Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online

(whether at a local or at a national level) and – on the part of GPs, who usually operated solo – saw in the increasingly fashionable nostrum of the health centre a dastardly socialist plot. ‘We have entered a new era of social consciousness,’ the Spectator – hardly noted for left-wing views – observed in the spring of 1944. ‘Some of the doctors seem not to have realised that fully, and it is desirable in everyone’s interest that they should.’ 8. A year later there was still a significant degree of consciousness-raising to be done.
     
    If in health there was still much to play for by 1945, the same was rather less true in education, where in outline anyway the post-war settlement had already taken shape. In a flurry of wartime action, it had three main elements: the Norwood Report of 1943, which examined what should be emphasised in the curriculum at secondary schools and (to the private satisfaction of the President of the Board of Education, Rab Butler, in theory a reforming Conservative) plumped for the time-honoured virtues of PE, ‘character’ and the English language, as opposed to anything more technical or modern; the Butler Act of 1944, which vastly expanded access to free secondary education; and, from the same year, the Fleming Report on the public schools, which in retrospect represented the spurning of a realistic chance to seek the abolition of the independent sector.
     
    Relatively few people at the time appreciated the negative significance of Norwood and Fleming, amid a general preference for concentrating on provision and numbers, whereas even at its outline stage the Butler legislation was widely seen as historic. ‘A landmark has been set up in English education,’ the Times Educational Supplement declared. ‘The Government’s White Paper promises the greatest and grandest educational advance since 1870.’ The paper’s editor, the progressive-minded Harold Dent, claimed that the government now accepted two key principles – ‘that there shall be equality of opportunity, and diversity of provision without impairment of the social unity’ – and boldly prophesied that ‘the throwing open of secondary education, of various types, to all’ would ‘result in a prodigious freeing of creative ability, and ensure to an extent yet incalculable that every child shall be prepared for the life he is best fitted to lead and the service he is best fitted to give’.
     
    Did that innocuous phrase ‘of various types’ catch some eyes? Quite possibly, for although Butler’s subsequent legislation would have nothing specific to say about different types of secondary school within the state sector, the fact was that at the very time of his White Paper the Norwood Report was not only enshrining as orthodoxy a tripartite system of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary moderns but explicitly avowing that ‘in the Grammar School the pupil is offered, because he is capable of reaching towards it, a conception of knowledge which is different from that which can be and should be envisaged in other types of school’. A former headmaster of Bristol Grammar School, Marlborough College and Harrow School, Sir Cyril Norwood had no qualms about pecking orders. In fact, there was an incipient movement under way in favour of the comprehensive school (or the ‘multilateral’, as it was then usually called), a movement in which Dent cautiously participated; yet even in one of English society’s more egalitarian phases, such a concept was far removed from practical politics. Significantly, when Dent in early 1944 wrote a pamphlet entitled The New Educational Bill , he neither questioned tripartism nor mentioned the comprehensive alternative.
     
    There seems, moreover, to have been a similar lack of concern about the inevitable selection implications of a tripartite structure. ‘The Government hold that there is nothing to be said in favour of a system which subjects children at the age of