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CHAPTER 4

Butler – Education

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

Disraeli, quoted by R. A. Butler in frontispiece of the 1943 White Paper Educational Reconstruction

We are not likely to see another dissolution of the monasteries.

Professor H. C. Barnard, writing in 1947 on the public schools

EDUCATION is the most political of all subjects, for it is firmly about the future. It defines the sort of society people want to see. At one extreme, for those who believe that the next generation should be more equal than the present one, the demand is for equal access to equally good education for all – although furious arguments can then follow about what is meant at which stage of a child’s life by ‘equal access’ and ‘good’, given wide variations in home background, income, aspirations and ability. At the other is a belief that there will always be inequalities and that it is better to organise for that reality, selecting out the high fliers to ensure that they do fly high and are thus able to support the mass for whom it might be safer all round if expectations were not too greatly raised. Education locks into a host of other issues. Should society be culturally or industrially equipped? Should important cultural, religious and economic differences between particular groups be sustained or suppressed? Should extra resources go into helping the least able, boosting the average or ensuring that the brightest are fully stretched? Should the ultimate aim of education be wealth creation, or should it simply be provided in its own right and for its own sake, to free people for the richer enjoyment of life through the knowledge, skills and concepts instilled?

Not all these conflicting objectives are necessarily incompatible all the time, but they do ensure that education is deeply political in the broadest, and far from purely party, sense. How it should be organised, what should be taught, how it should be taught, to whom and for what purpose, were to become some of the most closely fought issues of the modern welfare state. There is a certain irony, therefore, in the fact that education was the first of the five giants to be reformed, and reformed by a Conservative. In July 1941, R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler went to Downing Street to be appointed President of the Board of Education. His own account sets the scene:

The PM saw me after his afternoon nap and was audibly purring like a great tiger. He said, ‘You have been in the House [of Commons] for 15 years and it is time you were promoted.’ I said I had only been there for 12 years but he waved this aside. He said, ‘You have been in the Government for the best part of that time [Butler was currently in the Foreign Office] and I want you to go to the Board of Education. I think you can leave your mark there. You will be independent. Besides,’ he said with rising fervour, ‘you will be in the war. You will move poor children from here to here,’ and he lifted up and evacuated imaginary children from one side of his blotting pad to the other; ‘this will be very difficult.’ He went on: ‘I am too old now to think you can improve people’s natures.’ He looked at me pityingly and said: ‘Everyone has to learn to defend himself. I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.’ I said that I should like to influence what was taught in schools but that this was always frowned upon. Here he looked very earnest and commented, ‘Of course not by instruction or order but by suggestion.’ I then said that I had always looked forward to going to the Board of Education if I were given the chance. He appeared ever so slightly surprised at this, showing that he felt that in wartime a central job, such as the one I was leaving, is the most important. But he looked genuinely pleased that I had shown so much satisfaction and seemed to think the appointment entirely suitable. He concluded the interview by saying ‘Come and see me to discuss things – not details, but the broad lines.’¹

Two days after taking over, Butler met the Archbishop of Canterbury. Three weeks later that was followed up by a session with a deputation of thirty-three Free Church and Anglican leaders with the Archbishop again at their head. They had come to discuss their ‘five points’, almost all of which related to religious education. Butler judged the meeting ‘successful’, finished it by asking a slightly startled Archbishop to close with a prayer,² and promptly went on holiday.

Given that, for many of the years that followed, religion ceased to be a central issue in British schools, an explanation is needed for Butler’s holding his first substantive meetings with the churches. Until the 1830s schooling had been entirely voluntary with no state funding. A country that had produced Shakespeare, Milton, Newton and Smeaton and in the early nineteenth century had Faraday, Stephenson, Telford and Keats in its ranks had just four universities in Scotland and two in England – Oxford and Cambridge. Fewer than ten public (that is, private, fee-paying, boarding) schools were in existence, although there was a spread of endowed and often ancient grammar schools, private tuition, and small ‘dame’ schools taught by women in private houses. In addition, a little very rudimentary teaching for the young was provided in Sunday Schools or in elementary schools which were run by church-sponsored voluntary societies. In 1818 just 7 per cent of children attended day school. The beginnings of an educational movement were, however, under way, although there were still strong fears that ‘too much education might lead to disaffection’ in a society where the labour and service of the many supported the wealth and leisure of the few. Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, famously told Queen Victoria in the late 1830s: ‘I do not know why there is all this fuss about education. None of the Pagets [the Marquis of Anglesey’s family] can read or write and they do very well.’

The industrial revolution, however, produced a demand for better educated workers to which the state was finally to respond. In 1833 a half-empty House of Commons approved a £20,000 grant for school building to help the two church-based school societies, one Anglican and one Free Church, which had been founded in 1811 and 1810 respectively.³ The Anglican society’s full title, The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, in a sense says all that needs to be said about education before 1830.

Parliament as a whole was barely interested. Although this was the moment when the state first became involved in any way in education, the government was still spending more in a year on the Queen’s stables than on educating its children.⁴ The church schools were helped because they were about the only people standing on the barren field; the Catholic schools were later also to receive funds. But by opting to subsidise church schools rather than create secular state ones, Parliament invested in a problem that Butler would still be grappling with more than a century later, for religious feeling ran high. Nonconformists bitterly opposed Anglican instruction in schools, as did Roman Catholics, and vice versa. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary in 1841, was to complain bitterly: ‘Religion, the Keystone of education, is in this country the bar to its progress.’⁵ For the various church societies – Church of England, Roman Catholic and the Nonconformists embracing various brands of Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and others – went to war.

What was taught and how it was taught was not yet remotely the business of the government. What was taught was heavily biased towards the Bible. How it was taught was in many schools the ‘monitorial’ system: one teacher taught the older pupils who in turn taught the younger ones. Andrew Bell, the driving force behind the National Society, a bitter rival to the Quaker Joseph Lancaster who was patron of the British and Foreign, said: ‘Give me twenty-four pupils today and I will give you twenty-four teachers tomorrow.’ In this way a hundred children could be ‘taught’ by one master.⁶

Slowly, amid passionate rows between the various churches about who should be aided, and between all of the churches and those few who favoured state education about whether the godless state even ‘had a right to educate’, government aid spread to books, equipment and teachers’ salaries. In 1839 the very first inspections carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools began. Scotland still had more universities than England (and proved better endowed in schooling also), but in 1825, in part because Nonconformists remained barred from Oxbridge (they were not admitted until the 1850s), London University was founded and 1833 saw the creation of the University of Durham.

Parliament’s interest grew and Royal Commissions on Oxbridge, the elementary schools, endowed schools and the nine public schools followed in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1867 working-class men in urban areas, where schooling was least good, gained the vote, and in 1870, W. E. Forster produced his Elementary Education Act – introducing the first state schooling at a time when an estimated 700,000 children aged between six and ten were in school but an estimated one million were not.⁷ Up to this point, as Derek Fraser nicely puts it, the only way to receive a state education was to be ‘a cadet, a felon or a pauper’ since the army, prison and workhouse did provide at least some schooling.⁸

Forster’s Act, landmark though it was, merely tried in his own words to ‘fill up the gaps’. ‘We must take care … not to destroy the existing system in introducing a new one.’⁹ It allowed school boards to be established in areas of clear need to provide elementary schools. The boards were financed by a mix of government grant and local rates and they were directly elected – the view having grown that a direct local interest in education was vital if progress was to be achieved. In this way, education became an interest of local government, although central government grants to the voluntary church schools continued. Schooling was still neither free (as it was already in the New England states of America) nor compulsory. The school boards could award free places, in Forster’s words, ‘to parents who they think really cannot afford to pay’ and with government approval could even establish free schools ‘under special circumstances’ – in effect, chiefly in the poorest areas of large towns. While hinting that he personally favoured free schooling, Forster argued the Treasury’s case that providing it for all would be ‘not only unnecessary but mischievous. Why should we relieve the parent from all payments for the education of his child … the enormous majority of them are able, and will continue to be able to pay these fees.’¹⁰ Parents were expected to find around a third of the cost of education. Subject in each case to parliamentary approval, the boards were also allowed to frame by-laws making education for five- to twelve-year-olds compulsory. Gradually they began to exercise this power. By 1876 half the population was under compulsion, and in 1880 school was made compulsory for all five- to ten-year-olds. For ten- to fourteen-year-olds the picture still varied widely around the country.

In theory, the new, non-denominational state schools were to complement the church ones, which in return for their grant now had to allow parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction. This was an attempt to settle the religious issue. In practice, as Harry Judge put it, ‘in many places the parson and the school board glowered at one another, and fought for pupils and resources’.¹¹ A dual educational system, which duelled, had been created.

Meanwhile the public schools were expanding rapidly, catering for a growing middle class at a time of rapid economic expansion. Their ethos was stamped on them by Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1827 to 1841. Correlli Barnett in The Audit of War, his assault on the causes of Britain’s post-war decline, writes that Arnold:

through the medium of disciples who went on from Rugby to become leading figures in other public schools … was more responsible than any other single person for the nature of later Victorian élite education and the character both of the revamped ancient public schools and all the numerous new ones that opened between 1840 and 1900 to cater for the swelling middle classes.¹²

That character was hierarchical, games-playing, privileged, classics-based, robust Christianity. The Clarendon Royal Commission on the public schools in 1864 complained that natural science was ‘practically excluded’ and that their education was thus ‘narrower than it was three centuries ago’; this exclusion was ‘a plain defect and great practical evil’.¹³ Barnett argues that these public school attitudes transferred into the ‘liberal’ education of Oxford and Cambridge, based on ‘Greats’: mathematics, classics and philosophy. Not for them science, technology, the creation of wealth. The universities, John Stuart Mill said in 1867, ‘are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.’¹⁴

Thus, Barnett argues, the combined impact in the mid-nineteenth century of the public schools and Oxbridge was that:

Henceforward the British governing élite was to be composed of essay-writers rather than problem-solvers – minds judicious, balanced and cautious rather than operational and engaged; the temperament of the academic rather than the man of action. Moreover this was to be an élite aloof from the ferocious struggle for survival going on in the world’s market place; more at home in a club or senior common room than a factory.¹⁵

Or, as Peter Hennessy has put it, the public schools’ ‘mid-nineteenth-century role has been depicted as doubly malign by continuing to misshape an old aristocracy based on blood and land while absorbing and equally deforming a new aristocracy sired by the sweat and money of the men who made Britain’s and the world’s first industrial revolution.’¹⁶

If that was what was happening to the elite, life was infinitely worse at the other end of the social scale. Another Royal Commission, this time on technical instruction, toured Europe to report in 1884 that schooling in Germany was ‘over-whelmingly superior … the dense ignorance so common among workmen in England is unknown.’ They added: ‘Your commissioners cannot repeat too often that they have been impressed with the general intelligence and technical knowledge of the masters and managers of industrial establishments on the Continent.’¹⁷

As education was being studied, local government was being reformed and to answer these concerns in 1889 the newly created counties and county boroughs were empowered to provide technical education. By coincidence in 1890 a new tax on spirits was introduced. In one of the rare examples of the Treasury agreeing to an earmarked tax, it was persuaded to hand the proceeds over to the county schools. ‘Whisky money’ started to help finance secondary education. Meanwhile, in part as a result of the great burst of Victorian philanthropy, colleges that would become the redbrick universities of the great cities were being founded in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds, and in 1889 they received their first government grant, totalling £15,000.¹⁸

By the 1890s, however, the voluntary church-based schools were once again in financial difficulties. Because the board schools had access both to the rates and to government grants, the quality as well as the quantity of the education they provided was outstripping that of the church schools. Approaching half of the under-elevens were now in board rather than church schools and the boards had started to invest in post-eleven-year-old education.

Robert Morant, a young civil servant of the type it is doubtful that the service could tolerate today, believed Britain faced ‘an educational emergency’ and determined to sort out the ragged patchwork of provision. He was another friend of the Webbs and another product of Toynbee Hall. A former tutor to the royal princes of Siam, he became known in Whitehall as a ‘magnificent hustler’. The difficulty was how to get his political masters to act. On Boxing Day 1898 he quietly slipped into his office for a clandestine meeting to persuade a London County Council official to bring a test case over whether school boards could legally fund secondary education under the 1870 Act.¹⁹ The auditor ruled they could not: it was unlawful for a school board to fund anything other than elementary education. Politically, however, the demand for secondary education was such that it could not be halted. So by this conspiratorial sleight of hand Morant, of whom it was said, ‘he was not unprincipled but he was unscrupulous’,²⁰ got what he wanted – reform.

Arthur Balfour’s 1902 Education Act created a Board of Education to replace the sub-committee of the Privy Council through which since 1833 money had been channelled to education, and a government minister was appointed as its President. The 2500 elected school boards were amalgamated into local education authorities which in turn became a full part of local government. They were given powers to fund education ‘other than elementary’. Secondary and technical education could thus be provided, along with teacher training colleges. But the Act also ended central government grants to both the state and voluntary schools. The church schools would now receive their grants for current spending (they were to be entirely responsible for their own capital spending) from local government in return for one-third of the seats on their governing bodies.

The result was another explosion of sectarian religious feeling. There were bitter and opposing protests about ‘Rome’ and ‘Canterbury’ ‘on the Rates’, while some Nonconformists went wild. In Wales they threatened passive resistance and withheld their rates.²¹ The Liberals exploited these divisions with ‘splenetic fury’ as a means of uniting their own supporters and the issue contributed to the Liberal landslide victory over the Tories in 1906. It was the election that first made Winston Churchill a minister and was a lesson he would never forget. The Act, however, produced ‘a surge forward in secondary education comparable with that in elementary education after 1870’. External examinations were developed. County and county borough secondary schools grew apace along with the independent grammar schools, many of which became direct grant schools after 1907 when grants from the Board of Education were offered in return for a quota of 25 per cent free places.

In 1916, Lloyd George sent the European historian H. A. L. Fisher to Education and the 1918 Education Act finally abolished fees in elementary schools, raised the school leaving age to fourteen, and ensured that not less than half the cost of education was met from central government funds. Legislation allowing twelve- to fourteen-year-olds to work part-time in factories was repealed. Much of the education up to fourteen, however, was still in elementary schools, not in the secondaries or grammars. And Fisher’s grander vision – allowing, but not compelling, local authorities to develop nursery schools and ‘day-continuation schools’ in which fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds would spend eight hours a week for forty weeks of the year – largely fell to the Geddes axe of 1922 which cut educational spending by about one-third. The mid-1930s economic crisis saw free scholarships to the selective secondary schools replaced by means-tested ‘special places’, although popularly these remained known as scholarships. While provision over the two decades did indeed grow, and various brave attempts to alter the shape of education were made, the effect of the economic blizzards was ‘to freeze the educational pattern for much of the inter-war years’.²²

Education, as Butler inherited it, looked broadly like this. Schooling up to fourteen was compulsory and free, with the great bulk of pupils staying in elementary or ‘all age’ schools until they left at fourteen (although many of the schools had developed junior and senior sections). Some stayed in the ‘all age’ schools until eighteen. In 1938, the last year for which there are pre-war statistics, 88 per cent of all pupils were in such schools.²³ A small group of brighter children, selected by examination at eleven, went on ‘special place’ scholarships to local authority secondary schools, many of which had been modelled on the independent grammars. Overall, just under half of their places (45 per cent) were free, the remainder being taken up by fee-payers arriving at ages between eleven and fourteen. The proportions in individual secondary schools varied enormously, however.

Independent of the local authority maintained sector were the public schools and the old endowed grammar schools; many of the latter now being direct grant schools, receiving financial help from the Board of Education in return for a proportion of free places. A variety of other types of assisted school also existed including commercial, trade, nautical and junior technical schools, and the ‘central’ schools, a mix of selective and non-selective municipal schools for eleven- to fifteen-year-olds. Private tutoring still flourished.

Very broadly – and it can only be very broadly – elementary schools catered for the working class up to the age of fourteen, a small proportion of these children escaping on scholarships into secondary education. Fees tended to exclude the working class who did not win scholarships. The secondaries mainly absorbed the lower middle-class children who stayed on either through scholarships or because their parents could pay, while the middle class and above could afford the independent grammars and public schools if their children did not win free places. Schooling reflected the gradations of society. The view of the Schools Inquiry Commission of 1868 that’… the different classes of society, the different occupations of life, require different teaching’²⁴ could still be seen in practice.

What all this meant has been chronicled by Corelli Barnett – ‘that tireless enumerator of Establishment failings’, in Peter Hennessy’s phrase²⁵ – and by Brian Simon, the equally tireless educational historian. The vast majority of children left school at fourteen with no formal qualifications, exam passes or failures, of any kind. They ‘were pushed off the plank straight into the job market’.²⁶ Of roughly 3.5 million children aged between thirteen and eighteen, only 470,000 or one in seven were in maintained schools, the great bulk of these leaving at sixteen. In 1938 a mere 19,000 stayed on until they were eighteen. Of these ‘only 8000 emerged with the Higher School Certificate, the potential passport to university or other higher education’ and just over half those actually got to university.²⁷ This ‘half-cock’ education system, in Barnett’s phrase, most neglected the talent of working-class children, for all too few of them hurdled the obstacles into secondary education and then on to university.²⁸

Of the 50,000 students in universities, just over half had started life in elementary schools. But overall it was calculated that one in 150 of the children in elementary schools reached university, against one in twenty for secondary schools and one in eight for the public schools.²⁹ Not only was class structure vividly reflected in British education, the nation’s overall educational record had slipped against its competitors. In the mid-1930s, even if Scotland and Wales did much better, England had only one student at university for every 1000 of the population. In Germany the figure was 1:604, in France 1:480 and in the United States 1:125.³⁰ In addition, British university education remained heavily arts-dominated. Imperial in London was the only science and technology based college, and science and technology courses accounted for only 25 per cent of university students.³¹ There were 149 technical colleges, but their full-time as opposed to part-time tally was only 9000 students. Of nearly three million fourteen- to eighteen- year-olds who had left school only one in twenty-five was on even a part-time course.³²

This was the unimpressive educational record which Butler confronted in 1941, the war having only compounded the situation. School building had halted, while the evacuation programme had left 500,000 children in January 1940 getting no schooling at all.³³ Butler inherited, however (and Beveridge exploited), powerful movements for reform. In the Labour movement, R. H. Tawney’s role was critical. Peter Hennessy describes him operating as ‘a kind of tweedy one man pressure group, producing ideas through a haze of herbal tobacco smoke pushing them gently in one forum after another until they caught on’.³⁴ As early as 1922, under his influence, Labour published Secondary Education for All. In 1926 he was a member of the Board of Education’s consultative committee which in the Hadow report produced the same target – secondary education for all from the age of eleven and the raising of the school leaving age to fifteen (legislated for in 1936, but defeated by the outbreak of war); in other words the creation of something much closer to modern primary and secondary education.³⁵ Secondary schools should be divided into selective grammars, promoting a ‘literary or scientific curriculum’, and non-selective secondary modern schools which would provide a more ‘realistic or practical trend in the last two years’. Hadow was followed in 1938 by Spens, another Board of Education report, which recommended an end to fees in all state schools and a tripartite division of secondary education into grammar, secondary modern and technical schools.

So while little happened to change the pattern of education in the 1930s, the pressure for growth in provision, and for a change in its nature, was on. And as Butler took over there was one other factor. The public schools were in crisis both conceptually and financially. They had been under attack since the First World War. In 1929, Robert Graves in his autobiography Goodbye to All That excoriated Charterhouse and the ‘fundamental evil’ of ‘what passed as the public school spirit’. By his account that included bullying, violence, adolescent homosexuality and a profound philistinism, despite a classics-based education, that left him with ‘an oppression of the spirit I hesitate to recall in its full intensity’.³⁶ Graham Greene’s symposium The Old School joined the assault in 1934 and demand for the type of education offered by public schools began to decline. In the summer of 1939, Harrow decided to close a boarding house, cutting its size from 600 to 500 pupils, and the Journal of Education predicted that some newer public schools would find it difficult to survive. They were being challenged by the ‘improvement in the quality of instruction at ordinary secondary schools’, and were in trouble. Their claim to ‘a special fitness to rule’ was attacked by Charles Douie, a former assistant principal of University College London and old boy of Rugby, who said: ‘I cannot believe that the England of tomorrow will tolerate privilege in education’.³⁷

Faced by a mounting financial crisis, the public school heads turned for help to Sir Cyril Norwood, a former headmaster of Marlborough and Harrow, now chairman of the Secondary Schools Examination Council. He identified Harrow, Marlborough, Lancing, Tonbridge and Repton as public schools whose future was either under threat or in serious doubt³⁸ and began to explore with the Board of Education the possibility of public funding in return for access. In the Spectator in late 1939 and early 1940 he acknowledged the ‘growing hostility’ to public schools. ‘It is hard to resist the argument that a State which draws its leaders in overwhelming proportions from a class so limited as this is not a democracy, but a pluto-democracy,’ he said, ‘and it is impossible to hope that the classes of this country will ever be united in spirit unless their members cease to be educated in two separate systems of schools, one of which is counted as definitely superior to the other.’³⁹ The defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France brought forth powerful internal as well as external criticism. T. C. Worsley, a master at Wellington, railed: ‘We are where we are, and shall be where we shall be, owing, largely, if not wholly, to the privileged education which the ruling classes have received in the last forty years.’ He added: ‘If the public schools are national assets because of their leadership training qualities, what are we to think of those qualities when we survey the mess into which their leadership has brought us?’⁴⁰ To achieve a ‘common elementary education for all’ would be a great advance. David Low’s Evening Standard cartoons of Colonel Blimp, the epitome of the old school tie that had brought Britain through Munich to a war in which the early days saw nothing but defeat or the grimmest of survival, also helped damage the public schools’ standing.

Churchill at times felt that change was not only inevitable but necessary. He told the boys at Harrow in December 1940 that ‘after the war the advantages of the public schools must be extended on a far broader basis’. Early in 1941 the Sunday Dispatch reported him as arguing that they should return to their long-forgotten original purpose of providing education for poor scholars, and David Chuter Ede, the Labour minister and education specialist who was Butler’s number two, recorded in his diary in February 1942:

The PM was glad to know that public schools were receiving our attention. He wanted 60 to 70 per cent of the places to be filled by bursaries – not by examination alone but on the recommendation of the counties and the great cities. We must reinforce the ruling class – though he disliked the word ‘class’. We must not choose by the mere accident of birth and wealth but by the accident – for it was equally an accident – of ability. The great cities would be proud to search for able youths to send to Haileybury, to Harrow and to Eton.⁴¹

Butler’s own attitude to public schools is defined by his biographer, Anthony Howard, as ‘agnostic’. In early 1942 he told Chuter Ede both that ‘he would not exclude a child because his parents could afford to pay but he would not admit a child who had fallen on his head while out hunting with the Quorn [the prestigious Leicestershire hunt]’. But he equally noted that the Conservative Party would be ‘up in arms unless a boy could get into a public school on payment’. In April 1943 in a letter to his own son’s housemaster at Eton, he said: ‘I do not personally think that the whole of the public school system is necessarily the best form of education, particularly when there is too much worship of games and the herd spirit.’⁴²

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Labour and every educational body on the left firmly wanted the public schools either brought into the national system⁴³ or simply abolished. So too did the local government officials who ran education. The Association of Directors and Secretaries of Education produced A Plan for the Future in 1942 that gave considerable prominence to the need to merge public and private education into one system. They sought ‘a common system of education national in scope … free, compulsory and universal’.

Other forces were also at work. If The Times had gone pink, the Times Educational Supplement had gone almost revolutionary. Harold Dent, a former Leicester schoolmaster, had just become editor. During ‘those war- torn years’, the TES recorded in its 75th anniversary supplement,’… H. C. Dent drove himself on all cylinders to take a lead in policy-making using a reinvigorated educational supplement as his vehicle … the TES became not just a forum for discussion of the nascent 1944 Act but a new kind of educational journal campaigning for a reform thorough enough to last beyond post-war euphoria.’⁴⁴

Dent enunciated the principle of equality of opportunity in a series of powerful leading articles that coincided with both Butler’s and Beveridge’s appointments. What was needed was ‘total reform based on a new conception of the place, status and function of education in a democratic State, not a patching and padding of the present system’. An opportunity was present ‘which may not recur for centuries – if ever’. The present system, he said, ‘has been a most effective safeguard of the social stratification we all in our heart of hearts bow down to and worship’. There would be ‘the strongest and bitterest opposition’ to change and those seeking it would need to be resolute – ‘ruthless if need be’. He was to argue elsewhere, ‘we can look for no permanent new order in society unless we have a new order in education.’⁴⁵ And in the final leader of the series, he declared, ‘the full working out of the principle of equality of opportunity will involve changes in the social order extending far outside the field of education’.⁴⁶

These changes were being born in the war, and Dent was far from unrepresentative. On 21 December 1940, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council wrote to The Times stating that the churches jointly sought, among other aims as ‘the Foundations for Peace’, the abolition of extreme inequalities of wealth and possessions, but also that every child, regardless of race or class, should have equal opportunities of education suitable for development of their particular capacities.

Meanwhile, the Board of Education’s officials had not been idle. In November 1940, the board’s permanent secretary Sir Maurice Holmes set up a planning group of senior officials, minuting that: ‘It is clear from references in the press that other persons and bodies have ideas on post-war educational reconstruction and I think this is a matter in which the Board should lead rather than follow.’⁴⁷ With the approval of Herwald Ramsbotham, Butler’s predecessor, who was eager to introduce reform, the officials (many of them evacuated to the Durley Dean Hotel in Bournemouth for the duration of war) drew up what became known from its cover as the ‘Green Book’. It was meant to form the basis of preliminary talks with interested parties on a possible post-war educational settlement and was compiled under the direction of R. S. Wood, the board’s deputy secretary. In January 1941 he minuted: ‘we may assume that responsibility for the direction of the nation’s effort in the immediate post-war years will remain in the hands of a National Government prepared to face radical changes in our social and economic system and contemplating not merely restoration or a return to normality, but reconstruction in a very real sense … while policies will have to command the support of the main elements in all parties, it is clear that the war is moving us more and more in the direction of Labour’s ideas and ideals.’⁴⁸

By June 1941 the Green Book was being distributed. It had the rubric ‘highly confidential’ stamped on its cover, but as one academic later observed, it was put about ‘in such a blaze of secrecy that it achieved an unusual degree of publicity’.⁴⁹ One of Butler’s early acts was to publish a summary of its contents and to disclose that an inquiry into a secondary school curriculum suitable for education up to fifteen was under way under Sir Cyril Norwood.

The man who at this point took over education was to become not only one of the dominant figures in post-war Conservative politics, but one of those who in the 1940s steered the Tories into the post-war Middle Way consensus. Already chairman of the Conservative Committee on Post-War Problems, R. A. Butler was thirty-nine at the time of his appointment. A man of urbane charm mixed with fierce intelligence and a certain telling asperity, he was the product of Marlborough and Cambridge. His father was Sir Monty Butler, an Indian civil servant from a long line of scholar-administrators who became Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (Rab himself later becoming Master of Trinity). The family included a string of Cambridge dons, two headmasters of Harrow, a tradition of high-minded reformism and links across the breadth of British life. Butler’s father-in-law, for example, was Samuel Courtauld, the reforming industrialist who had signed the National Policy for Industry produced just before the Beveridge report. Paul Addison judges that Butler ‘understood the domestic consequences of the war better than any other Conservative minister’.⁵⁰

His early meetings with the churches took place because they remained the great stumbling block to reform. Since the turn of the century the Church of England’s role in education had declined, largely because of its need to match support from the rates with voluntary efforts. The number of schools it ran was down by a quarter to 9000, and the proportion of pupils it was educating had fallen by half to 20 per cent as local authorities built up the state schools. These, however, were concentrated in the more populous urban areas; many of the C of E schools were in villages where the local parson provided religious instruction and the local Tory squirearchy raised much of the funding. Often they were the only schools in such areas, causing resentment among Nonconformists and Catholics who were forced to subject their children to the firmly Anglican bent of much of the education.

The proportion of Nonconformist schools had also declined, but the Roman Catholic influence, by contrast, had strengthened. Their school total had risen by 200 to 1200 over the same period and they were educating, at primary or elementary level, 8 per cent of the children. Between them in 1939 the churches still ran more than half the schools in England and Wales, though catering for well under half the pupils. In almost every way, however, the 1,250,000 children in these voluntary schools were getting a worse deal than the 3,000,000 in state schools. ‘Their buildings were older, their classrooms more antiquated, their amenities in every way inferior.’⁵¹

There were further complications. The 1926 Hadow report had been implemented to the extent that elementary ‘all age’ schools were in theory being reorganised into proper primary and secondary schools. That meant new buildings. But the churches had difficulty finding the necessary capital, so many of their schools remained small, inefficient and largely unreorganised, taking children up to fourteen and even older.⁵² Any attempt to raise the school leaving age to fifteen or even – the ultimate aim – to sixteen was bedevilled by the churches’ inability to find the capital to make that a reality. Any serious attempt at secondary education for all meant either providing much greater direct support for church schools, risking raising again the barely dormant cries of ‘Rome and Canterbury on the rates’, or asking the churches largely to withdraw from education after the age of eleven. They would not contemplate the other possibility – handing over their schools wholesale to the state. As Butler put it, ‘educational progress would not be possible unless the problem of the Church schools could be solved’.⁵³

Furthermore, denominationalism put restrictions on teachers. Chuter Ede, for example, a man nearing sixty who had lived through the school religious strife of the first decade of the twentieth century, had been born a Unitarian, but had been taught in a Church of England school. He went on to become a teacher, and both managed a C of E school and had been chairman of the county council which helped finance it. But short of changing his religion he could never hope to teach in it. The Free Churches and the increasingly influential and organised National Union of Teachers, whose roots lay in the elementary schools, wanted all schools transferred to direct local education authority control, with the Free Churches favouring Christian instruction but insisting it must be firmly non-denominational.⁵⁴

Well though Chuter Ede understood it, Butler may not have appreciated at first quite how viciously this hornets’ nest could sting.⁵⁵ On 12 September 1941, shortly after his return from holiday, Butler sent Churchill a note, reminding him of his offer of advice, and proposing a major education Bill. He listed the main issues to be solved:

There is, first, the need for industrial and technical training and the linking up of schools closely with employment. Secondly, a settlement with the Churches about Church schools and religious instruction in schools. Both these questions are nationwide. Thirdly, there is the question of the public schools, which may easily raise widespread controversy.⁵⁶

Had Butler achieved this agenda, Correlli Barnett would have been a happier man and Britain perhaps a more prosperous place. Churchill, however, who had in part been made a minister by the religious controversies in education in the first decade of the century, reacted as though he had been himself been stung. The next day (a Saturday) he promptly minuted Butler:

It would be the greatest mistake to raise the 1902 controversy during the war, and I certainly cannot contemplate a new Education Bill. I think it would also be a great mistake to stir up the public schools question at this present time. No one can possibly tell what the financial and economic state of the country will be when the war is over. Your main task at present is to get the schools working as well as possible under all the difficulties of air attack, evacuation, etc. If you can add to this industrial and technical training, enabling men not required for the Army to take their places promptly in munitions industry or radio work, this would be most useful. We cannot have any party politics in wartime, and both your second and third points raise these in a most acute and dangerous form. Meanwhile you have good scope as an administrator.⁵⁷

Butler records: ‘Sir Maurice Holmes took the Prime Minister’s minute as a veto on education reform and wrote me a philosophic letter,’ one Butler later described as ‘disappointingly compliant’.⁵⁸ It is a masterpiece of Mandarinese.

R. S. Wood and I have discussed the PM’s minute to you. I do not think we need be unduly cast down. It seems to me axiomatic that a major measure of educational reform will be demanded in quarters which make the demand irresistible, and the question then is not whether but when such reform will be brought about.

And there are, I feel, some advantages in having more time than ever your revised programme contemplated for reaching the greatest common measure of agreement on the more contentious issues, so that from this point of view the PM’s frigid reception of your proposals has its brighter side.

However, if educational legislation is to be shelved till the war is over, we shall then be able to think more clearly in terms of bricks and mortar than is possible while the war is in progress, and so form reasonably sound estimates of the dates when this and that measure of reform can become operative. The delay is of course disappointing, particularly to those of us who, like myself [Holmes was 57], cannot hope to accompany you into the Promised Land, but that you will lead the Children of Israel there, I do not doubt.⁵⁹

Butler, fortunately for the nation’s children and the Conservative Party’s future, was made of sterner stuff. In his memoirs he records: ‘Basing myself on long experience with Churchill over the India Bill [the great man had initially refused to contemplate Indian independence, only finally to embrace its inevitability], I decided to disregard what he said and go straight ahead. I knew that if I spared him the religious controversies and party political struggles of 1902 and side-tracked the public schools issue, I could win him over. I intended to have an Education Bill.’⁶⁰ He spent the next eighteen months attempting to do just that. ‘It was the religious issue that took the time,’ Butler later wrote.⁶¹ The one weapon he had to hand was the state of the church schools. The one solution available for the religious teaching controversy was something called the ‘agreed syllabus’ originally drawn up in Cambridgeshire in 1924 by a committee of Anglicans, Free Churchmen and teachers to provide religious instruction in the county’s schools. By 1942 more than 100 of the 400 local education authorities were using it. The syllabus was sufficiently non-denominational to keep the Nonconformists happy, while sufficiently C of E to allow some Anglican school managers to hand their schools over to the local authority in return for a promise that the agreed syllabus would be used.⁶² Churchill became intrigued by it, dubbing it ‘the County Council Creed’. But while some Anglicans were happy to live with it, others were not and the Roman Catholics disliked it, Cardinal Hinsley, the head of the Catholic Church in Britain, dubbing it ‘disembodied Christianity’.⁶³

Early talks with the churches did not go well. The Roman Catholics were adamant about retaining their own schools, arguing they paid rates and taxes for the upkeep of local authority schools ‘which their consciences would not let them use’ while having spent millions over the decades to provide their own. ‘They were determined they would not be lost now,’ Butler records.⁶⁴ On the Anglican side, the Archbishop of Canterbury was Cosmo Gordon Lang, seventy-seven years old and chairman of the governors of Charterhouse. In November 1941 he made Butler apprehensive by insisting that the future of the public schools was of ‘paramount importance’. It was therefore a considerable relief to Butler that Lang retired within six months. Churchill replaced him with William Temple, despite the new archbishop’s leftish leanings (apart from popularising the term ‘welfare state’ he had once, for seven years, been a Labour Party member). In Conservative circles ‘his political tendencies were suspect,’ Butler said in his memoirs, recording Temple as being ‘physically obese, but intellectually and spiritually a first-class athlete … we have few bishops today who could hold a candle to him.’⁶⁵

Temple, at sixty-one, ‘looked exactly like one of Dickens’s true philanthropists; a portly, chubby-faced, twinkling-eyed, bespectacled figure with a gusty laugh, exuding goodwill from every pore,’ according to Angus Calder. ‘Buoyantly self-confident, utterly serene in his acceptance of his mission of leadership, Temple himself had never known doubt or want.’ The son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, he had ‘easy brilliance’ and ‘far from being an impassioned extremist’ he was the ‘quintessence of compromise’.⁶⁶ At the age of twenty-eight he had become headmaster of Repton, but from twenty-seven for sixteen years he had been president of the Workers Educational Association, the ‘working class university’ which ran part-time, weekend and factory-based lectures and courses. Sir Maurice Holmes’s prescient judgement was that his appointment to Canterbury offered ‘a chance of getting the Church of England into play’.⁶⁷ Without him, the religious settlement in the 1944 Act may well not have happened. Temple and Butler’s rapport was one of those occasions when personalities, whether they gel or clash, matter in politics.

What tipped Temple to his side, according to Butler, was a meeting at the Board of Education’s Kingsway headquarters in the summer of 1942, not long after the Archbishop’s appointment, ‘one hot morning in the conference room, its windows blitzed out and covered with cardboard, no air in the room’.⁶⁸ Butler described to Temple the Board of Education’s ‘Black List’, the list of physically seriously substandard schools to which Chuter Ede had drawn his attention.⁶⁹ Of the 731 on the list, 543 of them were church schools – perhaps not surprising when more than 90 per cent of the church schools were over forty years old and the churches alone were responsible for capital spending. Butler records that Temple was moved by the figures and ‘said he had not realized what a bad state the church schools were in’.⁷⁰

In essence, Butler put it to him that the Church of England could continue to maintain its schools only at the expense of the children within them.⁷¹ The Archbishop agreed to back Butler’s subtle but effective scheme for solving the issue, which appeared to offer the church schools a choice. They could become either ‘controlled’ or ‘aided’. If controlled, the local education authority would take over all the schools’ costs, appoint almost all teachers and have a majority of managers or governors, while undertaking to use the ‘agreed’ religious syllabus. If aided, the LEA would provide running costs, but the church managers would be responsible (with a 50 per cent government grant) for bringing buildings up to standard. The managers would then retain the right to appoint teachers, control religious instruction and have a majority on the managing or governing body. Controlled status met the objections of the Free Churches over denominational teaching while reassuring Anglicans – or at least low church Anglicans – about the continuing Christian nature of the teaching. Butler’s own judgement was that ‘for the plan to succeed Anglican schools would have to opt for controlled status in large numbers.’⁷²

Temple argued publicly for the plan, using the scale of the financial challenge facing the church to help win round the Church Assembly. The church school societies and the Catholics had yet to be brought into line, however, the Catholics arguing that the 50 per cent grant was not enough. Butler put his considerable personality to work in a series of formal and informal meetings to settle the issue; at one point he went to stay at Leicester with Sir Robert Martin, a key figure in the National Society, where he ‘sat with him at The Brand [a public house] until a late hour’ persuading him of the viability of his proposals. The Roman Catholics proved a tougher nut to crack, despite what Butler called his ‘wanderings’ – repeated private visits to their homes and cathedrals. He complained in his autobiography that one of the chief problems was that they had ‘no special leader; those at the summit were very old and it was difficult to establish any personal contact’. He later blamed himself for his failure to find ‘one man of dignity and reliability with whom one can perpetually be in touch on a personal basis’.⁷³

This was not all Butler’s fault. While the other churches would meet him jointly, the Catholics would not. Butler recalled meeting Archbishop Amigo of Southwark in November 1942:

After much sounding of the bell, a sad looking, rather blue faced Chaplain let me in and we climbed a massive palace stair to the first floor where the Archbishop was sitting, fully robed, in a small room overlooking the ruins of Southwark Cathedral. His window was wide open on his left hand so that he could at once take in the tragic picture of the ruins and inhale the chilly morning air.

The Archbishop asked immediately we had sat down what I had come to see him for. I obliged by informing him; but it was not an auspicious beginning. He said that a 50 per cent grant was not sufficient and that he saw no chance of agreement with politicians …

This interview indicated the nature of the head-on collision with the Roman Catholic Church.⁷⁴

From time to time, according to Butler, various Catholic bishops would back his plan in private. ‘But in the event none of them attempted to control their own supporters, believing that their anxieties justified them in encouraging a fuss.’⁷⁵ Indeed, they went to public war in letters to The Times and elsewhere. Churchill eyed the row with a mixture of delight and real concern. When Cardinal Hinsley wrote to The Times on 2 November 1942 insisting on the independence of Catholic education, and declaring that ‘no political party will seek to be able to, or be able to set at naught the respect of the British people for minorities’, Churchill cut it out and sent it round to Butler pasted to a piece of cardboard with the message, ‘There you are, fixed, old cock.’⁷⁶ Butler also described Churchill ringing him up to complain that ‘you are landing me in the biggest political row of the generation’.⁷⁷ He was to record acidly in his memoirs that Churchill’s interest in education was ‘slight, intermittent and decidedly idiosyncratic’.⁷⁸

Butler continued preparing his Bill regardless, but the Cardinal’s letter scotched any hope of a commitment to legislation in that autumn’s King’s Speech.⁷⁹ Butler’s dedication to education, however, was demonstrated at this point when he turned down the post of Viceroy of India, just as Chuter Ede, who is something of an unsung hero of the Education Act both as an able and immensely knowledgeable deputy to Butler and as the key conduit to Labour MPs, had turned down a move from Education in the February of the same year. In part what saved Butler was the Beveridge report, published exactly a month after the Cardinal’s letter. Beveridge in his grandiloquent aside had sought the destruction of the giant Ignorance. The report may have had enemies in high places, but the sense that some measures must be taken grew. Education proved to be the card the Conservatives could play, if not to divert the pro-Beveridge forces, at least to appease them. Butler had already found encouragement from Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor, who had told him in September that he ‘would rather give money for education than throw it down the sink with Sir William Beveridge’.⁸⁰

If the churches had to be tackled, the public school issue too had to be settled. Butler started off talking to their Governing Bodies Association, undertaking direct negotiations with them as he did with the churches. Quite how far he was prepared to go remains unclear even now, and in his autobiography he is surprisingly coy on the subject. Whatever happened, in Anthony Howard’s judgement, ‘politically at some point his nerve failed him’ and in June 1942 he kicked for touch, setting up an independent inquiry under the Scottish judge Lord Fleming, a move that Butler said ‘temporarily removed the fuse’ from the issue.⁸¹ Quite why he did so has to be the subject of speculation. But Churchill’s original note forbidding an education Bill in September 1941 had expressed alarm that stirring up a public school issue which Butler himself had said would cause controversy would be ‘a great mistake’. Butler knew the religious issue, though not central to education per se, had to be settled to get secondary education for all; and some in the Church of England whom Butler desperately needed as allies were themselves strong proponents of the public schools, including Dr Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop of London, like Temple a former head of Repton and the man who was to succeed him as Archbishop of Canterbury. In early 1942, in Anthony Howard’s phrase, he had produced ‘ominous rumblings’ on the preservation of the public schools. For Butler, settling the churches was plainly more central than settling the public schools.

At any rate, Fleming was appointed in June along with twenty members and three Board of Education assessors, with relatively lily-livered terms of reference ‘to consider means whereby the association between the public schools and the general educational system of the country could be developed and extended’. In the Commons, Butler was even vaguer, saying the inquiry would investigate ‘how the facilities of a boarding school education might [my italics] be extended to those who desired to profit by them, irrespective of their means’. Press reaction was mixed, the Manchester Guardian declaring it would be ‘disastrous if it confined itself to schemes for providing free places in boarding school’, adding that ‘the nation is ready for daring and imaginative treatment of its problems’.⁸² The Daily Express, however, plainly believed real action was planned, announcing that a ‘public school revolution’ was under way.⁸³

The committee’s membership was a distinctly mixed bag including Robert Birley, headmaster of Charterhouse and a future head of Eton, who had already suggested to the Board of Education that his pupils in future might be 50 per cent state aided and 50 per cent fee-paying. There were three more public school heads and the headmistress of Roedean; Dr Geoffrey Fisher; two local government specialists, the chairman of Lancashire Education Committee and the chief education officer of the West Riding; G. D. H. Cole; and two trade unionists.

Butler in his memoirs says he had been told that ‘Fleming was a distinguished Scottish judge who could be relied upon to provide impartiality; I had not been prepared for the limitations of his views or for the humourlessness with which he gave them rein.’ After two years’ work Fleming produced what Butler judged to be a ‘sensationally ingenuous’ report.⁸⁴ Its recommendation was that LEAs could, if they wished, offer a 25 per cent share of places, to be paid for out of the rates, at public schools willing to allocate such places. It thus, in Anthony Howard’s phrase, depended on ‘two-way traffic: a local authority ready to make a heavy investment in individual pupils rather than in a collective facility like a school swimming bath, and a headmaster or a governing body prepared to accept such “guinea pigs” as part of the school’s regular entry’.⁸⁵ Moreover, Fleming’s report was not handed over until two months after the education Bill’s third reading and a mere week before Royal Assent. As Butler put it, ‘the first-class carriage had been shunted on to an immense siding’.⁸⁶

A version of Fleming was later enacted, but the public schools’ financial crisis had eased, and as Howard records the scheme soon foundered, ‘with public school headmasters making only a token obeisance in its direction and local education authorities, in the period immediately after the war, becoming increasingly reluctant to favour a particularly bright child as against the general mass of run-of-the-mill pupils in their care’.⁸⁷ By 1948 a mere 155 places had been taken up by local authorities under the Fleming scheme.⁸⁸

Fleming has been judged by many as a great lost opportunity. The combination of financial crisis in the public schools themselves and widespread criticism of their role and performance in the early 1940s provided the only time in the twentieth century when the political will and political votes to integrate them into the national education system just might have been assembled. Instead the public schools and private schooling were to remain a running sore in the education debate, poisoning arguments about the class-bound nature of Britain and equality of opportunity for ever and a day. Anthony Howard believes it was Butler’s ‘one real failure in his general strategy for educational reconstruction’. Butler, he says, was enough of a meritocrat not to approve of birth alone providing the winning educational ticket, and ‘he was quite enough of a central planner to realise just what the eventual impact of the withdrawal of the top 5 per cent of parents from a national structure of secondary education would be. He needed them to be involved, as he confessed in old age, if only to make sure, through their influence and articulacy, that standards in the State sector were kept high … The time was ripe, the public mood was propitious, the opportunity was there. And yet he contrived to throw it all away.’⁸⁹

While Butler was manoeuvring his way through the church and public school problem, Sir Cyril Norwood had been at work on the secondary school curriculum. His report in 1943 followed Hadow, Spens and the Green Book in confirming the expected divide of secondary education for all into three different types of school: selective grammars, selective technical schools, and secondary moderns. It did so in language that in later years was to have an uncomfortably patronising ring.

Like Gaul, the committee believed that children were divided into three parts. Those ‘interested in learning for its own sake’ who could ‘grasp an argument’ and care ‘to know how things came to be as well as how they are’. A pupil who ‘will have some capacity to enjoy, from an aesthetic point of view, the aptness of a phrase or the neatness of a proof’ who can take ‘a long view and hold his mind in suspense’. Those were the grammar school children who would ‘enter the learned professions’, or take up ‘higher administrative or business posts’.⁹⁰ The technical schools would be for children whose abilities ‘lie markedly in the field of applied science or applied art … to prepare boys and girls for taking up certain crafts – engineering, agriculture and the like’. The secondary modern was for the pupil who ‘deals more easily with concrete things than with ideas. He may have much ability but it will be in the realm of facts … He may see clearly along one line of study or interest and outstrip his generally abler fellows in that line; but he often fails to relate his knowledge or skill to other branches of activity. Because he is interested only in the moment he may be incapable of a long series of interconnected steps; relevance to present concerns is the only way of awakening his interest, abstractions mean little to him … he may or may not be good with his hands or sensitive to music or art.’

Much of this argument was based on the IQ work of the 1920s and 1930s, which was not uncontroversial even at the time. Its leading exponent was Sir Cyril Burt, the educational psychologist, some of whose work was later to be discredited as fabricated. He had been an adviser and witness to the Hadow and Spens inquiries and was Professor of Psychology at University College London. Sir Toby Weaver, a future deputy secretary at the Ministry of Education when the official mind on these issues had changed in favour of comprehensive schools, characterised this as ‘a general belief, I believe totally false, that children were divided into three kinds. It was sort of Platonic. There were golden children, silver children and iron children.’⁹¹

The Norwood report was anxious not to make this division at eleven-plus rigid. The schools should have ‘such parity as amenities and conditions can bestow’, and from ‘one type of education to another there should be ease of transfer, particularly, though not exclusively, in the early stages, for the transition from primary to secondary education is not a break but a process’. Particularly at thirteen-plus the performance of children should be ‘sympathetically and skilfully reviewed’.

But while the Board’s official mind was on a tripartite system, the stream which would in time become the comprehensive river was already running. At this point the term usually used was ‘multilateral’ and its definition was not always clear. To some it meant three types of school on one site, not one comprehensive school. The Spens committee in 1938 (Sir Will Spens was a former tutor of Butler’s at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) had considered multilaterals but had ‘reluctantly’ come down against them. They would need to be big – ‘say 800 [pupils] or possibly larger’ – which would mean much new and expensive school building. ‘We cannot therefore recommend the general creation of multilateral schools, even as the goal of a long range policy.’ Spens was firm, however, that ‘parity between all types of secondary school is a fundamental requirement’: the same teachers’ pay, class sizes, and building requirements until the sixth form, that is, post-sixteen education, was reached. ‘The multi-lateral idea, though it may not be expressed by means of the multilateral school, should in effect permeate the system of secondary education as we conceive it.’⁹²

Some of the left had latched firmly on to the multilateral idea. The Labour-controlled London County Council declared against segregated secondary schooling as early as 1935 and by 1944 was including comprehensives in its post-war development plan. Harold Dent of the Times Educational Supplement declared in his 1942 book A New Order in English Education: ‘I am utterly opposed to the idea of segregating adolescents in different types of school.’ He recorded ‘at least a strong minority opinion (latterly growing increasingly in strength) among educationists in favour of the “multi-lateral school”, ie the single school with a wide enough range of activities to meet the needs of all pupils’.⁹³ And in the same year the National Association of Labour Teachers persuaded the Labour Party Conference to call on the Board of Education ‘to encourage as a general policy, the development of a new type of multilateral school’.⁹⁴ But the idea, as yet, was still being formed. It did not command mass support. For many Labour MPs and councillors, equality of opportunity lay in ending fee-paying in grammar schools, thus opening them up to bright working-class children.

As these arguments proceeded, Beveridge finally gave Butler the chance to get his Bill. Called down to Chequers in March 1943 by Churchill to help prepare his ‘After the War’ broadcast – the one which committed Churchill in principle to ‘cradle to grave’ social security and much else beside – Butler seized Winston’s new willingness to talk about post-war reconstruction and told him that he was drafting legislation. ‘To this he paid no attention at all. I repeated in a louder voice, “I am drafting an Education Bill.” Without raising his head from the papers before him on the counterpane, he said simply that I must show him my plans when they are ready and that he was sure they would be very interesting. I gladly left it at that.’ Butler promptly went to see the Treasury ministers and assured Sir Kingsley Wood and later his replacement Sir John Anderson that, despite the enormous capital and current spending involved in his plan, ‘full implementation would take at least a generation’. They therefore became ‘reasonable and helpful’ over finance, agreeing with Churchill that education was ‘the lesser evil than the Beveridge scheme’.⁹⁵ In addition, no other minister on the home front had plans ready to launch – the advantage of Butler’s two-year run-in.

In June 1943 a White Paper was published,⁹⁶ a few days later the Norwood report unsurprisingly supported its proposals, and in January 1944 the Bill, unaltered in substance from the White Paper, was given its second reading. James Stuart, the chief whip, saw the beauty of its 122 clauses and eight schedules being that ‘it would keep the parliamentary troops thoroughly occupied; providing endless opportunities for debate, without any fear of breaking up the Government’.⁹⁷ Controversy remained over the church schools, particularly from the Roman Catholics. But Butler records that ‘despite the anxiety raised by this opposition, indeed largely because of it, there was a desire on the part of both government and back-benchers to get this matter out of the way before an election’.⁹⁸

The second reading proved placid and the Bill went into a committee of the whole house, to keep those MPs occupied. It took eight days to get through the first twenty-seven clauses, the closest call being when a Conservative, Mrs Thelma Cazalet Keir, tried to write in a date for the school leaving age to rise to sixteen. It was to be 1972 before that was finally achieved.

When trouble came, it proved to be not over the churches but over equal pay for women teachers. Butler opposed this measure, mindful of Churchill’s and the Treasury’s insistence on minimising cost. He attempted to justify his opposition by arguing that there would be widespread knock-on effects on civil service pay. Mrs Cazalet Keir, however, who managed the not inconsiderable feat of being both a Christian Scientist and teetotaller, and a member of the Tory Reform Group dining club, persuaded the group to back her amendment on equal pay which also gained much Labour support. The government, with some of the ‘less sprightly ministers’ failing to get out of Whitehall and into the division lobbies in time, went down by one vote – 117 to 116 – the coalition’s only significant defeat of the war years. Churchill, who felt that too much was being taken for granted about winning the war and who was irked at the continuing loss of by-elections, resolved to ‘rub the rebels’ noses in their mess’. With Labour ministers such as Bevin and Ede threatening their own side with resignation if the government lost, a confidence motion reversing the defeat was tabled. Churchill, needless to say, got a thumping majority.

But the government’s stance had two effects. Butler calculated that Churchill’s use of the brute club of a confidence vote paid ‘a handsome dividend’: ‘thereafter no member proved so bold as to press an amendment which was unacceptable to the Government if there was any prospect of its being carried’. That gave the remaining more controversial parts of the Bill an easier passage.⁹⁹ Historians believe its other effect, however, was that, like the Beveridge vote, it contributed to Labour’s landslide the next year. Even the Economist at the time said it would reinforce the number of electors who ‘suspected that the Government was ruthlessly obstructing reform’.¹⁰⁰

In his memoirs Butler accused Quintin Hogg and the Tory reformers of an ‘overweening attitude’, describing the vote as ‘that fateful night’,¹⁰¹ while twenty years on again Quintin Hogg replied in his that the issue was about equal pay for women teachers’ equal work. ‘Even now I feel it difficult to see how any sane man or woman with an eye to the future, let alone the politically sensitive R. A. Butler, could have disagreed with Thelma or with us.’ It seemed ‘an elementary piece of social justice’ which needed to be agreed ‘if only as an example of the line which was expected to be taken in social policy after the war, and which was in fact so taken … the episode was bad for Churchill, bad for Rab, bad for the Conservative party and bad for Britain’.¹⁰²

That alarm over, the Bill proceeded smoothly, the third reading turning ‘almost into an embarrassing festschrift’. Sir Edward Campbell, the rather obscure Tory MP for Bromley said: ‘We called the old Act, the Fisher Act. How are we going to remember this Bill? Shall we not call it the Butler Act?’¹⁰³ So indeed it became. Churchill telegraphed his congratulations to Butler as it became law in August, telling him he had won ‘a lasting place in the history of British education’.¹⁰⁴ The first of the five giants designed to combat Beveridge’s giant evils was in place. Implementation had barely started a year later, however, when this large step towards post-war reconstruction proved insufficient to persuade the electorate to trust the Tories with the rest of the task.