Abstract
In 1963, Edward Boyle appointed Lady Bridget Plowden to look into the state and future of primary education, reputedly having being impressed while he sat next to her at a dinner party.1 There were far deeper reasons behind the appointment, which mirrored the commissioning of the Schools Survey: the growing clamour around the idea of education as both an efficient use of public money and as one effective way of creating a more equal society, and the nagging fear that British children were being ill-served by their schools. The final Plowden Report of October 1966 was one of the most far-reaching reports ever submitted to the Ministry of Education, and one that in considering schools in poorer urban areas issued a famous rallying call to reform:
We have … seen schools caught in … vicious circles and read accounts of many more … We noted the grim approaches; incessant traffic noise in narrow streets; parked vehicles hemming in the pavement; rubbish dumps on waste land nearby; the absence of green playing spaces …; tiny play grounds; gaunt looking buildings; often poor decorative conditions inside; narrow passages; dark rooms; unheated and cramped cloakrooms; unroofed outside lavatories; tiny staff rooms; inadequate storage space …; inadequate space for movement and for PE; meals in classrooms; art on desks; music only to the discomfort of others in an echoing building … insufficient display space; attractive books kept unseen in cupboards for lack of space to lay them out … sometimes all around, the ingrained grime of generations.2
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
CACE, Children and their Primary Schools, London, HMSO, 1967, pp. 50–1.
CACE, Half Our Future, London, HMSO, 1963, pp. 17–26.
B. Jackson and R. Rae, Priority: How We Can Help Young Children in Educational Priority Areas: A Report for the Association of Multi-Racial Playgroups, Cambridge, Association of Multi-Racial Playgroups, 1969, p. 3.
P. Brown, A.H. Halsey, H. Lauder and A.M. Wells, ‘The Transformation of Education and Society’, in P. Brown, A.H. Halsey, H. Lauder and A.M. Wells (eds), Education: Culture, Economy and Society, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 27–31.
M. Loney, Community against Government: The British Community Development Project 1968–78, London, Heinemann, 1983, pp. 18–25. I am grateful to John Welshman for this reference.
C. Bagley, ‘Immigrant Children: A Review of Problems and Policy in Education’, Journal of Social Policy 2, 1973, p. 303.
G. Smith, ‘Whatever Happened to Educational Priority Areas?’, Oxford Review of Education 13, 1987, p. 26; ‘More Nursery School Places’, The Guardian, 12 January 1972.
M. Mayo, ‘The History and Early Development of CDP’, in R. Lees and G. Smith (eds), Action-Research in Community Development, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 7–10.
I. Dale, Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997, London, Politico’s, 2000, pp. 115, 143.
P. Widlake, ‘Educational Priority Areas: Action Research’, in M. Chazan (ed.), Compensatory Education, London, Butterworth, 1973, pp. 88–9.
C. Adelman, ‘Kurt Lewin and the Origins of Action Research’, Educational Action Research 1, 1993, pp. 8–9, 16;
N. Wein, ‘The Education of Disadvantaged Children: An International Comparison’, Educational Research 13, 1970, p. 13.
H. Silver and P. Silver, An Educational War on Poverty: American and British Policy-Making, 1960–1980, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 229–30. See CACE, Primary Schools, pp. 45–6, 119–20, 124.
A. Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp. 189–90.
See M. Young and P. McGeeney, Learning Begins at Home, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, pp. 119–30.
H. Perraton, ‘Michael Young and Education’, Contemporary British History 19, 2005, p. 304.
G. Smith and T. Smith, ‘A.H. Halsey: Oxford as a Base for Social Research and Educational Reform’, Oxford Review of Education 32, 2006, p. 114.
P. Cunningham, ‘Early Years Teachers and the Influence of Piaget: Evidence from Oral History’, Early Years 26, 2006, esp. pp. 8, 10. I owe this reference to Isobel Urquhart.
J. McVicker Hunt, Intelligence and Experience, New York, Ronald Press, 1961, pp. 362–3; see Silver and Silver, War on Poverty, pp. 34–5.
A.R. Jensen, Educability and Group Differences, London, Methuen, 1973, p. 365.
B.S. Bloom, A. Davis and R. Hess, Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation: An Introduction, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, pp. 2–4, 17–18;
see Bloom’s work on ‘environment and education’ in B.S. Bloom, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics, New York, Wiley, 1964, e.g. pp. 188–93.
Schools Council, Compensatory Education: A Report, London, Schools Council, 1969, pp. 7–10.
J. Welshman, ‘From Head Start to Sure Start: Reflections on Policy Transfer’, Children and Society 24, 2010, p. 90.
See the suggestive comments in M. Bulmer, ‘Sociology in Britain in the Twentieth Century: Differentiation and Establishment’, in A.H. Halsey and W.G. Runciman (eds), British Sociology seen from Without and Within, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 40–6.
G. Smith and T. Smith, ‘From Social Research to Educational Policy: 10/65 to the Education Reform Act 1988’, in C. Crouch and A. Heath (eds), Social Research and Social Reform: Essays in Honour of A.H. Halsey, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 249–52.
J.E. Floud, A.H. Halsey and F.M. Martin (eds), Social Class and Educational Opportunity, London, Heinemann, 1956, esp. pp. 71–81, 87–95, 118–27.
P. Willmott, Adolescent Boys of East London, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 81;
see M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957, pp. 144–52.
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, London, Chatto and Windus, 1957, esp. pp. 238–49. See T. Smith, ‘From Educational Priority Areas to Area-Based Interventions: Community, Neighbourhood and Preschool’, Oxford University Department of Social Policy and Social Work Discussion Paper 2007/07, 2007, p. 6.
A.H. Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996, p. 124.
D. Donnison, ‘Policies for Priority Areas’, Journal of Social Policy 3, 1974, pp. 131–2.
J. Payne, Educational Priority, vol. 2: EPA Surveys and Statistics, London, HMSO, 1974, figs A (1)–A (2), pp. 8–9, A (5)–A (6), pp. 12–13, fig. A (10), p. 20.
G. Smith (ed.), Educational Priority, vol. 4: The West Riding Project, London, HMSO, 1975, pp. 8–11.
A.H. Halsey (ed.), Educational Priority: EPA Problems and Policies, vol. 1, London, HMSO, 1972, pp. 62–5.
G. Smith and T. Smith, ‘Whatever Happened to EPAs? Part 2: Educational Priority Areas — 40 Years On’, Forum 49, 2007, tables I–III, pp. 150–1. See the earlier discussion of emergent new data sets, all unavailable in the late 1960s,
in G. Smith, ‘Urban Education: Current Position and Future Possibilities’, in M. Barber and R. Dann (eds), Raising Educational Standards in the Inner Cities, London, Cassell, 1996, pp. 34–40.
T. Lovett, The Role of School Managers in Educational Priority Areas, Liverpool EPA, 1970, p. 11.
E. Midwinter, Home and School Relations in Educational Priority Areas, Liverpool EPA, 1970, p. 8.
T. Lovett, An Experiment in Adult Education in the EPA, Liverpool EPA, 1971, esp. pp. 28, 33, 41–4.
Ibid., pp. 4–6. On the exhibition itself see K. Pulham, ‘The Great Exhibition 1970’: An Account of a School/Community Experiment, Liverpool EPA, 1971, pp. 3–8.
See esp. H. Acland, ‘Research as Stage Management: The Case of the Plowden Committee’, in M. Bulmer (ed.), Social Research and Royal Commissions, London, Allen and Unwin, 1980, esp. pp. 48–9; H. Acland, ‘Does Parent Involvement Matter?’, New Society, 16 September 1971.
P. Marris and M. Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, pp. 225, 228.
D.P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, New York, Free Press, 1969, pp. 132–8, 153–6, 203.
Community Development Project Inter-Project Editorial Team, Gilding the Ghetto: The State and the Poverty Experiments, London, CDP, 1977, p. 63.
E. Midwinter, Educational Priority Areas: The Philosophic Question, Liverpool EPA, 1970, p. 4.
G. Whitty, ‘Revisiting School Knowledge: Some Sociological Perspectives on New School Curricula’, European Journal of Education 45, 2010, pp. 28–9.
R.N. Rapoport, ‘Three Dilemmas in Action Research’, Human Relations 23, 1970, pp. 505–8.
A. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War Britain (2nd edn), London, Athlone Press, 1997, pp. 56–7.
J. Welshman, From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion: Policy, Poverty, and Parenting, Bristol, Policy Press, 2007, pp. 34–9.
K.G. Banting, Poverty, Politics and Policy: Britain in the 1960s, London, Macmillan, 1979, p. 134.
O. Banks, ‘The Sociology of Education, 1952–1982’, British Journal of Educational Studies 30, 1982, p. 23.
C. Chitty, Education Policy in Britain, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 40–7.
K. Watson, ‘Education and Opportunity’, in F. Carnevali and J.-M. Strange (eds), Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Cultural and Social Change, Harlow, Pearson, 2007, fig. 22.3, p. 359.
S.V. Ward, Planning and Urban Change (2nd edn), London, Sage, 2004, pp. 135–7.
I. Plewis, ‘Inequalities in Education: Targets and Education Action Zones’, Radical Statistics 68, 1998, pp. 71–2.
T. Sefton, A Fair Share of Welfare: Public Spending on Children in England, CASE Report 25, London, CASE, 2004, figs 6–7, p. 18, and table 6, pp. 56–7.
Social Exclusion Unit, The Impact of Government Policy on Social Exclusion Among Children Aged 0–13 and their Families, London, HMSO, 2004, p. 56.
Cm 4045, Bringing Britain Together: A National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, London, HMSO, 1998, pp. 56, 70.
S. Power and S. Gewirtz, ‘Reading Education Action Zones’, Journal of Education Policy 16, 2001, pp. 45–6.
G. Evans, Educational Failure and Working Class White Children, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 6–14.
C. Bryson, A. Kazimirski and H. Southwood, Childcare and Early Years Provision: A Study of Parents’ Use, Views and Experiences, Harlow, Pearson, 2006, table 7.23, p. 212, tables 7.25–7.27, pp. 216–18.
J. Hills, ‘After the Turning Point’, in J. Hills (ed.), New Inequalities: The Changing Distribution of Income and Wealth in the United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1996, fig. 1.1, p. 3; A. Gosling, S. Machin and C. Meghir, ‘What Has Happened to the Wages of Men since 1966?’, in Hills (ed.), Changing Distribution, fig. 6.4, p. 146.
Wilkinson and Pickett, Spirit Level, fig. 8.4, p. 109; R. Wilkinson and K. Pickett, ‘The Problems of Relative Deprivation: Why Some Societies Do Better than Others’, Social Science and Medicine 65, 2007, fig. 2, p. 1970;
J.D. Willms, ‘Literacy Proficiency of Youth: Evidence of Converging Socioeconomic Gradients’, International Journal of Educational Research 39, 2003, fig. 1, p. 249.
J.D. Willms, ‘Quality and Inequality in Children’s Literacy: The Effects of Families, Schools and Communities’, in D.P. Keating and C. Hertzman (eds), Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations, New York, Guilford Press, 1999, pp, 87–8.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Glen O’Hara
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Hara, G. (2012). Slum Schools, Civil Servants and Sociology: Educational Priority Areas, 1967–72. In: Governing Post-War Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361270_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230361270_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31155-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-36127-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)