Abstract
The creation of YTS is often presented as the realisation of proposals first outlined in the Education Act 1918, which suggested that all young workers should be given a right of access to day release education. Despite the enormous differences between then and now, it is still useful to examine the period when both the call for day release education and the demand for a school leaving age of sixteen were first formulated. In contrast with the contemporary YTS, both these demands were concerned with protecting young workers from exploitation, and with encouraging their broader intellectual and social development.
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Notes
There is no simple ‘history’ of the period spanned by this chapter, and there are intense arguments about the impact of mass unemployment. Stevenson and Cook, for example, have argued with great conviction and much evidence against a left-inclined version of events: It would, of course, be fatuous to suggest that the 1930s were not for many thousands of people a time of great hardship and personal suffering. Alongside the pictures of dole queues and hunger marches must also be placed those of another Britain, of new industries, prosperous suburbs and a rising standard of living (1977, p. 4).
For an extended discussion of the nature of the relationship that developed between the universities and British industry see Sanderson (1972). For a more general appraisal of the education and industry debate in the interwar period see Reeder (1979).
Stephen Humphries emphasises that it wasn’t just boys who resisted the formal demands of schooling: Interviews clearly indicate that girls were as likely to resist authoritarian control as boys. This may seem surprising in view of the orthodoxy which portrays working class girls as much more passive, subservient and deferential …[but] … there is evidence to suggest that inside school girls were as disobedient as, or even more disobedient than, boys. This defiance was occasionally reflected in higher expulsion rates … but because girls often employed more subtle and devious techniques of resistance than boys, much of their misbehaviour has remained hidden and unrecorded in school log and punishment books (1981, p. 76).
The most important legislation was the Shops Act 1934, the Factories Act 1937, and the subsequent Young Persons (Employment) Act 1938.
From the economic dislocations generated by demobilisation and the industrial struggles that marked the immediate postwar period, registered unemployment reached over 2.5 million in 1921, and while it fell relatively rapidly it never went below a million in the 1920s and was to jump again to 2.7 million in 1932. It did not fall below 2 million until 1936 and in 1939 still totalled over 1.5 million. Because of the restricted scope of unemployment insurance, the totals unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s were higher than the official figures would suggest. Groups excluded were as diverse as the self-employed, domestic servants, agricultural workers and married women. The totals are the ‘official’ ones, extracted from a table in Stevenson and Cook, 1977, p. 286.
The Insurance Act 1934 established a network of labour camps which were designed to secure the physical and moral regeneration of the ablebodied male unemployed. The men who were recruited to the labour camps were removed many miles from their homes and families; they lived under semi-military discipline; ‘out of bounds’ areas were laid down and curfews imposed; they would have to perform a full week’s work on road making (for example, sections of the North Circular Road in London), land drainage, irrigation systems, new sewerage schemes, afforestation, improvement of canals and bridges, brickmaking, building Whipsnade Zoo, and so on. For this labour they received no wages, but would get their meals in the camp plus 4 shillings a week pocket money. Their dependents, if any, had to exist on the scale of allowances provided by the unemployment board. At their high point there were thirty-six residential camps with between 150 and 200 inmates in each. Up to 1939 just under 190,000 unemployed men had been sent to the camps for three-month stretches. It speaks volumes about the conditions in the camps that over 37,000 men walked out of them knowing that they would be disqualified from benefit. The camps were closed at the outbreak of war when most inmates ‘volunteered’ for the forces (Colledge and Field, 1983).
During the 1930s there were a number of political groups propagating a ‘middle’ path out of economic crisis and mass unemployment, defining a new role for the state in the economy. The Next Five Years Group was formed in 1934, and was supported by members of all political parties (notably Harold Macmillan) and by numerous writers, scientists and educationalists such as Hadow and Percy Nunn. Their plans for reconstruction gave an important place to the education system which was to create the democratic citizens of a new society: The principle of government by consent and free discussion must be made more fully operative through the extension of education — that cardinal function of a democratic state; through the improvement of the system of representation, and through the further breaking down of barriers of class and privilege (quoted in Education Group, 1981, p. 52).
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© 1987 Dan Finn
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Finn, D. (1987). ‘Secondary Education for All’: Raising the School Leaving Age and Juvenile Unemployment Between the Wars. In: Training Without Jobs: New Deals and Broken Promises. Youth Questions. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18631-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18631-0_2
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