‘for the common good of all’: education and the hertfordshire garden cities, 1904-1939

Abstract

This article analyses two dramatically different perceptions of education, but each characterised by the great importance it attached to vocational education. The first was held by Hertfordshire Local Education Authority (LEA) and the second by two internationally famous utopian communities – Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities – that established themselves within it. While the reactionary LEA saw an essentially practical vocational education as all that mattered in elementary education, with secondary grammar schools the preserve of the elementary pupils’ social superiors, the garden cities fervently upheld that practical, vocational and secondary education should be offered, without discrimination, and with equal status and funding, to all. The article contends that despite all the startling differences in social, political, economic and educational outlook, the garden cities and the LEA did not spurn each other. Instead, a positive relationship evolved which transcended popular suspicions and served each party well in difficult times. It saw, for example, the LEA encouraging developments completely out of step with the Conservative policies it generally wholeheartedly endorsed, and it signalled that there were other ways of making educational progress beside the government's interpretation of the 1926 ‘Hadow’ Report and the total independence sought by, or forced upon, most supporters of ‘progressive’ schooling. The article analyses this unusual and hitherto ignored relationship, and in so doing it highlights the irony that St Christopher, the one Hertfordshire garden city school to attract the admiration of educational historians, turned its back on all the efforts to bring high quality schooling to the ordinary children in these burgeoning towns