Roy Lowe explains how he has ‘reluctantly’ concluded from his long, distinguished career of research and writing on education in Britain that ‘the one dominant outcome of our system of schooling’, as it has developed over time, is the ‘multiple inequalities that are now a major characteristic of our society’: inequalities of gender, class, ethnicity and religion, between north and south, rural and urban areas. It has ‘shore[d] up existing privilege’, not promoting social mobility but ‘a massive vehicle for the suppression of social mobility’.
He surveys this process from its origins in the mid eighteenth century, clearly relating it to social, cultural, economic and political change in England. Since Scotland, especially, and Wales differ in aspects of their educational and social systems he does not take them on. The present shape of schooling began to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the growth of industry, finance and the professions created an enlarged middle class determined to secure their sons’ futures, while the landed aristocracy strove to maintain their power, the Church of England to resist the growing non-conformist threat and powerful men to create an orderly, hard-working, subservient working-class. Schools were the path to all these objectives. ‘Public’ schools for the richest and most powerful, fee-paying grammar schools for the middle classes. Sunday schools to train workers in literacy and religious observance, evolving into day schools, including girls as elite schools did not. They shared the general assumption that girls did not need schooling for their sole destination-marriage. Though in the late eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft began a feminist riposte which, like gender inequality, has never died.
Eighteenth century England had only two ‘moribund’ universities, Oxford and Cambridge, effectively ‘finishing schools for the sons of the nobility’, teaching very little. Scotland had four, functioning, universities. Nineteenth-century Oxbridge seriously educated elite men for elite positions. Universities emerged in major towns due to middle-class demand, and funding. They gradually accepted girls, mainly into arts subjects, first London in 1878, then very gradually Oxford and Cambridge. Fee-paying education for middle-class girls expanded as parents recognized that not all could marry because females were a majority of the population, and employment opportunities opened, but only at lower levels as the professions expanded beyond the supply of suitable men.
Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the state gradually, reluctantly, funded extended working-class education to improve work skills and maintain social and political order as workers demanded political rights. Fee-paying schools and ancient universities were helped to retain their power through reinforcement of their extraordinary exemption from taxation, as charities. Lowe’s most original chapter is a detailed study of what he rightly calls this ‘neglected topic’. Many schools had been established as charities, with a long-abandoned mission to help the poor. A court case in 1805 usefully established that ‘the advancement of learning’ was a charitable activity. Then, the Charity Commission, conferring tax exemption, was established in 1853 by a Tory government primarily to preserve the status of elite schools. This has never since been seriously challenged. Hence, Eton, with an annual turnover of about £30 m and otherwise liable for c £4 m pa in tax, pays only £821,000. Since 2010 Academies have been allowed to register as charities.
As the state system grew it reinforced social inequalities within the growing lower-middle and working-classes. Schools in more prosperous districts were superior, then from the 1920s the emerging specialism of psychology identified inequalities which were ascribed to innate, inherited intelligence and skills, evident at early ages, which schools should support. This influenced the 1944 Education Act and its extension by the post-1945 Labour government which established the tripartite system of secondary education and 11+ selection. Labour believed this could foster equal opportunities regardless of background, though there were more grammar schools in prosperous districts and more for boys than girls.
Labour was replaced by the Conservatives, 1951–64. Lowe is rather outdated in describing the two parties as ‘broadly in agreement on economic and social policy’. The Conservatives did not dismantle the welfare state but they did little to improve it. They built schools, mainly in the New Towns, council estates and suburbs which housed few low-paid families. They ignored findings from the new field of educational sociology that grammar schools disproportionately educated middle class males. The system encouraged streaming in primary schools in preparation for the 11+ and better-off parents to have their children tutored.
Hence, when Labour returned to power in 1964 they introduced comprehensives. Most local authorities adopted them, particularly while Margaret Thatcher was Education Minister, 1971–4, to her great annoyance. This nurtured her determination to cut the powers and independence of local government and teachers. But many schools were streamed, dividing pupils by perceived ‘ability’, effectively by class, and all too often teachers made clear their low expectations of poor, ethnic minority and female students – Lowe gives the example of his daughter, who became GP nonetheless- as some still do. Gradually girls outperformed boys as their opportunities slowly expanded.
Lowe correctly judges that 1945–79 saw the greatest levelling of British society and of educational opportunities of the century. There was a certain degree of upward social mobility, mainly for men, though it owed more to the expansion of the economy than the schools. At last equal opportunities seemed possible. But it didn’t happen. Any possibility vanished under Thatcher in the 1980s, when cuts to local authority funding and powers, state subsidies to selective schools, closer government control of state schools, growing income inequality, reinforced old inequalities. Little changed under Major, or New Labour. Since 2010 inequalities in income and education have increased, worsened by the covid pandemic. Lowe concludes, depressingly but convincingly, ‘Whether we are talking about gender, social class, ethnic groups, regions, or access to positions of power and influence, education has done more to sustain existing inequalities than it has to erode them … education is just one of the weapons with which those in power sustain their position’.