Introduction

The function of schooling is to preserve the class and select the elite.

In this chapter I present a brief historical overview of policy and practice before making a detailed attempt to answer the question ‘What have been the historical processes whereby working-class educational failure has become legitimised and institutionalised?’ Whereas the last chapter focused on the relationships between education and the wider economy and society, this chapter focuses on the workings of the educational system. I start with a concise overview of the history of working-class education in Britain before focusing on the recent history of class in education.

The history of working-class education in the UK is short and stark. It was only in the early 19th century that ‘voluntary schools, mostly run and organised by the churches, became widespread. Even so, in 1818 only 7% of children were in day elementary schools, and shortly before the Education Act of 1870 was introduced still less than half of all primary aged children attended school. It was only when voluntary schools were supplemented by a state-supported system after the Education Act of 1870 that a majority of primary school-aged children went to school. However, right from the beginning the class system dictated the nature and remit of schools. State-supported schools, or board schools as they came to be called, became the schools for the working classes, with a sharply different curriculum to those schools that served the middle and upper classes. As Margaret McMillan, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, makes clear:

Was it possible that the children of the working class, however fortunate, however plucky, could hold their own later with those who in the formative years drank deep and long of every fountain of life? No. It’s impossible. Below every strike, concealed behind legislation of every order, there is this fact – the higher nutrition of the favoured few as compared with the balked childhood of the majority. Nothing evens up this gross injustice.

Andy Green, in his survey of the rise of education systems in England, France and the US, singles out England as the most blatant example of the use of schooling by a dominant class to secure control over subordinate groups.