So how did we get to this crisis point in education? This chapter provides an overview of educational developments in England since 1944, setting the scene to allow the magnitude of key social and economic changes to which education is expected to respond in the 21st century to be appreciated.

The welfare state settlement

For nearly 30 years after 1945, the UK economy enjoyed a ‘long boom’. Output increased, wages rose, and spending on the new welfare state increased accordingly. The Education Act 1944 established free state secondary schooling, albeit through a rigid tripartite system in which grammar, technical and secondary modern state schools were designed to channel the aptitudes and occupational destinies of young people from the ages of 11+. Corresponding as it did to the divisions of knowledge and labour in employment between non-manual ‘middle’ and skilled and unskilled manual ‘working’ classes, this left the ‘upper’ class private schools outside the state system altogether while still dominant over it.

The new state secondary provision was designed to match an industrial occupational order widely thought of as pyramid shaped, where, for example, in 1951 72% of employees were manual workers, with the majority categorised as no more than ‘semi-skilled’ (Callinicos and Harman, 1987, p 16). For these, the new secondary modern schools provided the minimal education needed for the factory floor. Technical schools equated with skilled or craft occupations. The grammar schools served as the avenue to white-collar/managerial work. They were also virtually the only way to progress to university, apart from through the fee-paying private schools with their close connections to the ‘antique’ universities of Oxford and Cambridge, notably through the exam boards. The ‘upper classes’ were thus largely absent from state schooling. Private schools catered for about 7% of the population, a figure not too dissimilar to today (although it is 14% in private sixth forms), and they are still closely connected with prestigious universities and even certain colleges within them. Their academic curriculum and character-forming ethos was mimicked by the grammar schools.

This left more of a binary than a tripartite system of state secondary schools, because technical education was expensive to provide and money was not forthcoming for it.