Secondary Education and the Raising of the School-Leaving Age

Coming of Age?

T. Woodin, G. McCulloch, S. Cowan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137065216
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Política educativa

The progressive raising of the school-leaving age has had momentous repercussions for our understanding of childhood and youth, for secondary education, and for social and educational inequality. This book assesses secondary education and the raising of the school-leaving age in the UK and places issues and debates in an international context.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The expansion of compulsory education represents a fundamental social transformation of the modern world. Raising of the school-leaving age (ROSLA) has been at the heart of this process. Schooling is commonly seen as a turning point in the lives of young people after which they are considered fit to participate more fully in society, literally coming of age. Debates over the length and content of this process have been both perennial and intense. ROSLA has not been a technical change but rather an historical shift, which has affected the ways in which we understand not only education but also youth, welfare, employment, and inequality. Yet, comparatively little has been written on the topic.

There are few aspects of social life that have been immune to the extension of compulsory education. The fortunes of economic competitiveness, modernization, democracy, citizenship, social justice, and human flourishing have all been tied to increasing the years of mandatory schooling. Expanding education within a “knowledge economy” has become a key target for those seeking to explain failures in the past and to herald progress in the future. Even revisionist perspectives that, from the 1960s and the 1970s, viewed schooling in terms of social control and the reproduction of inequalities, nevertheless agreed that compulsory education was growing in importance. Moreover, the centrality of education and learning in contemporary societies can be identified across the world. Compulsory schooling is a deeply embedded feature at the heart of national identities. In the West, fears about the “emerging” economies of China, India, Brazil, Russia, and others, where the expansion of education is much commented upon, have fuelled this agenda. Indeed, the demise of natural resources, the relocation of manufacturing industry to developing countries, the rise of service industries, and the intensification of technological innovation have all led to a renewed focus upon learning and skills. Countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Hungary, and some American states now have a school-leaving age of 18 and voluntary staying on has increased elsewhere. A related set of assumptions permeates the Millennium Development Goals to which universal access to primary education is central.

Our contemporary context provides an important departure point for an historical exploration of the school-leaving age not only in England but also Scotland and the United Kingdom more generally. In England, the 2008 Education and Skills Act legislated to make participation in education and training compulsory up to 17 from 2013 and 18 from 2015, a policy decision informed to some extent by historical analysis. From 1997 to 2010, Labour governments generally tended to play down the relevance of historical explanations, but such comparisons became prominent in this case. The then–secretary of state for education, Ed Balls, made direct comparisons with the 1918 Education Act that raised the hope of education to 18. He invoked the post-1945 need to rebuild a democratic society as presaging the concerns of the early twenty-first century. Despite the clear differences between the raising of the school-leaving age and the more diffuse notion of “participation,” which could include various forms of certified education and training, extending compulsion in education clearly lent itself to historical inquiry.¹

The related notions of “policy memory” and “policy amnesia” are useful to develop an understanding of both past and present. It is possible to develop “policy learning” from the past if we are sensitive to the fact that apparently similar measures may acquire very different meanings across historical contexts. Long-term policy oscillations in key debates over the school-leaving age resurface in complex ways in different historical settings. By examining broad historical transformations, continuing dilemmas and repeated practices can be identified in secondary education. Historical “lessons” rarely come in the form of detailed and precise prescriptions but rather depend upon an awareness of long-term structural factors that constrain the freedom for action in the present. Despite the lack of a sustained study in this area, judging by a recent spate of publications, there is clearly an appetite for linking historical analysis to contemporary policy development.²

The progressive raising of the school-leaving age has not been a neutral reform or an isolated case of educational history but has been rooted in particular historical contexts. In Britain, areas of welfare, such as health, experienced a sudden and visible increase in state direction, control, and ownership after 1948 with the creation of the National Health Service, whereas state educational provision developed more incrementally but nonetheless significantly. At the heart of ROSLA lies this interconnection between prosaic detail and its broader social significance. The title of G. A. N. Lowndes’s book A Silent Social Revolution well captured the sense that profound changes were resulting from accumulating reforms, even if it underestimated the controversy that underlay them.³

In view of these educational and social implications, it is surprising that there has been no major historical treatment of ROSLA, either in the United Kingdom or internationally. But it is possible to identify important commentaries and debates at moments when ROSLA became more prominent in public discourse. The successive raising of the school-leaving age reveals that change took place at moments of heightened social crisis and deeply felt social changes. The key dates when the age was raised represent historical turning points for a collective negotiation of the purpose of education within a divided society. In Britain, compulsory education developed in the nineteenth century and was extended in stages up to the present day. A number of education acts from 1870 introduced compulsory universal education and served to harness and regulate the use of literacy within a society coming to terms with industrialization and imperial expansion.⁴ This legislation came in the wake of the extension of the franchise in 1867 to a wider section of the population, which had stimulated widespread debate and moral panic among the upper and middle classes. It also responded to a gradual decline in the need for child labor and would encourage nascent economic demands for a labor force educated to a basic level. After 1880, as compulsion came to be accepted by influential sections of public opinion, the school-leaving age was extended from 10 to 11 in 1893 and to 12 in 1899, although some areas raised it beyond that (such as Scotland where the leaving age became 14 before it did in England).⁵

The key stages of ROSLA in the twentieth century followed soon after the two world wars and helped to crystallize an impulse for educational progress. The 1918 Education Act raised the age to 14 with no exceptions, a measure that was implemented in 1921. In the early twentieth century, ROSLA became central to a progressive educational alliance spearheaded by reforming institutions such as the International Labour Office (ILO) and social democratic parties. The British economic historian and doyen of educational progressives, R. H. Tawney, placed ROSLA at the heart of social change in arguing that education made a vital economic, social, cultural, and moral contribution to national life. He conceived of schools as quasi-religious, spiritual retreats, away from the dangerous and demeaning workplace, which allowed young people to mature in an enlightened environment.⁶ Tawney was a key influence on the Hadow Committee, which recommended raising the school-leaving age to 15 and the introduction of secondary education.⁷ In extending education, ROSLA also hastened its reorganization. Similarly, professional groups such as teachers were keen to express their support for the measure in the interwar years. This viewpoint was reflected in publications such as The Extra Year (1938), which was sponsored by a number of teacher unions.⁸ This progressive energy had helped to build the momentum behind the 1936 Education Act that raised the leaving age to 15 with what were described as “beneficial” exemptions, but was cancelled due to war. Finally, the 1944 Education Act paved the way to raise the leaving age to 15 in 1947 and to 16 when feasible. ROSLA established a crucial framework in which divided forms of secondary education developed in the United Kingdom.

This national experience helped to inform I. L. Kandel’s international study of the school-leaving age, as part of a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organisation) project reviewing compulsory education across the world, which appeared in 1951. Kandel summarized a number of national research projects on the topic. In its early years, UNESCO developed the idea of “fundamental” education, as one basis for nurturing intellectual and moral solidarity following wartime loss and destruction. It should not be surprising that the themes identified by Kandel reappear throughout the history of the school-leaving age and included equality of opportunity, education as an investment, and education and child labor laws. Each of these reflected continuing dilemmas of educational policy and practice.⁹

At times ROSLA has appeared to be an almost inevitable reform but, on closer analysis, tenacious strands of opposition can be identified. Following the 1944 Education Act, ROSLA to 16 remained on the statute book for 28 years before being implemented on the final crest of the postwar consensus that had seen the construction of the “welfare state.” But the power of a changing progressive alliance was still discernible in 1972 and ROSLA served as a catalyst for the reform of curriculum, pedagogy, and personal relationships in schools, which in turn stimulated further resistance. Edited collections by J. W. Tibble¹⁰ and Barry Turner¹¹ were published to reflect academic, practitioner, and political debates over the issue. Experimental projects tested out new ideas and more informal relationships between teachers and pupils whose self-expression was fostered.¹²

As a more critical and sustained response to some of the changes wrought by ROSLA, Dan Finn charted the changing connection between schooling and employment.¹³ The rise of vocationalism in the 1980s led Finn to explore youth employment initiatives and he noted that education was coming to replace work for many young people. His subtitle of “training without jobs” testified to the disaffection felt by many pupils. For those more sympathetic to the changes wrought in the 1980s, higher levels of compulsory schooling came to be seen as a positive development. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publication, Compulsory Education in a Changing World (1983) had been more neutral about the topic although it addressed the school-leaving age only tangentially. This was a study that appeared at a moment of transition to a new educational phase pervaded by neoliberal ideas relating to the economy.¹⁴

In recent decades, raising the school-leaving age has served as a measuring stick for economists who analyze the effects of compulsory education. The historical experiences of particular countries such as Greece, Canada, and the United Kingdom have been mined to show that increasing the years of compulsory education have had a positive outcome in terms of individual earnings—a correlation made in a mountain of research reports.¹⁵ The association between income and education reflects wider trends about the role of knowledge in the economy but necessarily hides more complex issues such as the quality and range of schooling, in addition to the effect on families, inequalities, and institutional factors, which can be more difficult to chart.¹⁶

These stages of growth took place over prolonged periods of time, involving intricate debate and the formation of coalitions that shaped and reshaped educational policy. In the process, the purpose, content, and nature of secondary education has remained entwined in a set of thorny and enduring conflicts. From its beginnings, different stakeholders advocated multiple visions for secondary education: who it is for, should it be a common or differentiated experience, where should it take place and, crucially, for how long it should last. The role of ROSLA in these wider educational debates has been underplayed, being viewed as a technical mechanism, a discrete legislative act that enabled children to remain in school for longer periods of time. Historians of education have tended to focus upon issues such as selection and the comprehensive movement, a debate that lent itself more directly to a particular form of class analysis which became prevalent from the 1960s.¹⁷ Brian Simon recognized the raising of the age in the 1940s as one significant element in educational advance that responded to a progressive social movement. It was seen as “a rapid and major thrust forward” and underlay the development of secondary education for all. Simon’s account of raising the age to 16 is more muted and crowded out by the issue of comprehensive schooling.¹⁸ But the broad issue of “secondary education for all” cannot in fact be fully understood without reference to the school-leaving age. In addition, ROSLA connects to another major postwar educational development, that of the expansion of higher education that was often pitted against ROSLA. Extending the leaving age was also presented in tandem with further education (FE), as a broader type of tertiary education, if not as an alternative.

Our approach aims to uncover complex patterns of educational change in relation to wider social, economic, political, and cultural issues, thus placing the history of ROSLA within a much wider set of structures. A decisive dilemma has been the issue of whether education was considered to be a cost or an investment that boosts human capital. Raising the leaving age has been viewed as a way of improving opportunity and social justice, whether in a limited sense of helping more pupils to climb an educational ladder or in terms of more fundamental social change. However, critics of ROSLA have underlined the escalating costs of welfare, the existing needs of the labor market and the fact that the tax burden could be ill-afforded and better-utilized elsewhere. Families have feared a loss of income consequent upon ROSLA. Educators and teachers have pointed to competing priorities in debates on ROSLA, as well as a predicted cost in terms of educational standards. As a result, on each occasion when the school-leaving age was raised, resources and arguments have ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The School-Leaving Age in International Perspective
• 3 Framework for ROSLA: Establishing Compulsion
• 4 ROSLA and the Emergence of Secondary Education
• 5 Forward with ROSLA 1951–1964
• 6 Waiting for ROSLA 1964–1968
• 7 Preparing for ROSLA 1968–1972
• 8 Achieving ROSLA
• 9 Raising the Participation Age: Policy Learning from the Past?
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index