write a newspaper report changes made by the british in education system

Four major challenges facing Britain’s education system after the pandemic

Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Student Inclusion and Professor of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, University of East Anglia

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Helena Gillespie's research is funded by Erasmus+ and has previously been funded by Advance HE and HEFCE. She is a school governor, multi academy trust member and director of Norfolk Cricket Board.

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The UK goverment’s Department for Education has some new ministers in charge following the political turmoil surrounding Boris Johnson’s resignation. After resigning only two days into the job of education secretary, Michelle Donelan has been replaced by James Cleverly , MP for Braintree.

Donelan’s former role overseeing higher education has been filled by Andrea Jenkyns, MP for Morley and Outwood, who has been named skills, further and higher education minister . Jenkyns’ credentials as an educational leader were called somewhat into question when she was photographed making a gesture to the public gathered outside Downing Street that would certainly have landed her in detention.

While these appointments can be considered, to some extent, to be caretaker roles pending the appointment of the new prime minister in early September, the new ministers still face significant challenges as they oversee schools, colleges and universities. Here are four issues facing them as they get to work.

Getting exams back to normal

The first hurdle comes next month with the annual round of GCSE and A-level exam results. This will be the first cohort since 2019 to have formally sat their exams. The Department of Education will be hoping that the exam results, which have already been taken and marked, will not cause such headline grabbing disruption this summer as in the two previous years.

In 2020, the first year that exams were cancelled due to the pandemic, results were overturned after it became clear that the algorithm used by the government to standardise grades was penalising students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Pupils could choose to use teacher assessments to decide grades instead.

In 2021, the government again elected to use teacher assessment to decide results, but the approach resulted in many more top grades. The jump in A grades at A-level, from 38% to 44%, meant that there were not enough places at top universities to go around – and universities had to offer prospective students packages of support to persuade them to defer to a 2022 start .

However, it is likely that the return to exams will mean a drop in grades from 2021, and there may be many disappointed students and parents. Weathering grade fluctuations in future years while also closing gaps in attainment for students from disadvantaged backgrounds will be a difficult trick to pull off.

Addressing inequality

In November 2020, the Department of Education launched its flagship initiative to address pandemic learning loss in England, the National Tutoring Programme – which pairs schools with tutors who work with individual students or small groups to help them catch up in core subjects.

However, the House of Commons Education Committee recently reported that the National Tutoring Programme is failing to make an impact in the schools in deprived areas where children are most behind with their education.

Read more: The government's academic catch-up strategy is failing children in England

Problems with the catch-up strategy are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to endemic inequalities in education in the UK. School buildings in many areas are facing pressure from growing class sizes and wear and tear. A 2021 report by the Department for Education put the backlog of school maintenance in England at a cost of £11.4 billion, an eye watering sum at a time of economic crisis.

It is difficult to see how schools can level up for their pupils in buildings that are falling down. The education secretary must hope for sympathy and support around the new cabinet table to access the funds needed.

Provide support for teachers

The pandemic has had a serious impact on children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and the problem remains acute. One of the short-term impacts of this is growing pressures on teachers in classrooms. For this reason as well as the rise in the cost of living, teachers are asking for a substantial pay increase .

It seems unlikely that current proposals for pay rises in schools, which sit below the rate of inflation, will stop a ballot on strike action or address teacher shortages caused by so many leaving the profession. If the new minister is to be able to deliver meaningful educational recovery, schools are going to need to be better staffed and better supported by other sector agencies. Achieving this looks both difficult and expensive.

Free speech in higher education

On 27 June 2022, before her promotion to education secretary and subsequent resignation, Michelle Donelan had written to university vice chancellors advising them to consider whether their membership of certain diversity schemes was appropriate given their responsibility to uphold free speech. This was regarded with concern by many in the education sector as a move that blurred the lines between appropriate regulation and university autonomy.

In addition, the controversial Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which seeks to ensure that free speech is protected on campus by limiting the “no-platforming” of speakers, is currently passing through the House of Lords. However, a recent survey has found that 61% of students think that universities should prioritise protecting students from discrimination rather than permitting unlimited free speech.

The new Department for Education team has much to do to ensure that good decisions are made on behalf of the UK’s children and young people.

This article was amended on July 19 2022 to reflect that the National Tutoring Programme and Condition of School Buildings Survey refer to England.

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The UK education system preserves inequality – new report

• Imran Tahir

Published on 13 September 2022

Our new comprehensive study, shows that education in the UK is not tackling inequality.

• Education and skills
• Poverty, inequality and social mobility
• Social mobility

Link to read article 

The Conversation

Your education has a huge effect on your life chances. As well as being likely to lead to better wages, higher levels of education are linked with better health, wealth and  even happiness . It should be a way for children from deprived backgrounds to escape poverty.

However, our new  comprehensive study , published as part of the Institute for Fiscal Studies  Deaton Review of Inequalities , shows that education in the UK is not tackling inequality. Instead, children from poorer backgrounds do worse throughout the education system.

The report assesses existing evidence using a range of different datasets. These include national statistics published by the Department for Education on all English pupils, as well as a detailed longitudinal sample of young people from across the UK. It shows there are pervasive and entrenched inequalities in educational attainment.

Unequal success

Children from disadvantaged households tend to do worse at school. This may not be a surprising fact, but our study illustrates the magnitude of this disadvantage gap. The graph below shows that children who are eligible for free school meals (which corresponds to roughly the 15% poorest pupils) in England do significantly worse at every stage of school.

Even at the age of five, there are significant differences in achievement at school. Only 57% of children who are eligible for free school meals are assessed as having a good level of development in meeting early learning goals, compared with 74% of children from better off households. These inequalities persist through primary school, into secondary school and beyond.

Differences in educational attainment aren’t a  new phenomenon . What’s striking, though, is how the size of the disadvantage gap has remained constant over a long period of time. The graph below shows the percentage of students in England reaching key GCSE benchmarks by their eligibility for free school meals from the mid-2000s.

Over the past 15 years, the size of the gap in GCSE attainment between children from rich and poor households has barely changed. Although the total share of pupils achieving these GCSE benchmarks has increased over time, children from better-off families have been 27%-28% more likely to meet these benchmarks throughout the period.

Household income

While eligibility for free school meals is one way of analysing socio-economic inequalities, it doesn’t capture the full distribution of household income. Another way is to group young people according to their family income. The graph below shows young people grouped by decile. This means that young people are ordered based on their family’s income at age 14 and placed into ten equal groups.

The graph shows the percentage of young people in the UK obtaining five good GCSEs, and the share obtaining at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, by the decile of their family income. With every increase in their family’s wealth, children are more likely to do better at school.

More than 70% of children from the richest tenth of families earn five good GCSEs, compared with fewer than 30% in the poorest households. While just over 10% of young people in middle-earning families (and fewer than 5% of those in the poorest families) earned at least one A or A* grade at GCSE, over a third of pupils from the richest tenth of families received at least one top grade.

Inequalities into adulthood

The gaps between poor and rich children during the school years translate into huge differences in their qualifications as adults. This graph shows educational attainment ten years after GCSEs (at the age of 26) for a group of students who took their GCSE exams in 2006.

The four bars show the distribution of qualifications at age 26 separately for the entire group, people who grew up in the poorest fifth of households, those who grew up in the richest fifth of households, and those who attended private schools.

There is a strong relationship between family background and eventual educational attainment. More than half of children who grew up in the most deprived households hold qualifications of up to GCSE level or below. On the other hand, almost half of those from the richest households have graduated from university.

The gap between private school students and the most disadvantaged is even more stark. Over 70% of private school students are university graduates by the age of 26, compared with less than 20% of children from the poorest fifth of households.

Young people from better-off families do better at all levels of the education system. They start out ahead and they end up being more qualified as adults. Instead of being an engine for social mobility, the UK’s education system allows inequalities at home to turn into differences in school achievement. This means that all too often, today’s education inequalities become tomorrow’s income inequalities.

Research Economist

Imran joined the IFS in 2019 and works in the Education and Skills sector.

Comment details

Suggested citation.

Tahir, I. (2022). The UK education system preserves inequality – new report [Comment] The Conversation. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/uk-education-system-preserves-inequality-new-report (accessed: 20 May 2024).

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Education Policy in England and Wales: 1979 to 2022

Education policy to 2022 has been influenced by neoliberalism: we now have a well established market in education with monitoring done centrally by government authorities while little has been done to address equality of educational opportunity.

Table of Contents

The last 40 years has seen a shift in the nature of education in England and Wales. Since the early 1980s we have seen a shift from a state education system to the establishment of a quasi-market in education.

The New Right conservative government which came to power in 1979 was influenced by a mixture of neoliberal and traditional conservative ideologies.

The New Right introduced the 1988 Education Act which first created an education market through the establishment of league tables, formula funding, OFSTED and the National Curriculum.

This created a system in which parents had the choice over which school to send their children to and by making schools compete with each other for pupils.

New Labour (1997 to 2010) continued the marketisation of education by keeping the same basic framework introduced through the 1988 Education Act.

New Labour’s third way approach to government meant they had more of a focus on social justice than the conservatives, in that they were more concerned with improving equality of educational opportunity for students from deprived backgrounds and to this end established academies in deprived urban areas, introduced Sure Start and introduced the Education Maintenance Allowance.

However New Labour still advanced marketisation through their focus on academies and through introducing fees for higher education.

When the Coalition came to power in 2010 they mostly ditched the social justice agenda and renewed their focus on creating an education market through the rapid conversion of LEA schools to academies and the establishment of Free Schools.

Since 2015 the The Tory government has largely carried on the Coalition’s agenda of establishing a quasi-education market, although this process has been stalled somewhat by the Pandemic requiring the government and schools to focus on their ‘safety’ and ‘catch-up’ agendas.

The rest of this post summarises the key changes to education policy since 1979.

The Curriculum

Up until 1988 there was little if no centralised control over the school curriculum, but that changed with the introduction of the National Curriculum as part of the 1988 Education Act.

The National Curriculum stipulated that all schools must teach core content and this made it possible to monitor schools to make sure they were delivering this content, and monitoring evolved through from 1988 to involve increasing amounts of Key Stage Testing.

The amount of prescribed content and volume of testing have been reduced in recent years, and the introduction of Academies and Free Schools means there are now more schools than ever that don’t have to teach the National Curriculum at all, but there still remains a strong focus on a core knowledge base.

School Structure and Governance

This has been a major area of change of the last 40 years in England and Wales.

In the early 1980s the majority of State Schools were under the control of Local Education Authorities who managed such things as school funding, term dates and teacher pay.

However the expansion of academies since the year 2000, and their rapid expansion since 2010, now means that 80% of secondary schools and 40% of primary schools are now independent of LEAs and are self managed either as single schools or Multi-Academy Trusts.

Neoliberals are happy with this arrangement as they see local government bureaucracies as inefficient, but ironically there is now more centralised control over academies and funding comes direct from central government.

Critics of academies argue that we now have a fragmented education system.

A Mass Market in Higher Education

In the 1980s the university sector was relatively small with most young people leaving the education system at 16 and going to work.

Today, we have a fully developed market in Higher Education with universities funded by research output and tuition fees from students with most students taking out loans of tens of thousands of pounds to pay for their fees.

The number of university places has also expanded massively – 50% of 18-30 year olds now attend university.

The U.K. Education market is also global, many students come here to study from abroad, and they tend to to pay a higher level of fees than UK citizens.

Early Years Education

in the 1980s there was very little pre-school childcare or education provided by the state, and this has been a huge area of expansion over the last 40 years.

All three and four year olds are entitled to 570 hours of free early education or childcare a year, equivalent to 15 hours a week ( Gov.UK ).

Unlike with the expansion of academies in the secondary and primary years of schooling, early child care provision is now the responsibility of Local Education Authorities.

Monitoring and Accountability

Monitoring has become increasingly sophisticated with the development of an education market.

Monitoring is now more centralised as more and more schools have converted to academies, come out of Local Education Authority of control and are now accountable to the Secretary of State for Education.

League tables have become the main means by which schools are held to account on a yearly basis with schools being required to publish annual progression data for students, with Progress 8 being the new benchmark for GCSE progress.

Schools are also monitored on their SEN data, number of exclusions and Ebacc performance.

OFSTED has expanded to include teams of inspectors and outstanding schools are now given light touch inspections whereas schools deemed to be in need of improvement are taken over by more successful academies.

Inequality of educational opportunity

Improving equality of educational opportunity has been a stated aim of every government since 1988, with New Labour doing the most through Sure Start, early academies and the Education Maintenance Allowance.

However, the Social Mobility Commission recently reported that the attainment gap has hardly shifted since 2014, and social class inequalities in educational achievement remain as a persistent feature of the education landscape.

Education Since 1979: 40 years of Neoliberalism…?

Looking back at the last 40 years of education policy it seems hard to argue that for the most part we have seen the influence of neoliberal ideology on education policy gradually transforming our education system into a quasi-market.

This seems to be especially true in the creation of a mass market in higher education but also in the establishment of academies and especially free schools where middle class parents get free reign use their cultural capital to effectively polarise education in local areas.

The strongest evidence for the influence of neoliberal ideology lies in the lack of progress around educational opportunities – after 40 years of education policy education remains a vehicle which allows for the reproduction of class inequality.

Possibly the one area of education policy where neoliberalism is less obvious is in the expansion of early years provision however we can just interpret this as being done so that parents are free to work in low-paid jobs, which is essential to capitalism.

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The above material is most relevant to students studying the education module as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology specification.

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The education system: What needs to change?

The UK’s education sector is subject to constant scrutiny and evokes wildly different opinions – and rightly so. In order to create and maintain the best possible system of learning for our children, and to nurture and protect our country’s educators, candid discussions about the education sector should be encouraged.

The Education Show 2017 provided the perfect platform to have these frank and open discussions, and to discover new ways to enhance teaching and learning across different subjects, specialisms, age groups and special educational needs (SEN). Here, several exhibitors reveal what, in their opinions, the biggest challenges facing the sector are, what changes we’re likely to see this year, what they would change about UK education and – to keep things positive – what they love about our education system.

Biggest challenges facing in education According to Mark Robinson, founder of FindEd, teacher recruitment is the greatest challenge facing schools at present, “without a doubt”. He says: “I asked many headteachers last year that exact question and recruitment was top of the list, followed by budget cuts.” And of course, it’s not just about the significant cost of recruitment but also about attracting the right people for the profession.

Tonya Meers, chief storyteller at Little Creative Days, also spoke of a reduction in the number of teachers and budget cuts, saying: “There is a lack of funding and increased pressure on school numbers, as well as the dwindling morale of teachers who are feeling undervalued and therefore leaving the profession. Also, too many tests and too much bureaucracy is having a negative impact.”

However, according to Annie-May Roberts of First Wave Adventures, change is the biggest challenge teachers and schools are facing today: “Changing systems and moving goalposts are challenging teachers every day.”

Online safety has also emerged as a prominent concern, with Laura Atkinson of Smoothwall summarising the dangers that ill-managed internet access in schools can pose: “One of the biggest challenges facing the sector, in this increasingly digital age, is the online security and safety of both pupils and staff. The web is, at its heart, a forum for worldwide knowledge sharing, and people of all ages benefit from it every day. But with this opportunity comes danger. As the digital world becomes more and more a part of education and its curriculums, schools are under pressure to enable pupils digitally, while also protecting them from the darker side of the web such as illegal activity, cyberbullying or radicalisation.”

A time of great change Last year was one of significant change in the education sector, and this change shows no signs of slowing down. With the rise of academies and reintroduction of grammar schools, it’s undoubtedly going to be a landmark year for UK education. Here’s what some of the exhibitors who will be at The Education Show next week are anticipating: “Bigger classes, fewer teachers and teaching staff, and less money – all potentially resulting in a fall in standards,” says Nina Simon of School Library Services. And Elizabeth Stafford, director of Music Education Solutions, agrees that problems with teacher recruitment and retention will grow this year: “The teacher recruitment and retention crises looks set to continue, and I anticipate a downturn in the number of pupils taking arts GCSE and A-level.”

Diana Somers of Language Magnet thinks the education sector should brace itself for further reductions in resources, saying: “Like most public sectors, the education sector has been hit with funding cuts and, as a result, headteachers are having to reduce staff and resources. The education sector is likely to undergo a difficult period of adjustment. Headteachers will be seriously looking at what is good value for money and worth having in schools, with effective schemes of work and the use of technology being ever-more important as schools also need to balance reduction with staying relevant to today’s society.”

Looking to the changes that will be sparked by the rapid advancements in technology, Lauren Atkinson of Smoothwall explains: “There has been a lot of noise in the past year around artificial intelligence (AI), and looking at the year ahead in education, there is great scope for AI to help both pupils and staff. AI doesn’t necessarily mean robots from the likes of iRobot or Human, parading around the classroom. As classrooms become fuller and busier and the demand on teachers increases, digital teaching assistants in the form of tablets, for example, could help alleviate the issue. They would be able to answer questions pupils may have, offer real-time explanations for those answers and may even be able to mark the children’s work on behalf of the teacher.”

UK education – the best bits One of the things that everyone at The Education Show will have in common is this: a love of education and a commitment to driving it forward. Therefore, the exhibitors we spoke to relished the opportunity to reflect upon some of their favourite things about education in the UK. Mark Robinson says the best thing about our education system is the people involved in it. “It’s wonderful to work with a community who are so passionate about making a difference to pupils’ lives and are willing to put so much of themselves into making it happen.” Katie Harrison, head of support at Picture News, seconds this sentiment by saying that the best thing about education in the UK is simply “our fantastic, hardworking and resilient teachers”. Also, Diana Somers is greatly encouraged by the sector’s level of diversity: “The diversity of the education sector is one of its strengths, enabling students to explore and develop their individual talents in an environment that suits their needs.”

UK education – what needs changing? Of course, we can’t just pat ourselves on the back and look at what is going well; it is important for us to look at what needs to change in education to ensure it is as effective and accessible as possible. Here is what some of the exhibitors would change about the current system.

Katie Harrison would like to see schools becoming more autonomous: “We need to improve school autonomy by allowing teachers much greater freedom with what and how they teach, with less scrutiny.”

Tonya Meers hopes that education decision-makers will move away from a ‘one size fits all approach, and begin to “allow children to develop more naturally”. However, Tom Strang from TeeJay Maths thinks that a ‘back to basics’ approach may improve our education system: “The time allocation to the basics and the need to concentrate on the basics more, albeit with much more exciting bright and colourful pupil-centred resources. 40 years ago, teachers spent 90 minutes on English and 90 minutes on maths every day, using the afternoons for various other topics including history, geography, art, music and (basic) science. Maybe we need to get back to those (halcyon) days.”

All of these topics, and many more, will be up for discussion and exploration at The Education Show from 16-18 March at the NEC, Birmingham.

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Peers call for urgent overhaul of secondary education in England

Lords report says there is too much learning by rote and many key Tory changes should be reversed

A major parliamentary report has called for an urgent overhaul of secondary education in England that would reverse many of the Conservatives’ key education changes of the past decade.

The House of Lords report says the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is too focused on academic learning and written exams, resulting in too much learning by rote and not enough opportunity for pupils to pursue creative and technical subjects.

Published on Tuesday, the report also calls for the English baccalaureate, introduced by the then education secretary Michael Gove as a school performance measure to encourage the uptake of a narrow suite of academic subjects, to be scrapped.

The government’s ambition was that 90% of year 10 pupils should enter the English baccalaureate, or Ebacc, by 2025. However, the criticism has been that in pursuing such a limited range of subjects there has been a dramatic decline in other subjects. “Opportunities to experience more practical, applied forms of learning have become increasingly limited, even though many pupils enjoy, and excel in, this way of acquiring knowledge and skills,” the report says.

The report also challenges the government’s focus on a “knowledge-rich” approach, complaining it has resulted in a curriculum that is “overburdened” with content, which is then examined by 25 to 30 hours of assessment at the end of year 11.

The criticisms by the Lords education for 11- to 16-year-olds cross-party committee echo many of the concerns raised over the years by school leaders, academics and unions in response to the series of changes introduced by the Conservative government.

The committee recommends instead that schools and teachers should be allowed to offer a more varied range of learning experiences, to help pupils develop a broader set of skills that will better meet the needs of a future digital and green economy. It says there should be more opportunities to study creative, cultural, vocational and technical subjects. Pupils should also have the option to take functional literacy and numeracy qualifications that are equal in value to GCSE English and maths.

The report also calls on the government to consider cutting the amount of external assessment undertaken by pupils during key stage 4 and introducing more non-exam assessments. It is also in favour of more on-screen assessment in GCSE exams.

“The evidence we have received is compelling,” said the former Conservative education minister Jo Johnson, who chairs the committee. “Change to the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is urgently needed, to address an overloaded curriculum, a disproportionate exam burden and declining opportunities to study creative and technical subjects.”

Another member of the committee, the former education secretary Kenneth Baker, said dropping the EBacc would give schools greater freedom to decide which subjects they wanted to teach. “There has been a tremendous drop in technical subjects – design and technology entries have dropped by between 70% and 80% in the last 13 years and many cultural subjects, such as drama, performing arts, music, dance, have dropped by 50%, at a time when there is now a huge demand from the creative sector and a boom in entertainment industries,” Lord Baker said.

Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “Any current or future government must take note of calls like this one, from across the sector, for curriculum and assessment modernisation. The future success and wellbeing of young people, and the nation, depends on it. However, without addressing real-terms school funding cuts and tackling the intense workload of staff, which drives our serious teacher recruitment and retention challenge, the changes needed have little chance of materialising.”

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added: “Government policies have prioritised a set of academic GCSEs, and increased the time students spend sitting exams as well as the amount of information they must memorise. It is not conducive to good mental health or enjoyment of learning.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We are constantly seeing the success of our reforms. Just last week, England was ranked 11th in the world for maths up from 27th in 2009, and in May we were named ‘best in the west’ for primary reading out of a comparable 43 countries.”

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Change in the Education System in England and Wales in the last 70 years (Part 1: 1944 – 1949

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Changes in British education

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The first schools in Britain were run by the Church and produced the clerics who doubled as priests and the civil service of the period. Later, the first ‘public’ and grammar schools appeared, to provide for the needs of the new merchant class.

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O’Donnell, G. (1994). Changes in British education. In: Mastering Sociology. Macmillan Master Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13434-2_7

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Histoire de l’éducation

Home Numéros 154 Dossier History of education in Britain s...

History of education in Britain since 1960

This article reviews the historiography as it has developed in Britain over the past sixty years in the history of education. This encompasses three key phases. From 1960 until about 1975 it was a field that was based mainly in key texts while new journals and societies began to emerge. From 1975 to the end of the century as it lost its mass market in teacher education, general texts in the history of education declined while specialised journals research grew in importance. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, specialisation continued in an increasingly diversified research field with a growing emphasis on theory, methodology, comparative and transnational approaches, and engagement with the social sciences. Initially quite insular and tending to focus on local and national concerns, it became prominent in international activities and in contributing to research with international, comparative and transnational vistas. Overall, the map of the history of education in Britain has changed both in form and in content, as well as in the audience towards which it was principally directed.

Cet article passe en revue les évolutions historiographiques qui ont marqué le champ de l'histoire de l'éducation en Grande-Bretagne au cours des soixante dernières années. Elle comprend trois phases clés. De 1960 à 1975 environ, c'est un domaine qui s'est principalement structuré autour de publications emblématiques alors que de nouvelles revues et sociétés commençaient à émerger. De 1975 à la fin du siècle, alors que l’histoire de l’éducation perdait le marché que représentait jusque-là la formation des enseignants, la place des grandes synthèses a décliné tandis que la recherche dans les revues spécialisées prenait de l'importance. Au cours des premières décennies du XXIe siècle, la spécialisation s'est poursuivie dans un champ de recherche de plus en plus diversifié, mettant de plus en plus l'accent sur la théorie, la méthodologie, les approches comparatives et transnationales, et l'ouverture aux sciences sociales. Initialement assez isolée et tendant à se concentrer sur des préoccupations locales et nationales, la communauté des chercheurs britanniques s’est activement impliquée dans les activités internationales, et a contribué à promouvoir les approches internationales, comparatives et transnationales. Dans l'ensemble, la carte de l'histoire de l'éducation en Grande-Bretagne a changé tant dans sa forme que dans son contenu, ainsi que dans le public auquel elle s'adressait.

Index terms

Keywords : , keywords: .

1 See e.g. Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education , London, Routledge, 2011.

1 Writing on the history of education has changed in fundamental ways over the past sixty years. In 1960, the history of education was produced mainly through texts written for a national audience, largely comprising future teachers, which gave it low status as a field of study in the academy compared to recognised disciplines such as history or philosophy. There was no national association to represent the history of education, nor any specific journal to support it. The educational past was usually represented in terms of gradual progress in the growth of schooling since the nineteenth century and the gradual improvement of the society and economy that it served. In 2020, the history of education was written mainly in journal articles rather than in texts. A national History of Education Society (HES) had emerged and grown to represent it, and was responsible for the development of a leading journal to explore different aspects of the past. The broad consensus of educational and social progress had been broken, to be replaced by revisionist approaches that sought to investigate many kinds of relationships between education and society 1 .

• 2 Earlier general discussions of the historiography of education in Britain include Peter Gordon, Ri (...)

2 The map of the history of education changed over these six decades in three broad phases, albeit often contested and partial in nature. In the first, roughly from 1960 until 1975, what was described as a quiet revolution took place as the area expanded, a new journal and association were created, and new topics and approaches were developed, although texts remained important. Over the following quarter-century, these gains threatened to go into reverse as the history of education lost its place in teacher education and general texts largely ceased production. In the early years of the twenty-first century the history of education began to reinvent itself as a research-based sub-discipline based in journal literature and research monographs. This encouraged a more diverse and fragmented audience across the social sciences and humanities rather than in teacher education, international as well as national in its orientation, while retaining its infrastructure in the form of its national association and journal 2 .

• 3 Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter, “Introduction”, in Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter (eds.), History of (...)
• 4 For general international trends in the history of education see also e.g. Gary McCulloch, “New di (...)

3 The current article seeks to trace the history of education in this period as a discrete and unique knowledge formation with a distinctive identity in higher education. It has been regarded by prominent advocates as a “discipline” in itself, or a “sub-discipline” or “specialism”, requiring as Gordon and Szreter put it, “both a cognitive identity and a professional identity, the latter being at the core of its institutionalisation” 3 . It has drawn eclectically on the methods, perspectives and philosophies associated with the discipline of history, while exploring the content of education as a field of knowledge, and engaging increasingly with the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary facets of the social sciences and humanities. The historical development of the history of education over the past sixty years is surveyed here in relation to an extended university project, occupying not only the departmental and faculty structures of higher education but also its many accompanying projects, developed and promoted by practising academics, such as journals, societies, centres and conferences. The main sources through which this is discussed are the published works that have been produced, both as books and as journal articles, and also the societies and conferences that were established during this period 4 .

I. 1960-1975: A quiet revolution

4 The first of these phases, from 1960 until the mid-1970s, was one of social and political debate in Britain. The narrow defeat of the Conservative government in 1964 led to a Labour government under Harold Wilson that emphasised educational and social reform. From 1970, under Edward Heath’s Conservative government, the further expansion of the educational system began to falter with growing industrial and economic problems. It was against this background that the sub-discipline of the history of education was fully institutionalised as a new academic society was established in the history of education in 1967, and then a new research journal, History of Education , in 1972.

• 5 Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780-1870 , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1960; B (...)

6 On Brian Simon see also e.g. Anne Corbett, “obituary, Brian Simon”, The Guardian , 22 January 2002.

5 In terms of the approach taken by historians of education, this phase of development was dominated by the work of Brian Simon at the University of Leicester, whose first three of his four-volume history of education in Britain since 1780 were published during this time. What became the first volume in the set, published in 1960, covered the period from 1780 to 1870, and explored the nature of educational reform in England during the Industrial Revolution, up to and including the Elementary Education Act of 1870. The second volume, in 1965, took the story up to 1920, while the third, in 1974, addressed the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s 5 . This was a story that belied the narrative of gradual social progress that had hitherto underpinned histories of education in Britain. On the contrary, it proposed that this history should be interpreted in Marxist terms, as being about a working-class struggle for education against the vested interests of the middle class. According to Simon, the originators of the education system in the nineteenth century, such as James Key-Shuttleworth and Robert Lowe, represented middle class interests in undermining those of the organised working class, in education no less than in society as a whole. Simon portrayed the contest between these opposing class interests playing itself out in the sphere of education throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 6 .

6 In the 1960s, the history of education was represented, as it had been for several decades, mainly through textbooks designed to appeal to student teachers being trained for their future profession. Simon’s work was no exception to this general rule, and there were many other examples of this type produced at this time. There were no British journals focusing specifically on the history of education in the early 1960s, and so it tended to be a text-based field with its roots in teacher education rather than a journal-based one leaning towards specialised research.

7 John Harrison, Learning and Living 1790-1960, London, RKP, 1960, p. xii-xiii.

• 8 Walter Armytage, Four Hundred Years of English Educatio n , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1 (...)
• 9 Walter Armytage, Th e American Influence on English Education , London, RKP, 1967; The French Influe (...)
• 10 Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966. S (...)
• 11 Gillian Sutherland, Policy-Making in Elementary Education, 1870-95 , Oxford University Press, Oxfor (...)

7 A further text produced in 1960 was John Harrison’s history of the English adult education movement, Learning and Living, 1790-1960 . Harrison’s work demonstrated the contribution of adult education, in relation to “contemporary aspects of social policy and social change”, to the growth of democracy and its ambivalent role as “alternatively a movement of protest and a means to promote social acceptance and harmony” 7 . Another key figure who produced his most significant work as texts at this time was Walter Armytage at the University of Sheffield. By contrast with Simon, Armytage’s published oeuvre presented the history of education in England in terms of gradual progress towards a rational, scientific and civilised society. He insisted that the structures developed under the 1870 Elementary Education Act were essentially benevolent and progressive in their design. He also cultivated a strongly internationalist dimension in his work which he reflected increasingly in his comparative studies, especially in demonstrating the international influences of educational ideas and practices. Armytage produced several books that traced the origins and development of modern educational and social movements 8 . In the later 1960s, Armytage also contributed a series of short works to the Students Library of Education series on different national influences on English education: the American, French, German, and Russian 9 . Joan Simon and Gillian Sutherland are further examples of leading historians of education who produced key texts that revised earlier approaches to particular periods, and discussed new perspectives on the history of education at this time. Joan Simon’s Education and Society in Tudor England was a benchmark text that effectively revised much earlier scholarship on sixteenth-century education 10 . For her part, Sutherland published significant studies on the nature of educational government in late nineteenth century England 11 .

• 12 Brian Simon, “The history of education”, in John William Tibble (ed.), The Study of Education , Lon (...)

13 Ibid ., p. 95.

14 Ibid ., p. 105.

8 Nevertheless, Brian Simon in a defining contribution asserted a different and distinctive rationale for the study of the history of education. He argued that historical study of education should be primarily concerned with the study of education as a social function. Thus, according to Simon, education was “a social function, and one of primary importance in every society” 12 . When viewed in this way, Simon insisted, the history of education could be recognised “as a vital contribution to social history –rather than as a flat record of acts and ordinances, punctuated by accounts of the theories of great educators who entertained ideas ‘in advance of their time” 13 . In such a history, moreover, education would take its proper place, “not merely as an adjunct to the historical process but as one of the chief factors conditioning men’s outlook and aspirations” 14 .

• 15 See also Gary McCulloch, Steven Cowan, A Social History of Educational Studies and Research , Londo (...)

9 These reflections on the nature and rationale of the history of education took place in a rapidly changing institutional context involving the expansion of higher education. Courses in teacher training were extended from two to three years in 1960 with a new Bachelor of Education (BEd) degree. In these extended courses, general treatments of education as a whole gave way to specialised examination of education based on its key disciplines, including history. This led to larger numbers of staff being appointed with specialist experience in particular disciplines, and in some cases ability in research. This was therefore a period of growth which encouraged the formation of new academic societies to support the disciplinary communities that were becoming established 15 .

16 History of Education Society Bulletin , no. 1, 1968, Editorial, p. 2.

10 In the case of the history of education, the HES was formed in December 1967 at a conference held at the City of Liverpool C.F. Mott College of Education. This was attended by 150 participants, mainly teachers of the subject in colleges and departments of education. Armytage and Simon both lent their authority to this initiative by opening the conference. They referred in this to a growing interest in the history of education, particularly since the introduction of the BEd degree. They also proposed potential new approaches to the topic, which Kenneth Charlton of the University of Birmingham discussed further in a subsequent address to the conference. The remainder of this conference was concerned with a consideration of current syllabuses in colleges and departments of education, and with a lecture on the relationship between Church and State 16 . This led to an annual conference held by the Society in subsequent years to explore particular themes: in December 1968, on the government and control of education since 1860; in December 1969, on the changing curriculum; and in December 1970, on history, sociology and education.

• 17 British Journal of Educational Studies , special issue, “1870 Elementary Education Act”, vol. 18, n (...)
• 18 Ministry of Education, 15 to 18 (Crowther Report), London, HMSO, 1959; Ministry of Education, Half (...)

11 Each of the three themes selected by the HES for its early conferences held wider significance. In the case of the 1968 conference on the government and control of education, it helped to mark the approaching centenary of the 1870 Elementary Education Act. This was also an interest of the main academic education journal, the British Journal of Educational Studies , whose long-time editor, Arthur Beales of King’s College London, was himself a historian. In 1970, the BJES published a special issue to commemorate the centenary of the Act 17 . The centenary coincided with the culmination in Britain of a period of relative economic growth and social reform, including education. Since the 1950s, investment in educational growth had led to further development at all levels of education. The gradual formation of a national system of education with its foundations traced to the nineteenth century could be widely observed and generally celebrated as a basis for further growth. The substantial reports on different aspects of education that were published in the late 1950s and 1960s –the Crowther report 15 to 18 , the Robbins report on higher education, the Newsom report Half our Future and the Plowden report on primary education– could all provide a historical narrative of growth and progress in education 18 .

19 HES (ed.) The Changing Curriculum , London, Methuen, 1971, Introduction, p. xi.

12 The second HES conference theme on the changing curriculum also reflected wider developments. In England during the 1960s, the school curriculum appeared to be a highly promising area for promoting radical change, alongside the organisational change offered by comprehensive secondary schools designed for pupils of all aptitudes and abilities. By the 1970s, the complexities and disappointments of curriculum reform were more clearly evident. Over this time, responding to these contemporary developments, the curriculum became a topic of increasing interest for historians of education. The introduction to the collection made the point that well defined external circumstances such as the launching of Sputnik I in 1957 sometimes appeared to stimulate curriculum change, but “often the reasons why new movements gain momentum are more complex and the skills of the historian are therefore more necessary then ever in helping to elucidate them” 19 . The collection itself represented an impressive range of papers contributed by leading scholars in the field, from humanist education in the Renaissance to heurism in the nineteenth century.

20 Edward Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class , New York, Pantheon, 1964.

• 21 Lawrence Stone, “The educational revolution in England, 1560-1640”, Past and Present , no. 28, 1964 (...)
• 22 See e.g. Michael Young (ed.), Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (...)
• 23 Gerald Bernbaum, “Sociological techniques and historical study”, in HES (ed.), History, Sociology (...)
• 24 See e.g. Alis Oancea, David Bridges, “Philosophy of education in the UK: the historical and contem (...)

13 Thirdly, the 1970 conference theme highlighted contemporary debates over the relationship between history of education and the disciplines of history on the one hand and sociology on the other. A new form of social history was also in a phase of expansion and institutionalisation during the 1960s, expressed in works such as Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class 20 . Innovative studies in the social history of education were included in a self-styled radical journal of social history, Past and Present , on such topics as the educational revolution of early modern England and the history of literacy, by Lawrence Stone, and on working class education in nineteenth century England, by Richard Johnson 21 . At the same time sociology as a discipline, and the sociology of education specifically, were becoming more firmly established in higher education. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were several explicit and elaborate attempts to integrate historical and sociological approaches to the study of education. This was a feature of the self-styled “new” sociology of education, which sought both social and historical explanations for “what counts as knowledge” in modern societies 22 . The HES’s venture into this area went so far as to suggest, in the contribution by Gerald Bernbaum, that “those who work in the field of education, with its wide-ranging perspectives and tradition of interdisciplinary activity, might pioneer historical sociology in order that we might better understand not only the educational system, but also the educational process” 23 . This suggested at least a partial rapprochement, never wholly realised, between the history and sociology of education that was not achieved between the history of education and the philosophy of education, which created a separate national society, conference and journal also in the 1960s 24 .

• 25 Asa Briggs, “The study of the history of education”, History of Education , vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, p. (...)

14 The HES’s interests and ideas developed in its early conferences led in 1972 to it establishing a new journal specifically devoted to the history of education. There had already appeared a journal founded by Peter Gosden at the University of Leeds in 1968 under the title of the Journal of Educational Administration and History. The HES’s new journal, entitled simply History of Education , was the first in Britain to be solely concerned with this topic. The emphasis of the new journal was clearly linked to social history, as its first issue indicated with its initial article by a leading social historian, Asa Briggs. This article concluded with a ringing declaration of intent, that the study of the history of education was best considered as part of the wider study of the history of society, social history broadly interpreted with the politics, economics and religion included 25 . It was a key moment in the redrawing of the map of the history of education in Britain.

• 26 Richard Aldrich, “A quiet revolution in the history of education”, Times Higher Educational Supple (...)

15 One sign of the nature and expansion of the field in the early 1970s was around new staffing appointments. One such was Richard Aldrich. He had read History at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge before becoming a history teacher at Godalming County School in Surrey and then senior lecturer in history at Southlands College. In 1973, while still completing his PhD, he was appointed as a lecturer in the history of education at the Institute of Education London (IOE), the first full time member of staff in this area at the largest centre for educational studies and research in the UK. The following year, Aldrich presented his hopes for his area of study in an article for the Times Higher Educational Supplement . Under the title of “Quiet revolution in the history of education”, Aldrich’s paper pointed out the advances made by his subject over the past few years. This, he proposed, was part of a much wider reorganisation and expansion of historical studies in general, although the history of education was special because it served both history and the needs of education. He suggested that wider changes “have tended to obscure the quiet revolution taking place in the history of education” 26 . Surely the future lay with them.

II. 1975-2000: Decline and dispersal?

• 27 Roy Lowe, “History as propaganda: the strange uses of the history of education (1983-1990)”, in Pe (...)

16 The final decades of the twentieth century posed significant challenges to history of education as a discrete knowledge formation, in Britain as elsewhere, and the expansion and confidence of the early 1970s soon began to fade. This was in the context, first, of changes in higher education including teacher education policy that endangered the traditional role of the history of education in teacher education. Roy Lowe of the University of Birmingham, for example, referred tellingly to “the beleaguered position of history of education in teacher-training and in-service courses”, adding that “At the close of two decades which have seen what is little short of a Renaissance, much of it conceived and carried out within Colleges and Faculties of Education, it is ironic that historians of education should find themselves under renewed attack” 27 . By the end of that decade, its position had deteriorated to such an extent that it was virtually excluded from the teacher education curriculum.

28 See Gary McCulloch, Struggle for the History of Education , op. cit ., Ch. 8.

• 29 See Gary McCulloch, “Marketing the millennium: education for the 21 st  century”, in Andy Hargreaves (...)
• 30 Brian Simon, “The history of education”, in Paul Hirst (ed.), Educational Theory and its Foundatio (...)
• 31 Richard Aldrich, “History of education in initial teacher education in England and Wales”, History (...)
• 32 Wendy Robinson, “Finding our professional niche: reinventing ourselves as twenty-first century his (...)

17 From the 1970s onwards, education came under increasing pressure to be more directly accountable to current social and economic demands, and this encouraged a growing emphasis on approaches that had an immediate utility and relevance for schools and teachers. This general trend was witnessed in courses in education, in teacher training and continued professional development, and also in research. Disciplinary studies of education, under the umbrella of educational studies, tended to give way to a more unitary approach in educational research. 28 The history of education also lost its prominent place in educational reforms, as these increasingly looked forward towards the promise and challenges of the next millennium rather than backwards to the foundations of the past 29 . Simon continued to insist that “all those professionally engaged in education” would benefit from historical understanding 30 . Nevertheless, by 1990 Aldrich could lament that, a century after being introduced into the curriculum, “history of education has been virtually eliminated from courses of initial teacher education, at least at the postgraduate level” 31 . This gave rise to growing problems for the history of education in many institutions of higher education. As another British historian of education, Wendy Robinson, commented, its “professional niche” was at risk, with an “ambivalent location”, straddling the rival domains of history of education, which “rendered it vulnerable to accusations of reduced status, worth and respectability within the academy” 32 .

18 Despite these less than promising circumstances, the history of education was able to survive partly through the support of the national organisation that it had recently developed. The national society created an infrastructure to help sustain it, generating regular conferences and other events and also providing collegial support and stimulating new developments. It provided an institutional base for the history of education, and eventually a means of nurturing fresh approaches and supporting new recruits. Its new journal became more firmly established when the publishers Taylor and Francis took over its publication from 1975, and it then benefited from stable editorship first under Kenneth Charlton (now at King’s College London), until 1986, and then Roy Lowe over the following decade until 1996. Gary McCulloch (Sheffield) took over as editor from 1996 until 2003, and by 2000 it expanded further from four issues to six issues per year. This provided the basis for a community of knowledge and practice, and a home for specialist research in the area. It was also a base for international research, as the HES’s annual conferences began to attract increasing numbers of overseas delegates while its home contingent began to diminish.

33 John Lawson, Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England , London, Routledge, 1973.

19 Indeed, just as the possibilities for research began to improve, the loss of teacher education meant a steady decline in the audience for its work. This meant a decline in staff numbers and the eclipse of the sub-discipline in a number of institutions where it had been prominent, such as Leeds, Liverpool, and even Simon’s old base of Leicester. King’s College London lost its premier position in the history of education with Charlton’s retirement in 1983, to be replaced by the Institute of Education London, now under Aldrich’s leadership. It also led to the loss of textbooks for teaching purposes. A Social History of Education in England by John Lawson and Harold Silver, published in 1973, covering the history of education from medieval times to the present, was one of the few new texts of this type 33 .

34 Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order, 1940-1990 , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991.

35 Brian Simon, note, “Historical books” (Brian Simon archive, London, UCL Institute of Education).

20 Only Simon’s texts remained, monuments of teaching courses in full retreat if not dying. When Simon’s fourth volume was published in 1991, bringing his history up to date, it was apparent that even his sales figures were well down on those of the 1960s and 1970s 34 . In 1995, Simon made a detailed check on the sales records of his four-volume history. The first, published in 1960, had sold well over 1000 copies in Britain in every five-year cycle until 1980, after when it began to decline. This might have been understandable as there were later volumes now in publication, but these showed the same trend. The second volume, published in 1965, sold 1500 copies or more in each five year cycle until 1980, when sales began to tail off, and it went out of print in 1990. The third volume, published in 1974, sold well over 1500 copies before 1980, but sales then declined sharply. The fourth volume, published in April 1991 in a hardback edition, sold only 529 copies by 1995, with an additional 300 in the United States. Simon’s own explanation for these relatively low sales was first, the high price of the books at 40 pounds, but second, “declining interest in history of education” 35 .

• 36 William Richardson, “History, education and audience”, in David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), His (...)

21 Thus, having once sustained itself mainly through teacher education, articulated in the form of textbooks, the history of education was now changing perforce to become more dependent on research and expressed in journal literature, in search of an audience for its work. William Richardson at the University of Exeter pointed out that the “professional audience” had “dried up” as government priorities had obliged teachers and educators to concentrate almost exclusively on immediate policy problems, and that “the onus is firmly on educationists specialising in history to put forward a fresh justification of their role and foster a new audience for their work” 36 .

37 History of Education , vol. 19, no. 3, 1990.

• 38 See e.g. Robert Anderson, Schools and Universities in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities (...)

22 In terms of research focus, there were several fresh directions developed during these years. In relation to the history of education in Wales, long regarded simply as an adjunct to England, some new approaches were taken in the 1980s and 1990s led especially by Gareth Elwyn Jones at the University of Wales Swansea. In 1989, the annual conference of the HES was held at Cardiff University on the history of education in Wales, leading the following year to a special issue of the journal History of Education 37 . Historians of Scottish education meanwhile began to challenge uncritical defences of the progress of education in Scotland, in particular through the work of Robert Anderson at the University of Edinburgh, especially his key study Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland , and Donald Withrington at the University of Aberdeen 38 .

• 39 Peter Gordon, Denis Lawton, Curriculum Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , Sevenoaks (...)
• 40 William Marsden, “Historical approaches to curriculum study”, in William Marsden (ed.), Post-War C (...)
• 41 William Marsden, “Introduction”, in William Marsden (ed.), Post-War Curriculum Development , p. vii (...)
• 42 Ivor Goodson (ed.), Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects for Study , London, Falm (...)
• 43 For further details see also Gary McCulloch, “Curriculum history and the history of education », i (...)

23 Another fresh emphasis was around the history of the school curriculum. The politics of the curriculum and the wide range of interests associated with it became central aspects of this new historical literature. A general historical account of curriculum change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Peter Gordon and Denis Lawton was based on their view that “curriculum change is the result of complex patterns of interaction between influential individuals and general processes of social, political and economic change” 39 . One prominent historian of education, William Marsden, the editor of a further set of conference papers on the topic produced by the History of Education Society, pointed out that in the light of recent experience sophisticated theoretical frameworks were not enough, and that interest had therefore shifted to “the constraints imposed by economic and political factors, the conflict of personality and group interest, […] by the level of teaching skills available, and by the sheer complexity of the exercise” 40 . In this HES collection, the focus was on curriculum change since the Second World War, with Marsden suggesting that “stock-taking” was now in order after the rapid pace of curriculum development in the 1960s and early 1970s 41 . During the 1980s, the work of Ivor Goodson and the emergence of a self-styled “curriculum history” took such research to a new level. Goodson’s ideal of the potential contribution of “curriculum history”, strongly influenced by the new sociology of education, led him to establish a book series entitled “Studies in Curriculum History”, with Falmer Press, a rising force in academic publishing in the 1980s under its managing director, Malcolm Clarkson. The flagship first volume in this series, edited by Goodson himself, was a collection under the title of Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum 42 . This included a wide range of historical accounts of the development of subjects in the secondary school curriculum 43 .

• 44 William Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society 1830-1870 : The Geography of Diversity in Provinc (...)
• 45 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiogr (...)
• 46 See e.g. Gary McCulloch, “Histories of urban education in the United Kingdom”, in Second Internati (...)
• 47 E.g. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 , Cambridge, (...)

24 Other new directions for history of education research in this period included literacy, urban education, and technical and vocational education. In relation to literacy, W.E. Stephens consolidated and extended the established quantitative method of calculating literacy by estimating numbers of brides and grooms able to sign their names on marriage registers 44 . On the other hand, David Vincent helped to pioneer the qualitative analysis of working-class autobiographies and a wide range of sources as a complementary approach to explore the application of reading and writing to the family, the workplace, the response to the natural world, the imaginative life of the community and the political ideology and movements of the nineteenth century 45 . The history of urban education also became a common focus of attention at this time, led in particular by historians such as David Reeder, W.E. Marsden and Anna Davin 46 . At the same time, a cluster of work developed around the history of technical and vocational education, reflecting on the historical failures of initiatives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to maintain Britain’s industrial competitiveness through educational change 47 .

• 48 E.g. June Purvis, “Working class women and adult education in nineteenth-century Britain”, History (...)
• 49 June Purvis, “The historiography of British education: a feminist critique”, in Ali Rattansi, Davi (...)

50 See History of Education, vol. 22, no. 3, 1993; and History of Education , vol. 29, no. 5, 2000.

• 51 Ian Grosvenor, Assimilating Identities: Racism and Educational Policy in Post 1945 Britain , London (...)

25 A further rich seam for research, complementing and in some cases challenging Simon’s emphasis on social class, was around the education of girls and women. June Purvis (Portsmouth) and Carol Dyhouse (Sussex) led the way in the 1980s, the former with research that highlighted the educational struggles of working class girls and women in the nineteenth century, and the latter with a study of the family relationships of girls growing up 48 . Purvis in particular complained that British history of education had been too slow to respond to the challenges posed by feminist history 49 . However, this early work helped to paved the way for further activity in the 1990s, including two annual conferences on related topics organised by the HES in 1992 and 1999, both leading to special issues of its Journal. The special issue in 2000, on “Breaking boundaries: gender, politics and the experience of education”, guest edited by Joyce Goodman (Winchester) and Jane Martin (North London) featured substantial contributions from England, the United States, India and South Africa 50 . New work on education and ethnicity was slower to develop, although Ian Grosvenor’s Assimilating Identities provided a significant fresh focus on racism and education policy since the Second World War 51 .

• 52 Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth , Oxfo (...)
• 53 Philip Gardner, “The giant at the front: young teachers and corporal punishment in inter-war eleme (...)
• 54 Cambridge Journal of Education , special issue, “Teachers’ lives: training and careers in historica (...)

26 During this time, an increasing range of evidence began to be deployed in the history of education, with some early discussions on theoretical issues. Oral history became increasingly familiar as a methodological device, especially as a means of discovering the experiences, outlooks and alternative agendas of marginalised groups such as the working class, women, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples. The value of such evidence was emphasised by Stephen Humphries in his study of working class childhood and youth, Hooligans or Rebels? , published in 1981 52 . By the 1990s, significant research was taking place on the oral history of teachers’ professional practice, with Philip Gardner and Peter Cunningham at Cambridge leading the way in this area 53 . The annual conference of the HES was devoted to this topic in 1996, with a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Education based on this event following soon afterwards 54 .Visual history involving analysis of documents such as photographs and films also began to be deployed more widely at this time, allowing new research on the history of classrooms and of teacher and learner interactions.

• 55 Anthony Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School , Cambridge, Cambridge Uni (...)
• 56 Detlef Muller, Fritz Ringer, Brian Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Struct (...)

57 History of Education , vol. 27, no. 3, 1998; History of Education , vol. 28, no. 3, 1999.

27 More broadly, the significance of education in disseminating ideals and practices around the British Empire itself became a key theme, especially in the writings of J.A. Mangan. His early work on nineteenth-century public schools developed into research that highlighted the imperial role of the products of the public schools in different outposts of the Empire around the world 55 . Meanwhile, British historians of education were especially active in helping to organise an international association, the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). Brian Simon, then the chair of the HES, led an initiative that culminated in an all-European seminar on the history of education held in Oxford in September 1978. ISCHE was established the following year, with Simon elected as its first chairman from 1979 to 1982. Further discussions and seminars produced a collection published in 1987, edited by Simon with Detlef Muller and Fritz Ringer of Germany, on the rise of the modern educational system, including several case studies on secondary and higher education in England 56 . The HES annual conference in 1987 was concerned with the theme of international currents in educational ideas and practice. During the 1990s, this increasing interest in international issues was maintained, guided in particular by Richard Aldrich, as president first of the HES and then of ISCHE. Comparative and international approaches were further encouraged through HES annual conferences on education and economic performance, in 1997, and on education and national identity the following year. Each of these events was followed by a special issue on the topic in History of Education 57 .

III. 2000-2020: specialisation and internationalisation

28 In the first few years of the twenty-first century, Simon died, while Aldrich retired as professor of history of education at the IOE London, and Lowe also stepped down from his professorship at Swansea. Yet, if this seemed like the final links with its expansive phase being broken, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century the history of education in Britain generally maintained its position by developing in its research rather than in its teaching, and becoming increasingly specialised in its approach. It retained the strong national infrastructure that had helped it to survive in the 1980s and 1990s, while looking outwards to international, comparative and transnational perspectives. Still lacking a mass audience for its work, questions remained around its future development and identity as higher education continued to change apace.

• 58 Roy Lowe, “Writing the history of education”, in Roy Lowe (ed.), History of Education: Major Theme (...)
• 59 David Crook, Richard Aldrich, “Introduction”, in David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), History of E (...)

29 At the turn of the century, a number of commentators could argue that the history of education in Britain was in a healthy and vigorous condition, at least in the quality of its research. For example, Roy Lowe argued that since the early 1960s, over the span of his own professional career, “the writing of the History of Education has undergone little short of a revolution”. Indeed, Lowe continued, “In recent years, History of Education has become clearly identified as a full and proper element in the study of history more generally, with a central role to play in the development of social, economic and political history, and this development can be only for the good” 58 . This general view was endorsed by Crook and Aldrich, who also insisted that in terms of research and publications, “British history of education entered the twenty-first century in a relatively strong position” 59 .

60 Kevin Brehony, book review, History of Education , vol. 32, no. 4, 2003, p. 441.

• 61 Marc Depaepe, “What kind of history of education may we expect for the twenty-first century? Some (...)

30 On the other hand, there were significant criticisms of the kind of research that was being undertaken. The British historian of education Kevin Brehony contended that insufficient attention had been given to social theory, in particular postmodernism 60 . Meanwhile, Marc Depaepe, a senior European historian of education, registered severe reservations in relation to British history of education for showing the effects of having been excluded from initial teacher education. Depaepe described one edited collection of essays produced in Britain as “the fruit of frustration and anger at the languishing position of the history of education course in teacher training”, and argued that this represented a “corporatist defensive reflex” on the part of British historians of education 61 .

• 62 History of Education , special issue, “Social change in the history of education: the British exper (...)
• 63 See e.g. Jane Martin, Joyce Goodman, Women and Education 1800-1980 , London, Palgrave Macmillan, 20 (...)
• 64 See e.g. Joyce Goodman, “Troubling histories and theories: gender and the history of education”, H (...)

31 Overall, the position was doubtless mixed, as a new generation of educational historians came to the fore. McCulloch moved from Sheffield to be appointed as the first Brian Simon professor of the history of education at the IOE London in 2003. Joyce Goodman built up the history of women’s education into the Centre for the History of Women’s Education as a professor at University College Winchester, followed by Stephanie Spencer. Ian Grosvenor became professor of the history of urban education at the University of Birmingham, with Ruth Watts and then Jane Martin leading studies at Birmingham on the history of women’s education. The HES was now firmly established with its annual conferences and a policy for supporting research students and early career researchers. A set of six seminars funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and based on a partnership between the IOE, Winchester and Exeter, engaged in a thorough review and analysis of the history of education and of its key research priorities, leading in 2007 to a double special issue of History of Education on social change in the history of education 62 . The election of first Ruth Watts, and later Joyce Goodman, Jane Martin and Stephanie Spencer as presidents of the HES reflected the importance of women in the leadership of the national field, as well as the growing amount of research on the history of girls’ and women’s education 63 . New approaches to “gendering” the history of education itself also became well established 64 .

• 65 Oxford Review of Education , special issue, “Histories of learning in the modern world”, guest edit (...)
• 66 David Crook, “Teacher education as a field of historical research: retrospect and prospect”, Histo (...)
• 67 E.g. Kevin Myers, “Immigrants and ethnic minorities in the history of education”, Paedagogica Hist (...)
• 68 Felicity Armstrong, “Disability, education and social change in England since 1960” History of Edu (...)
• 69 E.g. Pamela Dale, “Special education at Starcross before 1948”, History of Education , vol. 36, no. (...)
• 70 Derrick Armstrong, Experiences of Special Education: Re-Evaluating Policy and Practice through Lif (...)

32 There were many other fresh directions, such as the history of learners and learning advocated in a special issue of Oxford Review of Education on histories of education in the modern world, and indications of a revival of interest in the history of adult education and learning 65 . While interest in the history of teacher education diminished, the history of higher education as a whole increased in volume and variety 66 . The history of ethnic minorities and immigration in relation education began to be explored in greater detail and depth 67 . The history of disability and disabled people in education also received some detailed attention, which was overdue as Felicity Armstrong argued 68 . Discussion of special education facilities became a growth area 69 . The experiences of disabled people in education were examined through their own testimonies 70 .

• 71 See e.g.  History of Education , special issue, “Theory and methodology in the history of education” (...)
• 72 E.g. Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin Myers, Nick Peim (eds.), Visual History: Images of Education , Berne, P (...)
• 73 Martin Lawn, Ian Grosvenor, “‘When in doubt, preserve’: exploring the traces of teaching and mater (...)
• 74 E.g. Gary McCulloch, “Sensing the realities of English middle-class education: James Bryce and the (...)

33 There was increasing awareness of the importance of theory and methodology in history of education research, again drawing on insights in the broader social sciences 71 . Visual history, analysing photographs, portraits, prints, cartoons, films and other visual evidence have been analysed in order to accompany or challenge the established prominence of written texts in historical research. This kind of approach has helped historians of education to gain closer purchase on classroom life and the teaching and learning interface 72 . Historical interest in the “materiality” of schools and other educational artefacts has also begun to be developed in a range of ways. For example, Lawn and Grosvenor have explored the history of material technologies in schools, encountering traces of past practices of teachers and pupils, including everyday technologies such as pencils, slates, exercise books, ink bottles and larger devices like school desks, blackboards, typewriters, photocopiers and spirit duplicators 73 . Sensory history, involving the non-cognitive dimensions of sensation, especially the five senses of smell, sound, touch, taste and sight, has also become a theme attracting novel attention in the history of education in Britain 74 .

• 75 Richard Aldrich, “The three duties of the historian of education”, History of Education , vol. 32, (...)
• 76 See e.g. Carol Smart, “Reconsidering the recent history of child sexual abuse, 1910-1960”, Journal (...)

34 Finally, these novel concerns with theory and methodology were accompanied by another new departure receiving close attention in social science research: awareness of ethical issues. In a classic piece, Richard Aldrich presented the “three duties” of the historian in education in terms of the duty to the people of the past, the duty to our own generation, and the duty to search after the truth 75 . Such concerns were given greater force in research on the history of child sexual abuse, in the context of schools, the family or beyond 76 .

• 77 See Ian Grosvenor, Ruth Watts, “Urbanisation and education: the city as a light and beacon?”, Paed (...)
• 78 History of Education , special issue, “Centre and periphery – networks, space and geography in the (...)
• 79 Paedagogica Historica , special issue, “‘Empires overseas’ and ‘Empires at home’: Postcolonial and (...)
• 80 See Paedagogica Historica , special issue, “Education, war and peace”, guest editors Gary McCulloch (...)

35 In the early decades of the new century British historians of education were also making an increasing contribution to the development of the history of education around the world. In 2001, the University of Birmingham hosted the ISCHE annual conference on the theme of “Urbanisation and education” 77 .The HES conference and journal special issue of 2002-2003 marked the first collaborative venture of the British HES and that of Australia and New Zealand, with the unidirectional notion of “centre and periphery” 78 . A special workshop at the ISCHE conference in 2007, arising from the ESRC initiative, went further in exploring the themes of postcolonialism and transnationalism, with a further special issue of the journal Paedagogica Historica as a result 79 . In July 2014, nearly six hundred delegates were attracted from around the world to take part in an ISCHE annual conference held at the IOE London on “Education, war and peace” to mark the centenary of the First World War 80 . British historians of education also made significant contributions to the further development of ISCHE in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

• 81 See also Gary McCulloch, Steven Cowan, A Social History of Educational Studies and Research , Londo (...)
• 82 Martin Lawn, John Furlong, “The disciplines of education in the UK: between the ghost and the shad (...)
• 83 History of Education , special issue, “Education and citizenship in modern Scotland”, vol. 38, no.  (...)
• 84 Gareth Elwyn Jones, “Perspectives from the brink of extinction: the fate of history of education s (...)

36 Nevertheless, there remained significant strategic challenges for the future. Nationally, the Labour governments under first Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown and a period of economic growth had presided over further expansion of the higher education system. The onset of financial crisis in 2008 followed by a period of austerity under a coalition government and then Conservative governments from 2010 posed question marks against a number of established institutions, with a referendum in 2016 eventually leading to Britain leaving the European Union, and there were increasing threats to the unity and security of Britain itself. Within this broader context, the history of education continued to be vulnerable to structural developments that were often beyond its control. It remained largely isolated from a mass teaching audience, although in a number of institutions the establishment of undergraduate courses in education provided a new opportunity. There were predictions of severe budget cuts and in some cases of closure of university education departments 81 . Martin Lawn and John Furlong had already identified what they saw as a demographic crisis that appeared more acute in education departments than in the social sciences more generally, and worse still among those working in the disciplines of education. Indeed, they suggested, “The crucial role of a discipline in education in breaking down problems into its own logics and mediating between public information and problems, and public action is in danger of disappearing” 82 . New work in the Scottish context appeared generally to be in decline despite the efforts of a special conference and journal issue, and subsequently of a comprehensive handbook on the history of education in Scotland, and an edited collection on the Catholic church and education in Scotland 83 . In Wales, lamented the veteran Gareth Elwyn Jones, the study of the history of education was already on the brink of extinction 84 .

• 85 Joyce Goodman, Ian Grosvenor, “Educational research – history of education a curious case?”, Oxfor (...)

37 Overall, the history of education in Britain has changed both in form and in content, as well as in the principal audience towards which it was directed. In some ways it had been redrawn such as to be almost unrecognisable in its key features. It found a new role as increasingly specialised in nature and mainly oriented towards research-based academic journal publications. As Goodman and Grosvenor have observed, historians of education have tended “to publish predominantly in specialized journals and for a pre-determined audience” 85 . The existence of a specialist society in the history of education could also lessen regular involvement in associations with a broader orientation. At its best, research in the history of education could contribute well to wider research in the humanities and the social sciences. Yet there was a risk here too that with increasing erudition in its research, its audience would become correspondingly remote, limited, and distant from the concerns of an impatient world.

38 In terms of its intellectual contribution over these sixty years, the history of education in Britain has documented the changing and contested relationship between education and the wider society, focusing initially on the role of social class and increasingly on other themes such as gender, the curriculum, teaching and learning, and drawing explicitly on wider theoretical and methodological approaches. It has tended to focus more narrowly on the history of education in modern times rather than on earlier periods, with even the nineteenth century, and the origins of modern schooling, beginning to fade from view in much teaching and research. Initially quite insular and tending to focus on local and national concerns, it became prominent in international activities and in contributing to research with international, comparative and transnational vistas.

39 Unlike the situation in the 1960s, there were no longer journals catering for different audiences that were generally prepared to include articles on the history of education on a regular basis, although there remained a number of potential outlets in diverse areas as well as the now established specialist journals. Also unlike the 1960s, when there were many institutions that might have a few historians of education to provide support for teacher education, there were now fewer institutions involved, some with isolated researchers and others with a small group operating around a research niche. New leaders continued to emerge: Catherine Burke at Cambridge, Wendy Robinson and Rob Freathy at Exeter, and Stephen Parker at Worcester, among others. Looking forward to the longer term, the existential issue remained as it had since the 1980s, how the history of education in Britain could continue to sustain itself and maintain its organisational infrastructure and its strong sense of identity and purpose, forged in the 1960s and 1970s, in conditions that continued to be far from benign.

2 Earlier general discussions of the historiography of education in Britain include Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter (eds.), History of Education: The Making of a Discipline , London, Woburn, 1989; William Richardson, “Historians and educationists: the history of education as a field of study in post-war England”, Part I, 1945-1972, History of Education , vol. 28, no. 1, 1999, p. 1-30; and Part II, 1972-1996, History of Education , vol. 28, no. 2, 1999, p. 109-141; David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), History of Education in the Twenty-first Century , London, Institute of Education, 2000; William Richardson, “British historiography of education in international context at the turn of the century, 1996-2006”, History of Education, vol. 26, no. 4-5, 2007, p. 569-593; Joyce Goodman, Ian Grosvenor, “Educational research–history of education a special case?”, Oxford Review of Education , vol. 35, no. 5, 2009, p. 601-616; History of Education , special issue, “Forty years of History of Education, 1972-2011”, vol. 41, no. 1, 2012.

3 Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter, “Introduction”, in Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter (eds.), History of Education… , op. cit ., p. 3.

4 For general international trends in the history of education see also e.g. Gary McCulloch, “New directions in the history of education”, Journal of International and Comparative Education , vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, p. 47-56; and Gary McCulloch, “Consensus and revisionism in educational history”, in John Rury, Eileen Tamura (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2029, p. 19-32.

5 Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education, 1780-1870 , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1960; Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870-1920 , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1965; Brian Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform, 1920-1940 , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1974. See also Gary McCulloch, “A people’s history of education: Brian Simon, the British Communist Party, and Studies in the History of Education, 1780-1870”, History of Education , vol. 39, no. 4, 2010, p. 437-57; and Gary McCulloch, Struggle for the History of Education , op. cit ., esp. Ch. 4.

8 Walter Armytage, Four Hundred Years of English Educatio n , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1964; The Rise of the Technocrats: A Social History , London, RKP, 1965; A Social History of Engineering , Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1966; Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560-1960 , London, RKP, 1968.

9 Walter Armytage, Th e American Influence on English Education , London, RKP, 1967; The French Influence on English Education, London , RKP, 1968; The German Influence on English Education , London, RKP, and The Russian Influence on English Education . For Armytage see also e.g. his entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: < https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/70031 >.

10 Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966. See also “The history of education in Past and Present ”, Oxford Review of Education , vol. 3, no. 1, 1977, p. 71-86. On Joan Simon as a historian of education, see e.g. Joan Simon, “My life in the history of education”, History of Education Society Bulletin , no. 54, 1994, p. 29, 33; Ruth Watts, “Obituary: Joan Simon (1915-2005)”, History of Education , vol. 35, no. 1, 2006, p. 5-9; and Jane Martin, “Neglected women historians: the case of Joan Simon”, Forum , vol. 56, no. 3, 2014, p. 54-66.

11 Gillian Sutherland, Policy-Making in Elementary Education, 1870-95 , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973. See also Gillian Sutherland, “The study of the history of education”, History , vol. 54, no. 180, 1969, p. 59-69.

12 Brian Simon, “The history of education”, in John William Tibble (ed.), The Study of Education , London, RKP, 1966, p. 92.

15 See also Gary McCulloch, Steven Cowan, A Social History of Educational Studies and Research , London, Routledge, 2018, p. 50-53.

17 British Journal of Educational Studies , special issue, “1870 Elementary Education Act”, vol. 18, no. 2, 1970.

18 Ministry of Education, 15 to 18 (Crowther Report), London, HMSO, 1959; Ministry of Education, Half our Future  (Newsom Report), London, HMSO, 1963; L. Robbins, Higher Education  (Robbins Report), London, HMSO, 1963; Department of Education and Science, Children and their Primary Schools  (Plowden Report), London, HMSO, 1967.

21 Lawrence Stone, “The educational revolution in England, 1560-1640”, Past and Present , no. 28, 1964, p. 69-139; Lawrence Stone, “Literacy and education in England, 1640-1900”, Past and Present , no. 42, 1969, p. 69-139; Richard Johnson, “Educational policy and social control in early Victorian England”, Past and Present , no. 49, 1970, p. 96-119.

22 See e.g. Michael Young (ed.), Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education , London, Collier-Macmillan, 1971.

23 Gerald Bernbaum, “Sociological techniques and historical study”, in HES (ed.), History, Sociology and Education , p. 18. See also e.g. Peter Musgrave (ed.), Sociology, History and Education: A Reader , London, Methuen,1971.

24 See e.g. Alis Oancea, David Bridges, “Philosophy of education in the UK: the historical and contemporary tradition”, Oxford Review of Education , vol. 35, no. 5, 2009, p. 353-68.

25 Asa Briggs, “The study of the history of education”, History of Education , vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, p. 16.

26 Richard Aldrich, “A quiet revolution in the history of education”, Times Higher Educational Supplement , 3 May 1974, p. 14.

27 Roy Lowe, “History as propaganda: the strange uses of the history of education (1983-1990)”, in Peter Gordon, Richard Szreter (eds.), History of Education… , op. cit ., p. 225.

29 See Gary McCulloch, “Marketing the millennium: education for the 21 st  century”, in Andy Hargreaves, Roy Evans (eds.), Beyond Educational Reform: Bringing Teachers Back In , Buckingham, Open University Press, 1996, p. 19-28.

30 Brian Simon, “The history of education”, in Paul Hirst (ed.), Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines , London, RKP, 1983, p. 65.

31 Richard Aldrich, “History of education in initial teacher education in England and Wales”, History of Education Society Bulletin , no. 45, 1990, p. 47.

32 Wendy Robinson, “Finding our professional niche: reinventing ourselves as twenty-first century historian of education”, in David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), History of Education for the Twenty-First Century , op. cit ., p. 51.

36 William Richardson, “History, education and audience”, in David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), History of Education for the Twenty-First Century , London, Institute of Education, p. 18.

38 See e.g. Robert Anderson, Schools and Universities in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities , Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1983; and Donald Withrington, “Scotland: a national educational system and ideals of citizenship”, Paedagogica Historica , vol. 29, no. 3, 1990, p. 699-710.

39 Peter Gordon, Denis Lawton, Curriculum Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , Sevenoaks, Hodder and Stoughton, 1978, p. 2.

40 William Marsden, “Historical approaches to curriculum study”, in William Marsden (ed.), Post-War Curriculum Development , Leicester, HES, 1979, p. 94-95.

41 William Marsden, “Introduction”, in William Marsden (ed.), Post-War Curriculum Development , p. vii-viii.

42 Ivor Goodson (ed.), Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum: Subjects for Study , London, Falmer, 1985; see also Ivor Goodson, The Making of Curriculum: Collected Essays , London, Falmer, 1988.

43 For further details see also Gary McCulloch, “Curriculum history and the history of education », in Pat Sikes, Yvonne Novakovic (eds.), Storying the Public Intellectual , London, Routledge, 2020, p. 91-99.

44 William Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society 1830-1870 : The Geography of Diversity in Provincial England , Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987. See also David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England : The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy , Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

45 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography , London, Methuen, 1982; David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914 , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

46 See e.g. Gary McCulloch, “Histories of urban education in the United Kingdom”, in Second International Handbook of Urban Education , Dordrecht, Springer, 2017, p. 1005-1019; David Reeder (ed.), Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century, London, Taylor and Francis, 1977; William Marsden, Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales in Nineteenth-Century Britain , London, Woburn, 1987; Anna Davin, Growing up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870-1914 , London, Rivers Oram Press, 1996.

47 E.g. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981; Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War , London, Macmillan, 1986; Gary McCulloch, The Secondary Technical School: A Usable Past? , London, Falmer, 1989; Michael Sanderson, The Missing Stratum , London, Athlone Press, 1994.

48 E.g. June Purvis, “Working class women and adult education in nineteenth-century Britain”, History of Education , vol. 9, no. 3, 1980, p. 193-212; June Purvis, Hard Lessons: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain , Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989; Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England , London, Routledge, 1981.

49 June Purvis, “The historiography of British education: a feminist critique”, in Ali Rattansi, David Reeder (eds.), Rethinking Radical Education , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1992, p. 249-66.

51 Ian Grosvenor, Assimilating Identities: Racism and Educational Policy in Post 1945 Britain , London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1997.

52 Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth , Oxford, Blackwell, 1981.

53 Philip Gardner, “The giant at the front: young teachers and corporal punishment in inter-war elementary schools”, History of Education , vol. 25, no. 2, 1996, p. 141-63; Philip Gardner, Peter Cunningham, “Oral history and teachers’ professional practice: a wartime turning point?”, Cambridge Journal of Education , vol. 27, no. 3, 1997, p. 331-42.

54 Cambridge Journal of Education , special issue, “Teachers’ lives: training and careers in historical perspective”, vol. 27, no. 3, 1997. See also Cambridge Journal of Education , special issue, “Teachers, biography and life history”, vol. 20, no. 3, 1990.

55 Anthony Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981; Anthony Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism , New York, Viking, 1986.

56 Detlef Muller, Fritz Ringer, Brian Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural Change and Social Reproduction, 1870-1920 , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

58 Roy Lowe, “Writing the history of education”, in Roy Lowe (ed.), History of Education: Major Themes , London, Routledge, 2000, vol. 1, p. xlii-xliii.

59 David Crook, Richard Aldrich, “Introduction”, in David Crook, Richard Aldrich (eds.), History of Education for the Twenty-First Century , op. cit ., p. x.

61 Marc Depaepe, “What kind of history of education may we expect for the twenty-first century? Some comments on four recent readers in the field”, Paedagogica Historica , vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2003, p. 189.

62 History of Education , special issue, “Social change in the history of education: the British experience in international context”, vol. 36, no. 4-5, 2007.

63 See e.g. Jane Martin, Joyce Goodman, Women and Education 1800-1980 , London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Women’s History Review , special issue, “Revisioning the history of girls and women in the long 1950s”, vol. 26, no. 1, 2017; Women’s History Review , special issue, “Twists and turns in histories of women’s education”, vol. 29, no. 3, 2020.

64 See e.g. Joyce Goodman, “Troubling histories and theories: gender and the history of education”, History of Education, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003, p. 157-174; Stephanie Spencer, Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s , London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Ruth Watts, “Gendering the story: change in the history of education”, History of Education , vol. 34, no. 3, 2005, p. 225-241; Joyce Goodman, “The gendered politics of historical writing in History of Education ”, History of Education , vol. 41, no. 1, 2012, p. 9-24.

65 Oxford Review of Education , special issue, “Histories of learning in the modern world”, guest editors Gary McCulloch and Tom Woodin, vol. 36, no. 2, 2010; Mark Freeman, “Adult education history in Britain: past, present and future”, Paedagogica Historica , vol. 56, no. 3, 2020, Part I, p. 384-395; Part 2, p. 396-410.

66 David Crook, “Teacher education as a field of historical research: retrospect and prospect”, History of Education , vol. 41, no. 1, 2012, p. 57-72; Roy Lowe, “The changing role of the academic journal: the coverage of higher education in History of Education as a case study, 1972-2011”, History of Education , vol. 41, no. 1, 2012, p. 103-115.

67 E.g. Kevin Myers, “Immigrants and ethnic minorities in the history of education”, Paedagogica Historica , vol. 45, no. 6, 2009, p. 801-816; Kevin Myers, Struggles for a Past: Irish and Afro-Caribbean Histories in England, 1950-2000 , Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015; Olivier Esteves, The “Desegregation” of English Schools: Bussing, Race and Urban Space, 1960s-80s , Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018.

68 Felicity Armstrong, “Disability, education and social change in England since 1960” History of Education , vol. 36, no. 4-5, 2007, p. 551-568.

69 E.g. Pamela Dale, “Special education at Starcross before 1948”, History of Education , vol. 36, no. 1, 2007, p. 17-44; Jane Read, Jan Walmsley, “Historical perspectives on special education, 1890-1970”, Disability and Society , vol. 21, no. 5, 2006, p. 455-69; Kevin Myers, Anna Brown, “Mental deficiency: the diagnosis and after-care of special school leavers in early twentieth-century Birmingham (UK)”, Journal of Historical Sociology , vol. 18, no. 1-2, 2005, p. 72-98.

70 Derrick Armstrong, Experiences of Special Education: Re-Evaluating Policy and Practice through Life Stories , London, Routledge/Falmer, 2003.

71 See e.g.  History of Education , special issue, “Theory and methodology in the history of education”, guest editors Gary McCulloch and Ruth Watts, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003.

72 E.g. Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin Myers, Nick Peim (eds.), Visual History: Images of Education , Berne, Peter Lang, 2005; Dierdre Raftery (ed.), Celebrating Teachers: A Visual History , London, Fil Rouge Press, 2016.

73 Martin Lawn, Ian Grosvenor, “‘When in doubt, preserve’: exploring the traces of teaching and material culture in English schools”, History of Education , vol. 30, no. 2, 2007, p. 117-127. See also e.g.  History of Education , special issue, “Science, technologies and the material culture in the history of education”, vol. 40, no. 2, 2017, based on the 2015 HES annual conference, guest edited by Heather Ellis.

74 E.g. Gary McCulloch, “Sensing the realities of English middle-class education: James Bryce and the Schools Inquiry Commission, 1865-1868”, History of Education , vol. 40, no. 5, 2011, p. 599-613; and Ian Grosvenor, “Back to the future or towards a sensory history of schooling”, History of Education , vol. 41, no. 5, 2012, p. 675-687.

75 Richard Aldrich, “The three duties of the historian of education”, History of Education , vol. 32, no. 2, 2003, p. 133-43.

76 See e.g. Carol Smart, “Reconsidering the recent history of child sexual abuse, 1910-1960”, Journal of Social Policy , vol. 29, no. 1, 2000, p. 55-71; and Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap, Louise Jackson, Louise Settle, “Historical child sexual abuse in England and Wales: the role of historians”, History of Education , vol. 45, no. 4, 2016, p. 411-29.

77 See Ian Grosvenor, Ruth Watts, “Urbanisation and education: the city as a light and beacon?”, Paedagogica Historica , vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2003, p. 1-4.

78 History of Education , special issue, “Centre and periphery – networks, space and geography in the history of education”, vol. 32, no. 3, 2003.

79 Paedagogica Historica , special issue, “‘Empires overseas’ and ‘Empires at home’: Postcolonial and transnational perspectives on social change in the history of education”, guest editors Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, vol. 45, no. 6, 2009.

80 See Paedagogica Historica , special issue, “Education, war and peace”, guest editors Gary McCulloch and Georgina Brewis, vol. 52, no. 1-2, 2016.

81 See also Gary McCulloch, Steven Cowan, A Social History of Educational Studies and Research , London, Routledge, 2018, esp. Ch. 9.

82 Martin Lawn, John Furlong, “The disciplines of education in the UK: between the ghost and the shadow”, Oxford Review of Education , vol. 35, no. 5, 2009, p. 549-50.

83 History of Education , special issue, “Education and citizenship in modern Scotland”, vol. 38, no. 3, 2009; Robert. Anderson, Mark Freeman, Lindsay Paterson (eds.) The Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland , Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015; Stephen McKinney, Raymond McCluskey (eds.), A History of Catholic Education and Schooling in Scotland: New Perspectives , London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

84 Gareth Elwyn Jones, “Perspectives from the brink of extinction: the fate of history of education study in Wales”, History of Education , vol. 42, no. 3, 2013, p. 381-95.

85 Joyce Goodman, Ian Grosvenor, “Educational research – history of education a curious case?”, Oxford Review of Education , vol. 35, no. 5, 2009, p. 601-616.

Bibliographical reference

Gary McCulloch , “History of education in Britain since 1960” ,  Histoire de l’éducation , 154 | 2020, 119-141.

Electronic reference

Gary McCulloch , “History of education in Britain since 1960” ,  Histoire de l’éducation [Online], 154 | 2020, Online since 01 January 2023 , connection on 20 May 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/histoire-education/5640; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/histoire-education.5640

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British Education System In India - Features and Impact

Quest for upsc cse panels.

Sub-Categories:

GS-I: Modern History

Prelims: History of India and Indian National Movement

Mains: The Freedom Struggle — its various stages and important contributors/contributions from different parts of the country. 

British Education System In India: Different facets of life changed when British territorial rule over India was established. With the handover of power to the British, education was one of those areas that underwent significant change. The colonial rulers created the educational system in a colonial country to legitimise their rule and meet their own economic needs. The British Education System In India was formally established through the Charter Acts.

In 1813, when the Charter was up for renewal, the British Parliament ordered the East India Company to set aside Rs 1 lakh annually "for the revival and promotion of literature, the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories."

As a result, the Queen made official financial arrangements for the first time, and the East India Company was given responsibility for the natives' education.

Policies under British Education System in India

Before the acquisition of territorial power, the Company had no role in education; however, there were attempts by the missionaries to establish charity schools and to promote learning.

• Due to the fear of adverse reactions and opposition to their role by the local people, the Company maintained neutrality on education after becoming a territorial power.
• The opinions were also divided on whether the Company should promote western or oriental learning.
• Some individuals played a significant role in promoting English education in Calcutta. For example- The establishment of Hindu College by David Hare. Raja Ram Mohan Roy headed its foundation committee.

Impact of British Education System In India

• It helped in creating a new class of people who later helped them in governance as well as in controlling many aspects of administration in India.
• English as a link language: The use of English by Indians provided one language that cut across the entire country and became a common link for them.
• Growth of national consciousness: English books and newspapers brought to Indians new ideas from the West, like freedom, democracy, equality and brotherhood.
• Neglect of mass education: This was one of the major weaknesses of the British Education System In India. In 1911, 94% of Indians lacked literacy, which changed to 92% by 1921.
• Neglect of female education: The almost complete disregard for girls' education, for which there were no funds allocated, was a significant flaw in the early policy of the British Education System In India.
• Neglect of scientific and technical education: The Company’s administration also neglected scientific and technical education. By 1857, the country had only three medical colleges at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras and only one engineering college in Roorkee.
• Minimal financial support : The issue of finance was at the heart of many of the drawbacks of the education policies during British India.

The indigenous system of education was replaced by the new British Education System In India. There were many Englishmen who tried to promote oriental learning, but the Anglicists prevailed over such Orientalists. New schools and colleges were established to promote learning. New social, political and economic ideas came through the channel of Western education. But the British Education System In India ignored scientific and technical education. Moreover, the beneficiary of this education was mainly the upper crust of society. So the transformation that came with English education was very limited in nature.

PYQs on British Education System In India

Question 1: Wellesley established the Fort William College at Calcutta because (UPSC Prelims 2020)

• he was asked by the Board of Directors at London to do so
• he wanted to revive interest in oriental learning in India
• he wanted to provide William Carey and his associates with employment
• he wanted to train British civilians for administrative purpose in India

Answer: (d)

Question 2: With reference to educational institutes during colonial rule in India, consider the following pairs: (UPSC Prelims 2018)

                Institution                                          Founder

• Sanskrit College at Benaras                William Jones
• Calcutta Madrasa                                Warren Hastings
• Fort William College                           Arthur Wellesley

Which of the pairs given above is/are correct?

Answer: (b)

FAQs on British Education System in India

Q) what were the drawbacks of the british education system in india.

At all levels, the growth of education was uneven. Primary schools were harmed by a lack of funding. Because English was the only language used for instruction, the average person did not benefit from it.

Q) What was the aim of the British Education System In India?

The first goal was to create a class of translators to serve as a link between the British emperors and the millions of Indians they ruled. The second goal was to create a group of people who were British in intelligence, morals, and taste but of Indian blood and colour.

Q) What were the indigenous efforts taken for the spread of education under British rule?

Under British rule, the impetus to education was given by Nationalists. For example- Gokhale was the first and foremost architect of the Bill on compulsory and free education. Clause 6 of Gokhale’s Bill provided for the banning of child labour as a pre-condition for the enforcement of school attendance.

Q) Which was the first education commission set up after independence?

The first committee for the most important education in independent India was the University Education Committee of 1948, Radhakrishnan, to report on the status of Indian university education and propose improvements and extensions.

Q) What was the positive impact of the British Education System on Indian society?

Dalits rebelled and fought for their rights as a result of Dalits being educated by the British in an equal and nondiscriminatory manner. Additionally, widows' rights were granted. Eliminating vices like Sati and untouchability is a step in the direction of a more tolerant and advanced society.

© 2024 Vajiram & Ravi. All rights reserved

Educ 300: Education Reform, Past and Present

an undergraduate course with Professor Jack Dougherty at Trinity College, Hartford CT

The Effects of the Colonial Period on Education in Burma

In the early 1800s, the British government, motivated by profit and security, marched into the Southeast Asian nation of Burma, also known today as Myanmar. A Buddhist country rich in natural resources, Burma was an expansionist power that bordered India, one of Great Britain’s most prized colonies. Three Anglo-Burmese Wars were fought over a period of 60 years and Burmese territories were annexed as provinces of British India before the British government allowed Burma to be administered separately in 1937 (Harvey, 1946). In 1948, Burma finally gained its independence but the presence of the British colonists had inevitably transformed the nation, its government, society, and institutions. The education system in Burma was one of the areas in which profound changes had taken place. How did British colonization transform the Burmese education system  during the mid-19 th  to early 20 th  centuries  and how did nationalists respond to these foreign influences?

In the pre-colonial period, education and religion were inextricably linked as the Theravada Buddhist monastic order, or the Sangha, served as the main educational institution for the natives. After Burma was colonized, the British attempted to reform the existing system, initially by working to incorporate more secular subjects into the monastic curriculum and later by setting up a system of secular schools that could supply them with local administrators and civil servants and enable them to “civilize” the Burmese people. With the rise of the nationalistic spirit in the 20 th century, the educated Burmese demanded education reforms and created national schools that endeavored to rebuild a sense of national identity. [1]

Prior to the arrival of the British, few private schools existed except those established by Christian missionaries and local monasteries in the self-contained agricultural villages were the center of culture and served as schools for the Burmese boys. Due to religious restrictions set against women, girls were educated at home by parents who taught them basic literacy skills alone with other skills related to efficacy in home duties and at the marketplace needed for business activities (Cady, 1958).  The emphasis of monastic education was placed largely on learning and reciting religious Pali scriptures that would help the boys develop skills required to eventually monks (Fuqua, 1992). The strong connection between religion and schooling is reflected by fact that the Burmese word for school ( kyaung ) is the same word used to refer to the monastery.Though the education was of a religious nature, the monastic schools ensured that Burma had a high literacy rate of about 60% as the majority of Burmese men were at least able to read and write their basic letters (Harvey, 1946).

The monastery schools were completely independent from government control and Buddhist monks, in addition to carrying out the duties of their office, acted as the schoolmasters, teaching the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Their work was supported by voluntary gifts, donations, and alms from the villagers, allowing the monks to provide education free of charge to all boys in the village regardless of their class or religious background (Octennial Report, 1956). Some boys attended the school in the day and went home at night while others temporarily became novices for a period of time and lived at the monastery. Rather than using exams or grades to categorize the boys, the monks grouped boys instead by lessons they had completed (Octennial Report, 1956). The main issue in these village school systems, however, was that attendance was irregular and some students dropped out after just receiving the basic literacy skills as working in the fields took precedence over going to school.

In addition to teaching students the basics needed for literacy, the monastic education aimed to transmit the traditional cultural, moral, and religious values of the community and society (Cady, 1958). The monastic education system also contributed to the leveling of classes in society as entrance was open to all and regardless of whether one was a prince or the son of a poor farmer, everyone enjoyed the same status and was subject to the same discipline (Cady, 1958). A more advanced level of education that addressed a wider array of subjects, such as Buddhist Studies, Classical Burmese literature, court protocol, engineering, construction and manufacturing operations (Cady, 1958) could also be attained at some monastic centers in urban locations. This education enabled those who would become monks to build pagodas and monasteries and for those who didn’t to fill roles in the Burmese court.

Aside from monastic schools, a few other avenues of education were also available to the Burmese males. Vocational education was learned in a hands-on manner with students taking up actual apprenticeships (Harvey, 1946). The Burmese kings also sent men to Calcutta and attend higher learning institutions to acquire other sorts of training in the medical or technical fields (Furnivall, 1948).

Prior to 1854, the British had a laissez-faire policy in regards to education. The British had a policy of conciliation since the early 19 th century and to avoid confrontation with the local population they did not try to change the education system which was linked to religion (Fuqua, 1992). However, as mentioned before, western education schools had already been established by Christian missionaries in the rural areas populated by Non-Burman ethnic tribes, such as the Karens, Kachins, and Chins. While the missionaries’ efforts with the Burmans and Shans, who were devout Buddhists, were met with resistance, they successfully educated some of the minority groups and also converted them to Christianity. These schools educated both male and female students. The efforts of the American Baptist mission schools, for instance, were so successful with the Karen that they eventually established a college for them in the city of Rangoon (Cady, 1958). These mission schools were an effective means of educating rural populations living in areas that were hard to reach due to geographical barriers, even after a formal school system began to emerge later.

Starting in 1854, the British authorities extended their influence into the education system. Their aim was to “convey useful and practical knowledge suited to every station in life to the great masses of people” as well as to “spread civilization” to remove superstitious prejudices (Fuqua, 1992) . Aside from their liberal and humanitarian sentiments, they also hoped to use education to attach subjects more closely to British rule (Furnivall, 1948) and needed natives who were literate and fluent in English to fill the positions as local administrators and subordinate civil servants (Hillman, 1946). Though they had already opened three Anglo-vernacular schools between the period of 1885 and 1844 to educate English-speaking clerks, there was little demand for these schools because fewer positions in government work was available at that time and most people continued going to monastic schools.

Initially, the British attempted to use the existing monastic system to fashion a rudimentary system of western-style primary education. As this was prior to the separation of Burma from India, this simply resulted in the imposition of educational policies in India on the Burmese system. It fell upon Sir Arthur Phayre, the Commissioner of British Burma to combine the best of both worlds and incorporate secular subjects into monastic system to create a westernized system similar to what was established in India (Fuqua, 1992). However, Phayre’s attempts failed because they were resisted by the monks and they failed to take into accounts the differences between the Indian and Burmese population. Although a few monasteries were receptive to the idea of improving their curriculum and accepted secular textbooks from the British, most monasteries resisted the change. Monks refused to teach subjects like geography and science which they considered to be evil and “refused to play the layman, to be supervised by the layman, to keep lay attendance registers, to exercise lay discipline, and to use lay books” (Campbell,1946). Although their resistance was in part due to religious reasons, it is also likely that they were reacting to being “systematically disenfranchised by the colonial state through its demolition of the pre-existing Buddhist political order” that was closely associated with the Burmese monarchy in the pre-colonial era(Cheesman, 2003). Phayre’s efforts also failed because unlike in India where there was “no comprehensive egalitarian schooling managed by a single agency” and access to schooling was dependent on one’s wealth, gender, and social status in the caste system, in Burma a system of monastic schooling that had a magnitude of independence already existed (Cheesman, 2003). This impeded the efforts of the British who had no means of unifying and reaching out to the hundreds of monastic schools that were not under a central authority. Additionally, the British failed to consider the problem of fluctuations and irregularities in school attendance that was prevalent in monastic schools.

The disappointing results of trying to influence the Sangha and merge monastic education with western secular notions of schooling, the British administration changed their strategy. By 1871, the British authorities set up a system of lay schools under the control of a director of public instruction and his inspectors (Furnivall, 1948). Three main types of schools were established: vernacular schools, Anglo-vernacular schools, and English schools. These schools had taught the 3 Rs as well as subjects in science, British history, the British constitution, Grades 1 to 4 were designated as elementary school, grades 5 to 7 were designated as middle school and grades 8 to 10 as high school (Tinker, 1967). The language of instruction was Burmese in the vernacular schools and English in the English schools, while Anglo-Vernacular schools used both languages for instruction until the 8 th standard and English becomes the sole language of instruction (Tinker, 1967). Students had to pay a fee to attend these schools and those who could not pay continued to attend monastic schools (Cheesman, 2003). Those who displayed high academic ability in vernacular schools were given financial aid and other “bridge” program provisions were made for them to transfer into Anglo-vernacular schools (Cambell, 1946). By 1891, there were over 6000 lay schools opened in Burma (Fuqua, 1992). The opening of the Rangoon University, the first higher education institution, in 1885 by the government was followed quickly by the opening of universities (Hillman, 1946).

While the aim  of the Sangha was to “teach the boys how to live but not merely how to make a living” (Furnivall, 1948), the modern schooling system based on western ideologies taught students skills that had market value and that led them to contribute to the economy to the benefit of their colonizers. Students were trained for vocational jobs or low skill jobs so that they could enter the work-force and help the British maximize their economic profits and the best of them attained higher education that allowed them to work in the colonial administration (Fuqua, 1992). The British education system did however have a positive effect on female education and increased female literacy because women were permitted to enroll in these lay schools (Furnivall, 19480).

Later in the 1870s when the opening of the Suez Canal accelerated Burma’s economic growth which consequently led the administrative expansion, there was a rise in demand for English schools (Hillman, 1946). The majority of the schools that were opened were vernacular schools which only led to careers as vernacular school teachers or other low paying manual jobs. The Burmese began to realize that they needed to enroll in Anglo-Vernacular or English schools that would allow them attend university and secure jobs in the administration and other government office jobs in the education, health, forestry, and agricultural sectors (Tinker, 1967). As the number of students in Anglo-vernacular and English schools increased, so did the enrollment in universities, leading to a new class of educated Burmese citizens. The desire for social advantage led to the rise in demand and popularity of the state-managed modern education system and to the decline of the monastic school system.

In the turn of the 20 th century, the rise in the number of educated Burmese led to a nationalist movement that was inspired by a number of concurrent events. The reforms being implemented by the British in neighboring India and the Japanese victories against Russia opened up the possibility of successfully resisting their opp. Education received from the schooling system established by the British ironically contributed to the nationalist movement in two ways. First, while more people had earned higher degrees to enter government posts, most available posts for the Burmese had been filled by 1930. The frustration of university students was manifested in strikes and protests, contributing to the conditions of political unrest and economic decline in Burma (Hillman, 1946). In 1920, the university students began a national strike to protest against educational policies set by the British who raised the bar for university entrance requirements, marking the entry of students into national politics.

Second, education empowered the Burmese people to fight for liberation from their western colonizers; the Burmese who had gone abroad for further studies returned with both a realization of how they had been second-class citizens in their own country that was being exploited by the colonizers as well as new ideas about government and politics (Cady, 1958). A revival of interest in Burmese history, arts, and literature followed John Furnivall’s organization of the Burma Research Society in 1909 (Cady, 1958). A nationalist group called the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) that was modeled after the Young Men’s Christian Association began to organize and were later joined by other university student led groups such as the Thakin group and We Burmans Association They began to use print materials to mobilize nationalist sentiments across the nation (Cheesman, 2003).

The agenda of these groups were centered largely on issues of education (Schober,2007).  The Burmese began to realize that the knowledge of Burmese literature had almost died out and that aside from rural areas, English had become the main spoken language as Burmese language and literacy were not sufficiently taught in schools attended by the majority of students (Schober,2007).  The YMBA based on its model and actions implicitly seemed to acknowledge that modernization was necessary and did not completely discard modern education. But at the same time, concerned about the influence of western education on the national identity, they tried to support schools that had Buddhism in the curriculum (Schober, 2007).The nationalists also supported monastic schools, petitioning the government to exempt these schools from taxation and discouraging costly religious rituals in these schools.

In the 1920s, Burmese nationalists began to open private schools that were independent of government control that fostered nationalistic ideals (Hillman, 1946). Despite popular support, these schools did not have sufficient funding and had to receive government support (Hillman, 1946). The YMBA agitated the government further to establish more national schools that were independent from the British education system where Burmese was the language of instruction (Fuqua, 1992). Their aim was to establish a system that could compete with the British system and eventually supplant it (Fuqua, 1992).

[1] Please note that within the borders of Burma there exists a number of different ethnic minority groups who are identified separately from the main population of Burmans. In this paper, I am refer to the entire population that lives in Burma as “Burmese” and to those of the majority ethnic group as “Burmans”.

Cady, John F.  A History of Modern Burma . Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1958. Print.

Campbell, A. (1946). Education in Burma. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts , 49 , 438-448.

Cheesman, N. (2003). School, State and Sangha in Burma.  Comparative Education ,  39 (1), 45-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3099630

Furnivall, J. S. (1948).  Colonial policy and practice a comparative study of Burma and Netherlands India, . Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press.

Fuqua, J. (1992). A Comparison of Japanese and British Colonial Policy in Asia and their Effect on Indigenous Educational Systems Through 1930 (Master’s Thesis). Retrieved from DITC database. (Ascension Order No. ADA2544560)

Harvey, G. E. (1946). British Rule in Burma, 1824-1942 . London: Faber and Faber.

Hillman, O. Education in Burma.  Journal of Negro Education ,  15 , 526 – 533. Retrieved , from www.jstor.orgtable/2966118

Octennial Report on Education in Burma, 1947-48 to 1954-55 . (1956). Rangoon: Supdt., Govt. Printing and Staty., Union of Burma.

Schober, J. (2007). Colonial knowledge and buddhist education in burma. I.Harris (Ed.)  Buddhism, power, and political order (pp.52-70). London: Routledge.

Tinker, H. (1967).  The Union of Burma: a study of the first years of independence.  (4th ed.). London: issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs by Oxford U.P.

2 thoughts on “The Effects of the Colonial Period on Education in Burma”

This rich historical essay asks a dual question about education and power: how did British colonialists transform Burmese education, and in turn, how did Burmese nationalists respond to foreign influences through schooling in the mid-19th to early 20th-centuries? The introductory thesis succinctly argues that the Brits sought to secularize schools to create civil servants and “civilize” the Burmese, while later nationalists reintroduced native literature and language through mass education.

The body of the essay does an excellent job of drawing on a range of secondary sources that trace British attempts to westernize monastic schools, initial Burmese acceptance for social mobility into administrative occupations, followed by a subsequent nationalist movement that partly drew its strength from the new class of citizens that the British had educated. I encourage you to expand on this outstanding essay for your senior research project on Burmese teacher interviews (pending approval of the Ed 400 instructor), since it already has many of the qualities that I would expect from a published journal article in the field of educational history.

Also, be sure to include captions with each image above to credit the source.

Comments are closed.

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Writing news reports

Newswise values.

This lesson focuses on  all  of the  NewsWise values .

Learning objective

To inform and engage an audience (first draft).

Learning outcomes

Write a first draft of a news report, using the structural and language features of news reports.

Explain how a news report meets the four NewsWise values.

Evaluate a peer’s news report, providing feedback on the language and structural features used.

Starter/baseline assessment

Pupils spend five minutes reviewing their pyramid plan, to remind themselves of the order of information in their reports, while also referring to their original news report plans for detailed information.

As a class, recap the structural and language features of news reporting. How will you begin your news report? Which information will you include in the middle section? How many quotes will you include? How will you end your report? What do you need to remember about using paragraphs in news reports?

Learning activity

Pupils write the first draft of their news reports, using the planning sheets which they created in previous lessons.

Give pupils deadlines throughout the session to replicate the newsroom experience. You may wish to split the sections of the report into separate tasks with a deadline for each one, eg: 5W introduction; quotes and reported speech from interviews; additional research on the topic; final paragraph.

Refer back to the class News report toolkit, as well as the Model news reports and News reporting language word banks from lesson 11 to support pupils to write in an authentic news report style and structure.

See Creating a newsroom for further ideas on how to create a newsroom in your classroom.

Note: pupils do not need to add ‘page furniture’ at this point - this happens in  lesson 15 .

Pupils share their news reports with a partner, providing feedback to each other based upon the following questions: which language features have they included in their news report? Have they begun their news report with a 5 W introduction? Have they included  interesting  information? Have they started a new paragraph for every new point? Is the news report  balanced ? Do you think it is a  truthful  and  fair  report? Why?

Questions for assessment

What is the purpose of your news report? 

Who is your audience? 

What do you need to include in your news report? 

How will you make sure that your news report is truthful, fair, balanced and interesting?

Core knowledge and skills

In this lesson, pupils write the first draft of their news reports (without the ‘page furniture’). 

Conduct the lesson as a writing lesson, in line with your usual practice. Remind pupils of the structural and language features of news reporting by referring to your class’s ‘news report toolkit’.

Use success criteria to remind pupils of the key features of a news report, including: inverted pyramid structure - beginning with the most important information, moving on to additional interesting details and quotes, finishing with what might happen next/similar stories that have happened before/a really good quote that sums up the story; 5 Ws introduction, starting with Who or What, not When; short paragraphs; concise, formal language; written in the third person and past tense; reported and direct speech; relative clauses.

Lesson plan pdf

Creating a newsroom in your classroom

News report toolkit

Inverted pyramid structure

5 W introductions

Model news reports

News reporting language

Curriculum links

Selecting appropriate form, grammar, vocabulary and punctuation; using paragraphs to structure ideas; building cohesion     

Reviewing and editing writing

Peer-editing   

Finished NewsWise?

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Lesson 14: Subediting news reports

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Lesson 12: Recognising news report language

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Web versions of our unit of work for 9- to 11-year-olds

NewsWise classroom resources

The NewsWise units of work and all other resources

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Newspaper report

In this task, students write a front page newspaper report based on the murder of Nancy. The resource includes tips and a sample report about Bill Sikes' death to help students with style. 

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Blog The Education Hub

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/05/16/new-rshe-guidance-what-it-means-for-sex-education-lessons-in-schools/

New RSHE guidance: What it means for sex education lessons in schools

R elationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) is a subject taught at both primary and secondary school.  

In 2020, Relationships and Sex Education was made compulsory for all secondary school pupils in England and Health Education compulsory for all pupils in state-funded schools.  

Last year, the Prime Minister and Education Secretary brought forward the first review of the curriculum following reports of pupils being taught inappropriate content in RSHE in some schools.  

The review was informed by the advice of an independent panel of experts. The results of the review and updated guidance for consultation has now been published.   

We are now asking for views from parents, schools and others before the guidance is finalised. You can find the consultation here .   

What is new in the updated curriculum?  

Following the panel’s advice, w e’re introducing age limits, to ensure children aren’t being taught about sensitive and complex subjects before they are ready to fully understand them.    

We are also making clear that the concept of gender identity – the sense a person may have of their own gender, whether male, female or a number of other categories   – is highly contested and should not be taught. This is in line with the cautious approach taken in our gu idance on gender questioning children.  

Along with other factors, teaching this theory in the classroom could prompt some children to start to question their gender when they may not have done so otherwise, and is a complex theory for children to understand.   

The facts about biological sex and gender reassignment will still be taught.  

The guidance for schools also contains a new section on transparency with parents, making it absolutely clear that parents have a legal right to know what their children are being taught in RSHE and can request to see teaching materials.   

In addition, we’re seeking views on adding several new subjects to the curriculum, and more detail on others. These include:   

• Suicide prevention  
• Sexual harassment and sexual violence  
• L oneliness  
• The prevalence of 'deepfakes’  
• Healthy behaviours during pregnancy, as well as miscarriage  
• Illegal online behaviours including drug and knife supply  
• The dangers of vaping   
• Menstrual and gynaecological health including endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and heavy menstrual bleeding.  

What are the age limits?   

In primary school, we’ve set out that subjects such as the risks about online gaming, social media and scams should not be taught before year 3.   

Puberty shouldn’t be taught before year 4, whilst sex education shouldn’t be taught before year 5, in line with what pupils learn about conception and birth as part of the national curriculum for science.  

In secondary school, issues regarding sexual harassment shouldn’t be taught before year 7, direct references to suicide before year 8 and any explicit discussion of sexual activity before year 9.  

Do schools have to follow the guidance?  

Following the consultation, the guidance will be statutory, which means schools must follow it unless there are exceptional circumstances.   

There is some flexibility w ithin the age ratings, as schools will sometimes need to respond to questions from pupils about age-restricted content, if they come up earlier within their school community.   

In these circumstances, schools are instructed to make sure that teaching is limited to the essential facts without going into unnecessary details, and parents should be informed.  

When will schools start teaching this?  

School s will be able to use the guidance as soon as we publish the final version later this year.   

However, schools will need time to make changes to their curriculum, so we will allow an implementation period before the guidance comes into force.     

What can parents do with these resources once they have been shared?

This guidance has openness with parents at its heart. Parents are not able to veto curriculum content, but they should be able to see what their children are being taught, which gives them the opportunity to raise issues or concerns through the school’s own processes, if they want to.

Parents can also share copyrighted materials they have received from their school more widely under certain circumstances.

If they are not able to understand materials without assistance, parents can share the materials with translators to help them understand the content, on the basis that the material is not shared further.

Copyrighted material can also be shared under the law for so-called ‘fair dealing’ - for the purposes of quotation, criticism or review, which could include sharing for the purpose of making a complaint about the material.

This could consist of sharing with friends, families, faith leaders, lawyers, school organisations, governing bodies and trustees, local authorities, Ofsted and the media.  In each case, the sharing of the material must be proportionate and accompanied by an acknowledgment of the author and its ownership.

Under the same principle, parents can also share relevant extracts of materials with the general public, but except in cases where the material is very small, it is unlikely that it would be lawful to share the entirety of the material.

These principles would apply to any material which is being made available for teaching in schools, even if that material was provided subject to confidentiality restrictions.

Do all children have to learn RSHE?  

Parents still have the right to withdraw their child from sex education, but not from the essential content covered in relationships educatio n.  

You may also be interested in:

• Education Secretary's letter to parents: You have the right to see RSHE lesson material
• Sex education: What is RSHE and can parents access curriculum materials?
• What do children and young people learn in relationship, sex and health education

Tags: age ratings , Gender , Relationships and Sex Education , RSHE , sex ed , Sex education

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