William Richardson

In Search of the Further Education of Young People in Post-War England.

This article surveys three strands of development in the further education of young people in England since the Second World War: its institutional evolution, some aspects of the experience of its students and staff, and the political and economic imperatives that have given it shape and direction. The account draws upon a wide range of primary secondary sources, from the literatures of professional and social research, economics, political science and political history. Toward the end of the paper, a broader comparative perspective is adopted in order to pin down the distinctiveness of the English experience, before overall conclusions are drawn. These discuss the extent to which further education in England remains a local enterprise and the areas of continuity that, as whole, account both for its identity and its place in English culture and society.

Educational Studies in the United Kingdom, 1940–2002

This essay provides an assessment of the development of educational studies as a field of enquiry in the United Kingdom since 1940. The narrative embraces the UK as a whole but also offers an account of distinctive aspects of the evolution of the field in each constituent country over three broad periods: 1940-1959; 1960-1982; and 1983 to the present.

Public Policy Failure and Fiasco in Education: Perspectives on the British Examinations Crises of 2000-2002 and Other Episodes since 1975.

In recent years there has been a re‐appraisal within political science of the characteristics of various kinds of public policy failure. At the same time, the political significance of education has grown in most liberal democracies. The present paper examines public policy in British education since the mid‐1970s and asks: What goes wrong in policy‐making and when does manageable failure slide into full‐scale crisis? Various episodes of policy are explored and set against the theoretical framework developed by Mark Bovens and Paul t’Hart in an attempt to distinguish those policies in recent British education that have been controversial, those that have been manageable failures and those that turned into disabling fiascos.

Empires overseas and empires at home : postcolonial and transnational perspectives on social change in the history of education

Taylor and Francis CPDH_A_438639.sgm 10.1080/003092 0903384619 P edagogica Historica 0 30-9230 (pri t)/1477-674X (online) Original Article 2 09 & Francis 45 6 00De ember 2009 rofess r Joyc G od an Jo c .Goodm @winchester.ac.uk This collection of work grew out of an international symposium sponsored by the History of Education Society UK and held in Hamburg in 2007. The symposium aimed to contribute to understandings of different approaches to researching the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change in respect of “empires overseas” and “empires at home”. This twin focus on “empires overseas” and “empires at home” also reflects more recent developments in historiography away from the uni-directional flows from “centre” to “periphery” that has framed much colonial and imperial history and studies of education and empire.1 In particular, research published under the auspices of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) has taken forward international study of the history of education and empire. The current collection brings together many of these emerging developments in the international field. It represents historiographical debates within the history of education that engage with broader historical research and recent insights in the social sciences. It is also very timely, as it seeks to contribute to a new phase of global scholarship that, while remaining conscious of the difficult challenges of transnationalism and the postcolonial era2 and the legacy of 9/11, attempts to draw

Work-based Learning for Young People: National Policy, 1994-1997.

Abstract This article reviews national policy in work-based learning for young people during the mid-1990s in the United Kingdom. It is divided into three main sections. A brief contextual section covers the period of implementation of a national framework of post-compulsory qualifications prior to 1994 and the mounting pressures to which it was subjected. The second section examines a phase during which the framework and the place of NVQs within it was reviewed by official enquires led by Sir Ron Dearing and Gordon Beaumont (1995–1996). The third section deals with policy in the context of the long run-up to the General Election of May 1997.

Perspectives on vocational education and training in post‐war England

Over the last decade in Britain, there has been something of a renaissance in historical scholarship on education. This is represented in a broadening of theoretical, methodological and substantive concerns, and some of the most prominent themes in recent writing on the history of education have been brought together through a seminar series funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council during 2004–2006 (see McCulloch et al., 2005 and 2007). The aim of the present collection is twofold. First, it expands themes raised in the seminar series through discussion of the sphere of English post-war vocational education and training. Second, it gathers together contributions that would otherwise be scattered and less readily accessible to methodological comparison. As such, the articles collected here comprise a range of perspectives on the subject at hand and draw attention to the many opportunities that exist for further research. Indeed, it may be claimed that, while the historical study of education is flourishing and full of vitality, the representation of vocational education and training within the genre remains weak. Neither is this a matter merely of academic interest. For example, policy-making in the field is notoriously ahistorical, programmes under New Labour since 1997 having been predicated on the vague but oft-repeated assertion that, politically and culturally, vocational education and training is one of England’s main ‘historic weaknesses’. Indeed, the origins of this special issue lie in the annoyance of its editor at reading a policy statement of 2002 that went so far as to claim that no effort was made after 1945 ‘to develop better vocational and technical education to meet the needs of a rapidly changing post-war society’ (DfES, 2002, p. 7). If nothing else, the articles presented here show that a good deal happened. In civil society it is important to establish whether ministers and civil servants are merely ignorant of the past or choose deliberately to misinterpret it. However, before such judgment is passed, the

British Historiography of Education in International Context at the Turn of the Century, 1996–2006

This essay discusses themes in the historical literature on education produced in Britain over the last decade and sets these in a broader temporal, intellectual and geographical context. It is argued that the enormous expansion of the British field over the 15 years from the mid‐1960s was checked in the 1980s and that, in turn, this triggered early in the 1990s the beginnings of a major reappraisal of aims and methods that gathered pace in the late 1990s and has led to a further surge in work since 2001. A similar pattern was experienced elsewhere and, as intellectual trends became increasingly international in character by the turn of the century, so, too, did debate among historians of education over future directions for their field, its relative strength in different countries and the centrality that it should accord to schooling. In Britain, as elsewhere, the core concern of the field over the last half century has been that of education and social change, a preoccupation retained in the renewed expansion of recent years as the concepts, disciplinary frameworks, sources and methodologies deployed have widened.

Editors’ Introduction: Social Change in the History of Education

‘Fortunately in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square’. Lady Bracknell’s famous assertion, in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), has long been challenged for its view of the ineffectiveness of education. Historians of education have been to the fore in exploring the relationships that have developed over time between education and the wider society. For over four decades, the most frequently stated objective of research in the history of education in Britain and around the world has been to examine these relationships, and there is now a very large and diverse literature on this topic.1 This literature requires systematic and critical investigation for how much it explains about the extent to which education has contributed historically to social change, how it, in turn, has been moulded by society, and the needs and opportunities that remain for further research in this area. Such an overall review and analysis of the history of education and of its key research priorities has not been attempted before in the British context. It has now been possible to make a start through a series of six seminars funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Social change in the history of education’.2 In the United States, there have been a number of initiatives put in place to review the field and to investigate areas ripe for future development. The most significant of these developed in the 1950s under the auspices of the Ford Foundation.3 A key outcome of that initiative was the highly influential study produced by Bernard Bailyn in 1960, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for

Humanism and Protestantism in early modern english Education

For the past two decades Professor Ian Green has been undertaking a major project on the ways in which Protestant ideas and images were communicated in early modern England. So far, this has resulted in the publication of two of a projected trilogy of volumes, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechising in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996) and Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). Both books draw methodologically on the substantial work undertaken in the last generation on the history of the book in England in the two and a half centuries after the arrival of printing, coupled with the reception of print literature. This scholarship has been reviewed and summarised up to 2002 in Volume IV of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain edited by John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie. While the marginalia of individual readers can sometimes be recovered alongside a list of the contents of their personal library, such shafts of light are rare with the result that the sensibilities of generations of individual readers toward particular books remain mostly obscured. However, much can be learned from the painstaking reconstruction of the volumes that issued from the presses: the sequences of titles within the same genre and the revision and reissuing of specific titles, often over many decades. In this way, reader demand and the editorial revisions made by the authors of textbooks, primers and devotional titles can be illuminated and made suggestive. Happily for historians of education, in the spring of 2006, Professor Green interrupted work on the final volume of his trilogy (set to tackle image and ritual) to serve as Waynflete’s Lecturer at the University of Oxford on the theme of humanism and Protestantism in early modern England. This series included specific lectures on ‘The dominance of classicism and moralism in English education, c.1530–1760’ and ‘Reconciling virtue and grace in English school and parish instruction, c.1560–1760’. The result is the monograph under review, which forms part of the Ashgate series ‘St Andrews Studies in Reformation History’. This is a superb production that sits comfortably with the overall project, drawing as it does on Ian Green’s unrivalled knowledge of the publishing history of instructional books in the period. And, in the spirit of recent scholarship in the field, this monograph tackles questions that only a generation ago were considered more or less unanswerable. Equally valuable, the tentative answers to some of these questions are set in what may now be considered the most convenient and up-to-date account of recent scholarship on aspects of schooling in England between c.1530 and 1700. To achieve this, the book opens with an important discussion of ‘Historiography and sources’, close attention to scholarly method being a feature of the entire Green project. This discussion begins with a review of recent interpretation of the three History of Education Vol. 41, No. 3, May 2012, 423–435