The 1944 settlement: the backdrop

Under the 1944 Education Act (EA44), for the first time in English history, all parents could access secondary education free of charge for their children up to the age of 15, with all schools funded by the state required to work within the same legislative and regulatory framework. This constituted a step-change from what had been, before 1944, a far more confused and inconsistent environment of educational provision.

In this chapter, it is argued that pre-existing and long-standing attitudes about schooling based on selection and differentiation contributed to the post-war development of a tripartite system of secondary schooling based on the division of pupils into different types of secondary schools via use of a test of intellectual aptitude at age 11; EA44 had suggested but not required that such an approach be adopted. Within the post-1944 system, local authorities had a clear mandate to organise secondary education according to the requirements of the locality and to account to their electorates for their actions. This chapter will track how problematic aspects of the tripartite system, with its promised ‘parity of esteem’, became increasingly apparent, and how changes in the relationship between central and local government, highlighted on occasion in the form of judicial decisions and legislation, eventually led to a shift in the relative rights and powers of the local authority, of parents and of central government, and laid the ground for a new system of parental ‘choice’ run through quasi-markets.

In the post-War period up to the 1970s, Dale (1989, p 78) characterised education policy as conducted on ‘non-partisan’ and even ‘bi-partisan’ terms, and Ranson (1990, p 5) thought that the ‘partnership’ established by EA44 ‘formed a cross party consensus for a generation’. This is testament perhaps not just to a unifying post-War spirit but also to the broadly drawn nature of the powers and structures within the non-prescriptive legislation. This consensual style chimed with a pluralist view of democracy whereby different interest groups engaged with government decision-makers (and each other) in a way that respected other parties’ views and values, including democratic values, in order to arrive at a pragmatic and sustainable solution (see for example Dahl, 1967; and Held, 1996).