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CHAPTER 5

Butler’s legacy

It shall be lawful for His Majesty to appoint a Minister whose duty it shall be to promote the education of the people of England and Wales and the progressive development of institutions devoted to that purpose …

Education Act 1944, first sentence

The effect as I see it will be as much social as educational. I think it will have the effect of welding us all into one nation, when it’s got thoroughly worked out, instead of two nations as Disraeli talked about.

R. A. Butler, speaking about the Education Act in a Central Office of Information film, 1944

BUTLER’S ACT was indeed a mighty creation. ‘To make a précis of it would take at least as long as to play a football match,’ Butler observed.¹ It was, however, to prove as important for its omissions as its achievements, although those were numerous. First it settled, apparently once and for all, the religious question – though not quite in the way Butler and the Board of Education expected. Their original calculation was that only 500 of the 9000 Anglican schools would opt for what was from their own point of view the more costly independence of ‘aided’ rather than ‘controlled’ status. In fact 3000 chose the aided route.² But the settlement, of which the Catholics soon took advantage without ever formally accepting it, did effectively remove religion as a central educational issue. Not until Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Act introduced opted-out grant maintained schools and Muslims began seeking their own state-funded schools did religious instruction again reach anywhere near the centre of the debate.

The Bill made secondary education to fifteen a reality for all, and made it free. Tuition fees in all maintained schools were abolished. The sole exceptions were the ‘direct grant’ independent grammars which were still able to charge fees for the non-state-aided places. The words ‘elementary schooling’ were consigned to the historical dustbin, although achieving the end of these ‘all-age’ schools would take a distressing twenty years finally to complete. Formal distinctions linking teachers’ salaries to the funding of different types of secondary school were in theory abolished, in practice made less stark. Free school milk, meals, transport and medical inspections, plus improved inspection procedures were all legislated for, and the obligations and powers of local education authorities to provide scholarships for higher education (student grants) were extended. Independent schools for the first time had to register and face inspection. In general, pupils were ‘to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents’ – a vaguely delineated and heavily circumscribed right for parents to choose their child’s school which would grow into a major battleground.

Local authority control of education was rationalised, the number of authorities involved falling from 400 to 146 in England. The smaller boroughs, known as ‘Part III’ authorities, which controlled only elementary schools lost the right to do so. Primary, secondary and further education, ‘a continuous process conducted in three successive stages’, became the responsibility solely of counties and county boroughs. A new set of central powers was created for a new Minister of Education ‘to secure the effective execution by local authorities, under his control and direction, of the national policy for providing a varied and comprehensive service in every area’.³ The minister was given powers to ‘prevent the unreasonable exercise of functions’ by local education authorities or governors, and reserve powers to act if they were in default.

Therein, in a sense, lay the rub. For while the Act placed a number of duties on local authorities and strengthened central control, many of the minister’s powers were reserve powers. Butler was living with history; and the history which even in 1939 had left the churches with large-scale and burdensome responsibilities for education had also left local authorities running the rest of the school system. It was primarily a local, not a central, government function, and it was proudly defended terrain: Butler had to battle with significant parts of local government just to get rid of the ‘Part III’ authorities. And the resistance to central control – partly because of the long history of strife over religious education – was deeply inbred. Butler’s first remark to Churchill on taking the job reflected that sensitivity: ‘I said that I should like to influence what was taught in schools, but that this was always frowned on.’⁴

Thus, while the Act gave the minister powers to require local education authorities to draw up plans, and powers then to approve them, only in exceptional circumstances could the ministry dictate solutions. The powers were more of guidance, of influence and then of veto, rather than direction. In addition, they applied chiefly to organisation. There was no direct power to dictate what should be taught. The curriculum could indeed be influenced by advice and circular, it could and would be affected by the requirements of national examinations, but the minister could not lay it down. It is arguable that through financial regulations, ministers in fact had much more power and leverage than they used: but if they did, the culture remained against their using it.

Even guidance and advice was not entirely a ministerial matter. It was to be assembled in part by drawing on the newly created Central Advisory Councils. Their duty was to advise ministers ‘upon such matters connected with educational theory and practice as they think fit [my italics], and upon any questions referred to them by him’. Equally, the examination councils, while having ministry officials on them, were staffed by teachers and the education professionals. The councils talked to government and listened to it, but remained firmly and constitutionally independent. In a sense, education was to be run by two forms of bipartisan deal: the local authorities in partnership with the minister; and the minister and local authorities in partnership with the education professionals. No one was to be really in control.

All this provided a potentially healthy diversity, in contrast to monolithic state-dictated education systems. But such pluralism also produced a system which proved remarkably difficult to modify from the centre when problems were encountered. Given, to use Beveridge’s phrase, ‘a clear field’, something very different, more dirigiste or just simply more controllable, might have been devised. Had that happened, Kenneth Baker would not have been complaining just before he stunned the educational world with GERBIL, his Great Education Reform Bill of 1987 which produced the biggest single change since Butler, that ‘our education system is not the product of a single directing mind – a Napoleon or a Bismarck – let alone the expression of a single guiding principle. It has grown up by a process of addition and adaption. It reflects a good many historical compromises. In short, it is a bit of a muddle, one of those institutionalised muddles that the English have made peculiarly their own.’⁵

Butler, however, did not have a clear field. Like Beveridge, he had to adapt history in a coalition government whose main partners wished to avoid domestic conflict when there was still a war to be won. That made compromise easier, but the imposition of grand visions harder. For a start, educational reform had to be sold to Conservative back-benchers. And they, taken as a whole, and despite the emerging Tory Reform Group, were less keen on reform than Labour. Butler once complained his own side were ‘a stupid lot’ and on another occasion said: ‘I find in education that much of the drive towards a vaguely progressive future comes from Labour.’⁶ As a result fees in direct grant schools were retained, despite Butler’s appearing to favour their abolition.⁷ When Labour MPs divided the Commons on the issue, they lost. And at one point Butler, despite his agnostic view of public schools, felt the need to provide the Conservative back-bench 1922 Committee with a vague assurance that their position would be safeguarded after the war⁸ – as indeed it was. On top of that, the Treasury and Churchill were endlessly worried about what money would be available. Whenever it came to reconstruction, Butler records, ‘the crippling qualities of expense were much in the minds of my coalition colleagues’.⁹

All this helps to explain the loss of the opportunity to integrate public schools into the state education system. There would never again in the twentieth century be a moment when that would be at all feasible, and given the damage done by the public/private divide to education since, it is tempting to argue that Butler solved the wrong issue. Plenty of private education exists elsewhere in Europe, but it is often chosen for religious and cultural reasons, not for the class and opportunity-based divisions that have so marked Britain’s particular version of the public/private split.

Butler’s political motto, however, was always Bismarck’s ‘the art of the possible’ and settling the religious issue was the sine qua non for educational advance. Moreover, agreement had to be reached with churches who counted among their leading figures strong proponents of the public schools. In the end resolving the religious issues was more important than the problem of public schools. In addition, it was far from clear how their integration could be achieved.¹⁰ Nationalisation was an unlikely course for a coalition government. Drawing their teeth through central government’s compulsorily buying up large numbers of places would have been costly when Butler was not only under instruction not to spend but had bigger things to spend his money on, notably raising the school leaving age for all rather than buying a public school education for a few. The right would have opposed any such move; the left saw the initial effect of buying up places as propping up the public schools when they wanted abolition. But abolition – banning private education – was not on. Furthermore, there were obvious difficulties, which the Fleming report failed to answer, about how state-funded children were to be selected for this private, boarding education at prestigious schools. If they were chosen for intelligence and ability the better state schools would see their brighter pupils creamed off. If these were not to be the sole criteria, then what basis should be used for selection? Fleming had no clear answer to that, and by the end of the war the public schools’ financial crisis was over and whatever chance there had been of a solution was gone.

Some of the more radical measures which were in the Act fell through the mesh of its permissive powers – those that allowed, but did not oblige local authorities to do things, or which laid a duty to do them but only after the minister had set a starting date. Thus the Act provided not just for secondary education for all up to fifteen, but for a later rise to sixteen ‘as soon as it has become practicable’.¹¹ It was to take nearly thirty years for that to happen. Equally, the Act allowed local authorities to provide both nursery education and part-time attendance at county colleges up to eighteen, both to become compulsory on a day to be decided. That day never came, so that high-grade technical education, a concern of countless official reports from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, fell by the wayside. This occurred despite Butler having made it item number one on the list of three issues to be resolved that he had sent Churchill just weeks after his appointment. His officials’ Green Book, too, had stressed the ‘urgent need, in the interests of the industrial and commercial prosperity of this country, to secure an improved system of technical and commercial training’.¹² The Green Book had even toyed with centralising higher technical education, questioning whether it can ‘properly continue to be left to local initiative’. Butler himself minuted R. S. Wood asking how it could be fitted into the Bill. ‘Politics is said to be “l’art du possible”. The question is – what is possible; and what is our order of priority?’¹³

The issue was discussed at length with the Ministry of Labour. Bevin, remarkably, favoured school-leavers being sent at fourteen to state boarding schools in redundant service camps for two years to be given a blend of academic and practical skills, before receiving further education and training until they were twenty. As Minister of Labour, no one knew better than Bevin the shortage of skilled manpower. But when a remarkably similar programme, which included a state takeover of the public schools, was put to the Conservative Central Council in September 1942 it was thrown out root and branch by the party’s rank and file as a form of fascism, leaving Butler looking for less dramatic solutions.¹⁴

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 highly academic General Certificate of Education formulated by university examining boards for the benefit of the bookish?’²³

Any assessment of Butler’s Act, however, must concur with Harold Dent’s judgement: for all that it did not provide everything it was ‘the greatest measure of educational advance since 1870, and probably the greatest ever known’. That is not incompatible with one of Butler’s drier judgements on his own handiwork, that it essentially codified best existing practice.²⁴ In resolving some issues, his Act ducked others, leaving open ground that in years to come was to be fought over with all the vehemence of the religious issue that the Act finally settled.