One of the key difficulties may well have been, as Barnett argues, that no industrial or commercial body brought pressure on the Board of Education ‘of that relentless and effective kind exerted by the churches’. As a result ‘the crucial question of providing the nation with an education for capability from primary school up to technical university equal to that of her competitors was squeezed away to the sidelines’.15 A committee was set up with the blessing of the TUC and the British Employers’ Federation to examine day-continuation education. It reported in September 1943, after the White Paper but before the Bill. But another committee which examined higher technical education under Lord Eustace Percy was not even appointed until April 1944, when the Bill was well into its parliamentary run. It finally reported, after the Act took effect, in 1945.
The outcome was that the Act did place a duty on local authorities to provide ‘adequate facilities for further education’. It also provided powers for the minister, as soon as it was considered ‘practicable to do so’, to require LEAs to draw up plans for more day-continuation colleges, just forty of which had been established by 1938 and only one of which, in Rugby, was compulsory.16 In the event, no minister ever found it practical so to do. Barnett argues that the Act ‘offered not so much an executive operational framework as an opened gate to an empty construction site on which local authorities might or might not (depending on their zeal and the effectiveness of the ministry’s nagging) build the technical and further education system that Britain so desperately needed’.17
The problem, however, was that the local authorities were not the only players in this game. As Butler’s talks with Bevin illustrate, responsibilities for education and training were divided within government. Training had always always been seen as a matter for employers, while even education had taken time to become a full-blown responsibility for the state. Technical education and vocational training thus fell between the stools of employers, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Education. The county colleges were to depend on a reform of apprenticeships (then five years long) and industrial training which the employers never undertook. In the full employment after the war, many were only too happy to take on unskilled and poorly educated teenagers and still make profits without the need to invest in the training and day release that the county colleges required. As for the unions, training was never more than a minor bargaining chip in industrial relations. The drive from industry for better training existed far more in industrialists’ rhetoric than in reality. In the schools themselves, technical education fell between the grammars, whose highest aim was to produce entrants for universities that remained heavily arts-based, and secondary moderns, providing the low-grade practical education that was designed for their ‘iron’ children.
The universities remained largely outside the Act, save for strengthened powers for local authorities to provide student grants. They were after all independent, responsible neither to central nor to local government, though part-funded through the University Grants Committee. Nursery schooling suffered the same fate as technical education – provided for in the Act, but to be compulsory only when a date was set. Butler had rated both as priorities. ‘Equality of opportunity would remain something of an empty phrase if children entered the period of compulsory schooling from conditions of family deprivation, or left it to pursue what Churchill called blind-alley occupations,’ he said in 1971, explaining his Act’s nursery and technical education provisions. But nearly thirty years on from 1944, he judged pre-schooling to be still ‘patently inadequate’, while fewer than half of under-eighteens were released from industry for voluntary, not mandatory, part-time education. A price was paid in all this in terms of Britain’s fitness to fight its way in a competitive world.
If one concept, one ‘guiding principle’ to use Kenneth Baker’s phrase, underpinned the 1944 Act it was equality of opportunity – the aim Butler referred to in his memoirs and which was spelt out in the White Paper’s introduction. The battle to define precisely what equality of opportunity meant, however, was to dominate much of the history of post-war education.
For some, for whom comprehensive schooling was to become the keystone definition, Butler’s White Paper and Act with their tripartite (or tri-partheid as some put it with acid wit) system of grammars, technical and secondary moderns came to be seen as a thoroughly ‘Tory’ measure18 – the word here being firmly used as a term of abuse. In fact the Act was far subtler than that. In itself it did not set out the tripartite system, even though the White Paper made clear that was what was expected. The Act merely required education according to pupils’ ‘ages, abilities and aptitudes’, opening the door to multilateral or comprehensive schools. It did so because in fact there was no absolute consensus, even in official circles, about the ideal organisation of secondary education – or even the precise purpose of education.
The White Paper reveals the struggle in the official mind to balance four aims: equality of opportunity with diversity of provision; and parity of esteem between the different schools which would provide that diversity with social unity. For education, in this coalition White Paper, was not just about developing people’s talents. It included, as Butler’s assertion quoted at the beginning of this chapter shows, an element of what was to become the hotly disputed issue of ‘social engineering’ in education. The White Paper19 stated – providing a talismanic slogan for ever after for those who favoured comprehensives – that: ‘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 depend.’ Instead, children should ‘be classified, not on the results of a competitive test, but on an assessment of their individual aptitudes largely by such means as school records, supplemented, if necessary, by intelligence tests’.
Even so, it added, the choice should not be finally determined at eleven. At thirteen or even later there should be facilities for transfer, and ‘if the choice is to be a real one, it is manifest that conditions in different types of school must be broadly equivalent’. Grammar schools, the paper acknowledged, enjoyed at the time a prestige which ‘completely overshadows all other types of school’. Equal treatment was needed: though it has to be added that quite how the schools were meant to become equally valued when the Spens report of 1938 had estimated that a mere 15 per cent of secondary school pupils would go to grammars was not explained.
The White Paper went on to say that while grammars, secondary moderns and technical schools would indeed be the main types, ‘it would be wrong to suppose that they will necessarily remain separate and apart. Different types may be combined in one building or on one site … in any case free interchange of pupils from one type of education to another must be facilitated.’ Diversity, it also stated, ‘must not impair the social unity within the educational system which will open the way to a more closely knit society and give us the strength to face the tasks ahead’. So even in the coalition White Paper, education was also seen as a means of social engineering. Butler himself had some sympathy for the idea of multilateral schools. He once told Ede he was ‘more in favour of it than any of us’.20 But he saw them as an addition to the variety. His real aim, never to be achieved, was ‘social equality in the secondary schools of various types’,21 a view many Labour MPs and councillors shared at the time.22
In practice, despite the White Paper, the eleven-plus became a competitive exam and transfer between schools after eleven a rarity. Technical schools, left in the hands of local authorities to organise, never took off; at most they educated 2 per cent of the school population. This third leg of Butler’s tripod, as Barnett puts it ‘the one that might have fostered a technological national culture in place of a literary one … was simply never built’. The secondary modern school, ‘though greatly expanded in numbers in the postwar era, was to remain in the eyes of parents and children alike a mere educational settling-tank for academic failures’. How could it be otherwise ‘with staff of inferior quality to that in the grammar school, with resources per child barely a third of those enjoyed by the grammar school, and with no examination specifically designed for its pupils but instead only the