development. And education would still resemble a downwards escalator! While post war politicians and reformers considered education to be a ‘social’ or a ’merit’ good it is now more appropriate to describe it as ‘zero-sum good’- used to advance one’s own position at the expense of others. Practitioners caught in the ‘teach to test’ culture referred to above) spend as much time coaching their students to jump through assessment hoops as developing learning skills.
The changes to education outlined above, though given an extra unpleasantness by the rise of New Right ideas are the consequence of a changing relationship between working class young people and the labour market. New education policies need to be built around alternatives for the economy which include an employment plan, proper apprenticeships, even some form of job guarantee. Improved economic security for young people will enable them to make better choices about their educational journeys. But education researchers, let alone practitioners, with less time, are reluctant to stray into these areas….
Education, Economy and Society 
A more appropriate train metaphor – with Butler as the Fat Controller, might be the two track system of schools which the 1944 Act confirmed with a divide at 11+ into grammar schools and only a very few technical secondaries set up. This left the academic grammar school curriculum that grammars shared with privates in place by leaving exam boards in the hands of the Antique Universities, so that when structural comprehensive secondary school reform came 20 years later without any accompanying curricular reform, the comprehensive schools were left competing on an uneven playing field with the surviving grammars – even though they were blamed for ‘falling standards’! Meanwhile, higher education remained unreformed save by the polytechnics, widely regarded as a typical Labour government partial reform on the cheap. So with what you have previously called ‘The Great Reversal’ from 1979 on, when successive Tory governments reversed Labour’s socialisation of industry to privatise it and when this was then subsequently extended by New Labour to the privatisation of state services, a new tripartite system of schools, colleges and universities was left to sort and sift state pupils through the now consolidated and extended two-track system by marketised competition, effectively raising the education age for the majority from 14 to 16 to 18 and now 21/ 25+ and still no secure jobs at the end of it!