81
...to any material improvement in the education of the working class which
required public expenditure; or which removed the pool of cheap labour
provided by the 14 to 16 age groups which, excluded from insurance safeguards
and wages agreements no less than schools, were on call for unskilled work in
industry and dead-end jobs in the distributive trades.
(Simon 1974: 64)
Despite such opposition, in the 1920s and again in the 1930s, committees were
established to suggested solutions to the acknowledged limitations on access to
English secondary education. Although neither of the resulting reports was
implemented, they are important because both fed into the thinking of the Norwood
Report which shaped the major changes brought about in the 1944 Education Act.
In December 1925, the Hadow Committee reported on its investigations into the
glaring weaknesses in the education of the majority of children over the age of 11.
However, as with the Forster Act of 1870 and the Balfour Act of 1902, Hadow did not
grasp the nettle and recommend full-scale reform. Board of Education officials had
framed the committee’s terms of reference so as to exclude consideration of
secondary education for all and to retain the existing selective secondary sector as a
separate track.
Therefore, despite its being perceived in its day as a progressive way forward, the
Hadow Report reinforced the notion of education as a preparation for life in a
stratified society. The few would begin to climb the ladder at 11 through selective
tests, while the other 75% remained on a bottom rung in what Hadow termed
“modern” schools - to be added to existing elementary provision - until they left at
14. Simon identifies the Hadow Report’s recommendation of “selection by
differentiation” as part of the official ideology of the Board of Education. “This was
to be the key function of the education system, to which educational considerations
were subordinated over many years to come” (Simon 1974: 146). Lowe was even