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CHAPTER 9

The Final Foundations

By the time Labour left office in 1951 it had succeeded in presiding over a massive expansion of secondary schooling which in practice confirmed the distinctions in an already divided educational system.

Roy Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 1988, p. 53

[In the late 1940s] The award of a grammar school place at the age of eleven was equivalent to more than doubling the resources devoted to that child if it had gone to a modern school.

John Vaizey, The Costs of Education, 1958, p. 102

I wondered why I felt deep down angry having read the draft. Then I realised that Mr Squeers had given me a quizzical look across the years.

Ellen Wilkinson, on reading the proposed secondary modern school curriculum, 1946 in Vernon, Ellen Wilkinson, 1982, p. 222

There was a terrible shortage of teachers. The first ten years was all hands on deck to get schools built and more teachers in them.

Sir Toby Weaver, Deputy Secretary, Department of Education and Science, 1946–73

In its final form, as it emerged in 1948, the NHS represented the victory of the values of rationality, efficiency and equity … But there are other values … a view which stressed responsiveness rather than efficiency, differentiation rather than uniformity, self-government rather than national equity.

Rudolf Klein, The Politics of the NHS, 1983, p. 28

BEFORE BEVAN’s health and housing programmes took off, before Griffiths’s social security Acts, but with the reality of full employment, it fell to Ellen Wilkinson, the fiery flame-haired heroine of Jarrow, ‘five foot of dynamite’ (she was actually 4ft 10in) and ‘the pocket pasionaria’,¹ to start implementing Butler’s Education Act.

By the time Labour took power in July there had been a year of ‘massive, even frenetic’ planning among the 146 education authorities.² It had been a time of high optimism, what one county chief education officer was to call, with considerable prescience, perhaps ‘the last grand flourish and fanfare of local government’.³

However, not only was the school leaving age to be raised to fifteen on 1 April 1947, but the birth-rate (one of Bevan’s banes in housing and health) had been rising since 1942. That year it was up 73,000 to 652,000. In addition, the infant mortality rate was falling sharply under the influence of improved treatment and better wartime diets for the poor. Between 1942 and the end of 1947, no fewer than a million more children were born in England and Wales than in the previous five years. These all had to be found school places at the age of five, on top of the extra 200,000 places and 13,000 teachers needed to raise the school leaving age.⁴ The victims of this demographic shift in the school population proved to be the plans for nursery education and the major restructuring of secondary education that had been envisaged in the more enlightened parts of Butler’s White Paper and Act.

To get the show on the road, wonderful Nordic-sounding acronyms were enlisted. To achieve ROSLA (Raising of the School Leaving Age), HORSA and SFORSA (Hutting Operation for the Raising of the School Leaving Age and School Furniture Operation for the same purpose) came into being. In addition an emergency scheme, drawn up by the coalition, put 35,000 ex-servicemen and recruits from business and commerce through a crash twelve-month teacher-training course. Although it took over-long to get up to speed, it leavened the traditional teacher intake with people who had healthy experience of the outside world.⁵ Most, however, went to the primaries and the secondary moderns, where the birth-rate and the new school leaving age were chiefly increasing the numbers. The effect, unwittingly, was to reinforce the status distinction between grammars, with their better educated and better trained staff, and the secondary moderns.⁶

Such was the pressure and the competition elsewhere in the economy for raw materials and manpower (it was manpower shortage, not unemployment, which was Labour’s recurrent problem), that the Cabinet twice debated postponing ROSLA. In August and September 1945, Ellen Wilkinson achieved agreement easily enough that the date should stick. It was seen, in her words, as ‘a political necessity’ and in Herbert Morrison’s as a ‘test of the Government’s sincerity’. The date held even though it was realised that for a time it would mean makeshift accommodation and over-large classes. But in late 1946, Dalton, in all else the welfare state’s generous, even over-generous, friend, panicked. It would mean ‘a direct loss to the national labour force which will reach 370,000 by September 1948 … at a time when the whole economy is badly overstrained,’ he argued. A five-month postponement would also allow preparations to be much more complete.⁷

This was a battle that Ellen Wilkinson’s Permanent Secretary, Sir John Maud (later Lord Redcliffe-Maud), judged she had to win, or the already limited resources for education would go elsewhere.⁸ She arrived at Cabinet issuing barely veiled threats of resignation. Postponement would deprive 150,000 children of a whole year’s education, and ‘the children to suffer most would be precisely those working-class children whose education has already been so seriously interrupted by the war. They would all be children of working-class parents; and parents in better circumstances would remain free to keep their children at school,’ she told the Cabinet. If it was put off, the same intensity of effort to hit a date would never again be achieved. The country needed higher levels of skills immediately, not less skilled workers. Whenever governments hit trouble, she said, education was the first casualty.⁹

In a sense, the same argument that had kept children out of school in the nineteenth century, the need for their work, was being heard again. Ellen Wilkinson won, Dalton recording in his diary that he did not mind. ‘I had never been keen on this.’¹⁰ Barely a week later she ventured in the great freeze to an icy meeting to open the Old Vic Theatre School, its roof blitzed open to the sky, the room without heating. She caught pneumonia and on 6 February, at the age of 55, she died.¹¹ ROSLA was her memorial, George Tomlinson, a Lancashire weaver who had left school at ten, her successor.

Red Ellen’s and George Tomlinson’s reputations have suffered heavily in the hands of Labour critics for their failure to bend the permissive nature of Butler’s Act to Labour goals, particularly over secondary education and comprehensive schools. The new Ministry of Education officials were still firmly in the grip of the idea that there were gold, silver and iron children. Neither minister, it is argued, did enough to challenge that assumption.¹² Ellen Wilkinson, like so many other players in the welfare state’s story, was the product of a strong Methodist background. She was schooled at Ardwick Higher Elementary Grade in Manchester and fought her way to that city’s university in 1910, when women undergraduates were a rarity. She used to claim she had been born into the ‘proletarian purple’.¹³ Her memories of her own schooldays were that ‘the top few pupils were intelligent and could mop up facts like blotting paper … but we were made to wait for the rest of the huge classes … we wanted to stretch our minds but were merely a nuisance.’¹⁴ This was hardly the background likely to produce an automatic champion of mixed ability or multilateral schools, and her biographer Betty Vernon, while firmly defending her reputation, concedes she was ‘in no way … an educational expert’. Like many Labour MPs, she respected the grammar schools and had no intention of destroying them. She believed that Butler’s ‘parity of esteem’ in the tripartite system could be achieved, and reflected the same confusion that even her fiercest Labour critics sometimes displayed over the need to preserve grammar-school standards while seeing comprehensives as an ideal.¹⁵ In addition, for twelve of the last eighteen months of her life – her period at education – she was ‘desperately ill’ with chronic bronchitis and asthma.

Wilkinson had inherited The Nation’s Schools, Butler and Ede’s May 1945 circular advising local authorities on how plans for the new secondary system should be drawn up. It argued strongly for the tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, and discouraged multilaterals. ‘It would be a mistake to plunge too hastily on a large scale into a revolutionary change … innovation is not necessarily reform.’¹⁶ A circular Ellen Wilkinson approved six months after Labour took office opened the comprehensive door fractionally wider, but The New Secondary Education, issued in June 1947 after her death, again heavily reflected the ministry’s view that a tripartite system should be maintained. She had read the pamphlet, which indeed eventually carried her foreword, in March 1946 and had exploded in anger. ‘This pamphlet’, she had declared, ‘is fundamentally phoney because it subconsciously disguises the real question that has to be answered, namely, “What shall we do to get miners and agricultural workers if a hundred per cent of the children able to profit from it are offered real secondary education?” Answer … give the real stuff to a selected 25 per cent, steer the 75 per cent away from the humanities, pure science even history.’

Her anger came in part because, however astonishingly in hindsight, the intention was actually to reduce the intake of grammar and technical schools combined to 25 to 30 per cent of the school population to avoid diluting standards,¹⁷ while the secondary modern curriculum, responsibility for which was left heavily with the schools themselves, was assumed to be essentially concrete and practical.

‘Can’t Shakespeare mean more than a scrubbing brush?’ Red Ellen raged. ‘Can’t enough of a foreign language be taught to open windows on the world a bit wider – I learnt French verbs saying them as I scrubbed floors at home.’ It was suggested merely that ‘something of the sciences, maths and arts might be taught’ while history was ‘banished as too difficult … or was it possibly too dangerous if an intelligent child asked awkward questions? (Don’t worry how we got India, let’s go and do some nice work at the forge!)’¹⁸

Whatever her personal stance, as Margaret Thatcher was to find fifteen years later, tough-minded ministers with strong personal views cannot always shift the education department’s official mind. Ellen Wilkinson’s criticisms seem to have changed the pamphlet little. Two months after her outburst a circular which she approved confirmed in even starker terms what she was railing against.

With the school leaving age due to rise to fifteen, some secondary moderns, many of which were converted higher elementary schools, were proposing to enter suitable children for the School Certificate, then the main grammar-school qualification, instead of following tradition and decanting their children into the world of work largely qualification-free, save for attainment tests in the ‘three Rs’ of reading, writing and arithmetic. Almost unbelievably, the new circular debarred any school other than a grammar from entering any pupils for any external examination under the age of seventeen. In effect, secondary modern children would have to stay on two years beyond the planned school leaving age to gain a public qualification.¹⁹ There could be no clearer indication of how some saw education as being defined – an elite in grammars and cannon-fodder elsewhere. So much for Butler’s ‘parity of esteem’.

The worst of this situation was rescued a year later, in September 1947. With George Tomlinson now in charge, the newly reconstituted Secondary Schools Examination Council proposed a new examination, the General Certificate of Education (GCE). That would be taken at a minimum age of sixteen – one year rather than two beyond the minimum school leaving age. The standard of a pass, however, was to be the ‘credit’ level of the old School Certificate, which was well above the simple pass mark. GCEs did not start until 1951, but this decision was to set for years the mould of public examinations, which in turn heavily influenced the character of schools, both secondary modern and grammar. The only justification in the report for the high benchmark was that it would be ‘beneficial and stimulating’ and would give a pass ‘real significance’. Its aim, however, was plain enough. In the words not of Labour critics but a later government report produced under the Conservatives in 1960, the hope had been to ensure that the examination was ‘beyond the reach of any but those in selective courses’ – those in grammar schools and, if they ever developed in any numbers, the selective technical schools.

It was against these arguments, and the massive shortage of building materials and skills to provide almost any new schools other than those to service Bevan’s new housing estates and to replace bombed-out ones, that the new secondary organisation was conducted. What extra building there was had to concentrated on new primary places to meet the baby-boom and on the (often hutted) extensions to existing schools to accommodate the raised school leaving age. In October 1945, Ellen Wilkinson wrote that ‘the question of building permanent schools must wait until the housing situation has eased … it has taken all the weight I could bring to bear in Cabinet to get the extra provision for [HORSA] classrooms, but I should not myself find it within my conscience to take away labour from housing where we could manage with prefabricated huts.’²⁰

These conditions hardly left room for much in the way of new multilateral schools. To have big enough sixth forms, the ministry was calculating that comprehensives would need to be huge – 1500 to 1700 places. It still saw multilaterals (which could be different types of school on the same site, or different types of school linked as one, or what would now be recognised as a comprehensive) as experimental. So they were: in effect there were none. So when some authorities planned to move quickly to comprehensives, as Labour-controlled Middlesex did, George Tomlinson approved the plans for only three schools, not the six the county wanted.

The London County Council drew up plans to go entirely comprehensive, its sweeping proposals to put 91 per cent of its children into them drawing fire even from supporters of the idea. Harold Dent wrote in 1954: ‘The idea of the comprehensive school has never quite recovered from the blow dealt it when England’s largest municipality decided to adopt it. Even some people not entirely averse from the idea of trying out the comprehensive, or multi-lateral school, criticised the London County Council for embarking upon a total policy of comprehensive schools instead of beginning by setting up one or two as an experiment.’²¹ Indeed, one of the fairest criticisms that can be made of proponents of both systems is that neither over the next forty years organised any really robust research to show which system, comprehensives or grammar/secondaries, produced the best results overall.

Comprehensives did, however, begin to emerge. Windermere in Westmorland won the distinction of being the first in 1945, and that with only 220 pupils, and the Welsh island of Anglesey became the first all-comprehensive county in 1950. But by the time Labour left office in 1951, there were fewer than twenty genuine comprehensive schools in England and Wales²² along with some bilaterals – usually a mix of grammar and technical school. Comprehensive activists persuaded the Labour Party conference in 1946 and 1947 to call for a policy of ‘common schools’, and by 1951 the idea was in the manifesto. But it was there only in the weasel words of ‘greater equality of opportunity’, for the Labour Party as a whole was not won over to comprehensives and was not so to be until the mid-1960s.²³ Many Labour authorities were proud of their grammar schools and teachers held as wide a spread of opinion on the issue as any other grouping, the National Union of Teachers only adopting comprehensives as union policy when the government finally did so in the 1960s. Between 1945 and 1951 the grammars themselves mounted a vigorous defence of their role, led intellectually by heads of the still independent direct grant schools, 164 out of 232 of which had survived a pruning of their numbers by Labour.²⁴ Dr Eric James, headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, argued that comprehensives would involve ‘a retardation in the progress of the most gifted children’. That would be a denial of equal opportunity, he maintained, neatly turning the argument used by the supporters of comprehensives on its head. It would also be ‘a national disaster’, denying the best education to those best suited to solve the country’s problems.²⁵ That argument was to be heard many times in succeeding years, and many Labour politicians both nationally and locally had sympathy with it. They may have wanted equality of opportunity, but many were themselves the products of grammar schools. They knew from personal experience how grammars gave the chance to bright, working-class children to break free. Labour, Kenneth Morgan has said, retained ‘an instinctive faith in the grammar schools, the bright working-class child’s alternative to Eton and Winchester’.²⁶ And the Times Educational Supplement commented in 1951 when Labour left office that ‘it is extremely doubtful whether Mr Tomlinson ever once lifted a hand’ to encourage more comprehensives.²⁷

Educational development was not eased by the convertibility crisis of 1947 which, after a spell of considerable economic growth, was followed by the sterling crisis of 1949 and the spectacular devaluation of the pound from $4 to $2.80. Both crises produced spending cuts. The emergence of the Cold War followed by rearmament for Korea in 1950 put further pressure on social spending. The increase in education spending slowed from a £24.5 million rise in 1948–9 on a budget of £138 million the previous year, to an increase of only £7.5 million for 1951–2 taking it to just £200 million, the slow-down in growth coming against rising numbers of pupils as the baby-boom generation reached school age.

As a result nursery education went by the board. The promised county colleges for post-fifteen education failed to emerge. Technical schools remained a rarity. Competition for grammar school places if anything increased. Classes of fifty and sixty (Butler’s Education Act had aimed at thirty) were common as late as 1949, some in schools that had been blacklisted since long before the war. As late as 1951 a Commons debate showed around 250,000 children were still being taught in classes of more than forty, with 83,000 of them in classes of fifty or more.²⁸

There were plenty of silver linings. The quality of provision did slowly improve. School fees had gone, outside the public schools and a proportion of direct grant school places – a boon to the middle classes, who had mainly paid them in the past, but also opening up education to working-class children who had frequently faced family pressure to start work so as to earn money rather than cost it. Compulsory education now lasted a year longer, even if some teachers initially struggled to know what to do with the extra time in crowded classrooms with no examination goals to convince non-grammar school children of its value. New schools were being built: 150 new secondaries were under way in 1951, mainly in the suburbs, and some were of award-winning design and quality.²⁹

There had also been gains in higher education. Several thousand men and women discharged from the armed forces were put through university without the normal pre-entry qualifications. Many came at an age older than the usual student, glad to be alive and with an immense enthusiasm, producing what some dons in the days of student revolt in the late 1960s were to remember as a brief golden age. Too late for the schools-based Butler Act, the Percy report in 1945 called for a rapid increase in the number of engineering graduates in a limited number of local technical colleges. The report, however, drew a damaging distinction between universities and technical colleges, arguing that universities were for scientists, the colleges for technologists. An arcane and very British dispute over whether the awards should be a degree (BTech) or a diploma (Dip. Tech.) held up into the 1950s even the real progress Percy did offer, the universities jealously guarding their right to award degrees while the professional institutions, the mechanicals, electricals and others, fought to protect their position as the awarders of professional qualifications.³⁰ As the Times Educational Supplement was later to put it, the outcome was ‘the universities taking the high road and the technical colleges the low’.³¹

The case for expanding higher education was strengthened a year later, however, when the Barlow committee on scientific manpower, set up by Labour, recommended a doubling of science graduates. The invention of radar for the Battle of Britain had helped save the country at the beginning of the war. Penicillin had saved lives in the middle and was coming into civilian use. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had produced a cataclysmic conclusion, and the scientists were now promising unlimited cheap power from ‘atoms for peace’. A faith in science had been triggered that was not to peak until after Wilson had turned its promise into the election-winning ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ in 1963. ‘Never before has the importance of science been so widely recognised,’ the Barlow committee stated, ‘or so many hopes of future progress and welfare founded upon the scientist.’³²

Intelligence tests that had been used to argue for restrictions in the number of grammar school places were now used to argue for more scientists. Only 1 per cent of the age group went to university, Barlow argued, but 5 per cent were bright enough. Numbers could be doubled and standards raised.³³

The committee reported the universities split over expansion – Oxford and Cambridge resisting, the others in favour – and recommended the creation of ‘at least one new university’.³⁴ Given that Morrison had cleverly chosen Sir Alan Barlow, the second secretary to the Treasury, to chair the committee, the normal Treasury defences were breached and the report rapidly accepted. In what John Carswell, slightly tongue in cheek, has called ‘a quiet measure of nationalisation’, the University Grants Committee was enlarged, given a full-time chairman and told by Dalton to become a positive agent for change. Since 1919 the UGC had been an almost independent and ‘highly respectable backwater’ of the Treasury, dishing out small sums to the universities. Now it was told to ‘assist … in such plans for the development of the universities as may from time to time be required to ensure that they are fully adequate to national needs’. Its staff rose rapidly from five to twenty-two, and government’s relationship with the universities began to change fundamentally. Carswell records that from 1946 on, government grant became ‘not only indispensable to the universities, it constituted the greater part of their income’.³⁵ State scholarships for students expanded, and the University College of North Staffordshire opened at Keele in 1950. University student numbers jumped from 52,000 in 1945 to 84,000 in 1951, finally reaching 100,000 in 1958. Much of this expansion, however, proved to be in the universities’ traditional world of the arts, less of it in the sciences which Barlow had been set up to promote, although even Barlow had said expansion in the humanities should not be ‘sacrificed’ to the need for more scientists and technologists.³⁶ By 1950 the proportion on pure science courses had risen from 15 to 20 per cent, but applied science students numbered only 1 in 100.³⁷

Despite the expansion, Labour’s educational achievements in 1945–51 are judged harshly by historians. Kenneth Morgan, in his great assessment of that government, concludes: ‘It is hard to avoid the view that education was an area where the Labour government failed to provide any new ideas or inspiration’, although the new investment, the new impetus at elementary level, and the large increase in the school population did ‘pave the way for the educational boom of the fifties and sixties’.³⁸

Brian Simon, key champion of comprehensives, has been harsher. ‘No serious challenge, indeed, no challenge of any kind, had been launched at the citadels of power in the world of education.’³⁹ By 1951 the numbers still in the old ‘all-age’ elementary schools had been cut from well over a million of the 6.5 million schoolchildren – but only to 800,000. In a few areas of population growth, such as Essex, children were excluded from school for lack of facilities.⁴⁰ The grammar, direct grant and public schools went on largely untouched. The secondary moderns failed to achieve parity of esteem. And overcrowding in primary schools saw a rapid growth of private, often poorly staffed, preparatory schools for younger pupils in converted houses and mansions.⁴¹ Yet most of this apparent failure merely reflected the scale of what was needed to get the baby-boom generation into school and to keep the fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds there. And set against shortages of buildings, teachers, materials and money which dominated the early post-war agenda it seems harsh to complain that Labour failed to launch a comprehensive reorganisation for which there was no consensus even within Labour’s own ranks.

If education had suffered from the two great economic crises Labour faced in 1947 and 1949, each of which brought cuts in planned spending, the 1949 sterling crisis also hit the health service in its first year.

The NHS proved spectacularly more expensive than expected. The original estimate for the first nine months had been £132 million. Actual spending, at £208 million, proved two-thirds higher. The first full year, 1949–50, required another 70 per cent rise to £358 million, although the following year the rate of increase fell to a mere 10 per cent.⁴² Bevan did a far better job than Tomlinson of defending his corner, but in 1949 even he had to agree with Cripps on legislation which allowed a prescription charge to be included in the amending Act he had promised the doctors. He nevertheless staved off its actual introduction. Morrison could be heard muttering that ‘Nye is getting away with murder’ when other programmes including housing were being cut.⁴³

In February 1950, Labour was returned to power but with its mighty majority slashed to six. The hunt for economy in the NHS resumed, Bevan having to agree to a Cabinet committee to monitor expenditure. Then in June came the Korean War. Over the next six months what became a £4.7 billion three-year rearmament programme was devised. It was to cripple the increasingly successful export drive, slash non-military industrial investment, and again squeeze social spending. In January 1951, Bevan was moved to the Ministry of Labour, resentful at having been passed over both as Chancellor on Cripps’s resignation and as Foreign Secretary when Morrison replaced the ailing Bevin.⁴⁴

By April, Hugh Gaitskell, the new Chancellor, was adamant that charges for dental treatment (chiefly dentures) and spectacles would be introduced. Bevan had fought and fought against the proposal, and on 21 April he resigned. He damned the rearmament programme as ‘physically unattainable without grave extravagance in its spending’⁴⁵ (a view which proved right, Churchill’s government rapidly scaling it down).⁴⁶ When rearmament was costing billions, the charges would raise a mere £13 million, and £30 million in a full year.⁴⁷ It was, Bevan told the Commons, ‘the arithmetic of bedlam’.⁴⁸ Harold Wilson and John Freeman went with him, and Labour was plunged into almost a decade of internecine warfare between the Bevanite left and Gaitskellite right that was to play no small part in sustaining the Conservatives in power for thirteen years, and in erecting shibboleths about the definitions of socialism which scarred Labour for many years thereafter.

Within three years of its birth, the completely comprehensive and free health service had ceased to be. Peter Hennessy has summed up the clash: ‘Bevan regarded charging for teeth and spectacles as a betrayal of the fundamental principle of a free NHS. Gaitskell saw it as both common sense and an aid to good housekeeping.’⁴⁹ That battle was to be fought both within Labour ranks and between Labour and the Conservatives for years to come. In October 1951 the exhausted Labour Government, with Bevin dead, Cripps out of office and dying, Dalton largely a spent force, and Bevan back in his old role of back-bench rebel, went to the polls. The Conservatives were returned with a majority of seventeen. Churchill was again prime minister. A 1s. od. (5p) prescription charge, made possible by Labour’s legislation, was introduced in 1952 with a flat-rate charge for all dental treatment added to Labour’s charge for dentures. The welfare state had completed its founding period.