Education Act 1944

The Education Act 1944 (7 and 8 Geo 6 c. 31) changed the education system for secondary schools in England and Wales. This Act, commonly named after the Conservative politician R.A. Butler, introduced the Tripartite System of secondary education and made secondary education free for all pupils.

The tripartite system consisted of three different types of secondary school: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. It allowed for the creation of comprehensive schools which would combine these strands, but initially only a few were founded. It also created a system of direct grant schools, under which a number of independent schools received a direct grant from the Ministry of Education (as distinct from local education authorities or LEAs) in exchange for accepting a number of pupils on "free places".

To assess which pupils should attend which school, they took an exam known as the 11 plus. The system was intended to allocate pupils to the schools best suited to their "abilities and aptitudes", but in practice the number of grammar schools, for the academically inclined, remained unchanged, and few technical schools or comprehensive schools were established. As a result, most pupils went to secondary modern schools, whether they were suitable or not, meaning that the majority of education funding went to the secondary modern schools.

One of the ground-breaking results of the Act was to educate and mobilise women and the working class. It opened secondary school to girls, and the working class, and as a result, a far higher percentage attended higher education after secondary school. This newly found education increased working class awareness of their disadvantaged social position and created a bitter class division between the working and middle class. Such division was illustrated in the theatrical works of John Osborne in the late 1950s.

The Act renamed the Board of Education as the Ministry of Education, giving it greater powers and a bigger budget, ended fee-paying for state secondary schools, and enforced the division between primary (5–11 years old) and secondary (11–15 years old) that many local authorities had already introduced. While defining the school leaving age as 15, it granted the government the power to raise the age to 16 "as soon as the Minister is satisfied that it has become practicable",^[1] though the change was not implemented until 1973. The Act also provided for community colleges, offering education for both children and adults, a measure that was only followed through by a few LEAs such as the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges, and Coventry, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire community schools.

The Act also introduced compulsory prayer into all state-funded schools on a daily basis.^[2] This clause was amended by the Education Reform Act 1988, which specified that the act of worship should be of a 'broadly Christian nature' unless such a message was deemed to be inappropriate for a particular school or group of children. The amendment also specified that the act of worship could now take place in classes, rather than the previous system of conducting worship in assemblies.

The Act was repealed on 1 November 1996 by the Education Act 1996.^[3]

School milk

The Act provided free milk - a third of a pint a day - in schools to all children in the United Kingdom under the age of 18 until 1968 when Harold Wilson’s Labour Government withdrew free milk from secondary schools. This policy was extended in 1971 when Margaret Thatcher (then secretary of state for education) withdrew free school milk from children over seven.

References

Further reading

• Brown, J.W.H. (n.d.) The Education bill. London: Watts & Co. for the Rationalist Press Association.
• Dunford, John, Paul Sharp, The Education System in England and Wales, London: Longman, 1990, 17-24.
• Goldin, Claudia, "The Human Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past," The Journal of Economic History, 2001, Volume 61, Number 2.