Comprehensive School Reform and the 1945 Labour Government

When he says that Ellen Wilkinson opposed comprehensive schools, we can assume David Rubinstein' is using an historian's conventional shorthand, and would accept its limitations as considered comment on either the Labour government's educational policy or Ellen Wilkinson's career as a whole. Billy Hughes2 loyally reminds us of Ellen Wilkinson's strong commitment to socialism in word and deed during the 1930s, but this approach also has its limitations for it is the 1945-1951 period which concerns us, and the policy of a Party which declared itself specifically socialist. It is in this broader frame that we have to assess the comprehensive education issue and, in particular, to ask whether in implementing the 1944 Education Act along selective rather than comprehensive lines, the 1945 Labour government was failing to act as a socialist party might be expected to have acted at this time in history. If there was a failure, it might be hard to recognize in retrospect because this same Labour government was relatively so successful in implementing specifically socialist policy in other government departments, and also because the education ministry was so successful in implementing its policy. Billy Hughes gives clear evidence of ministry success, including Lord Alexander's opinion that more teachers were trained and schools built during Ellen Wilkinson's years at the ministry than at any other time in British history. Billy Hughes also says that Ellen Wilkinson fought opposition to get the school leaving age raised. In more recent times another woman education minister, Margaret Thatcher, also raised the leaving age amid opposition and presided over a department which was busy expanding school building. The policy Billy Hughes was describing was in the main an agreed one of expansion and reconstruction after a world war. In all probability it would have been carried out in much the same way, even if at not quite the same pace, by Liberals or Conservatives, either of whom almost certainly would also have agreed to implement the 1944 Act much as Labour did: by accepting the ministry's own strategy as set out in its 1943 Norwood Report.3 The Norwood Report said that children can be divided with certainty into three separate mental -types at eleven, and that separate development in segregated schools was therefore right for Britain's new post-war secondary system. Norwood's 'tripartitism' is discredited today, and its unscientific and expedient pronouncements, fitting children to schools rather than the reverse, were rejected by historians4 long before Cytil Burt, its moving influence, had his own research on hereditary influence discredited.5 That Norwood's philosophy was alien to Labour Party principle, and its policy contrary to Labour's policy, was pointed out from 1942 onwards by many socialists and teachers in the Labour Party, particularly when the ministry published A Nation's Schools in 1945, a month before Ellen Wilkinson was made minister of education. This laid down a tripartite system as the way for local authorities to develop the new secondary schools, and discouraged comprehensive education. Her reputation raised hopes that she would agree to repudiate this publication, but, according to the combined