Social class, gender and secondary education in Scotland in the 1950s

Abstract

Newly accessible data from the Scottish Mental Survey 1947 are used to investigate the legacy in the 1950s of reforms to Scottish secondary schooling in the first four decades of the 20th century. These reforms had sought to extend opportunity for post‐primary education beyond the children of the professional middle class who had formed the largest part of the clientele of older secondary schools. The reforms also provided unprecedented opportunities to girls. The findings of the analysis are that the widening of opportunity was maintained in the stable, selective system of the 1950s. A broadly homogeneous system of academic secondary education had been created for about 45% of the age group, by means of selection at age 12. Social class continued to influence pupils’ progress in this secondary sector, but not to any different extent in the older or the newer schools. Progress in secondary school was not related to gender except in science.

Acknowledgements

Alison Pattie is supported by a grant to Ian J. Deary from Help the Aged/Age Concern (The Disconnected Mind). Deary is Director of the University of Edinburgh Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, part of the cross council Lifelong Health and Wellbeing Initiative. Funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, and Medical Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank the SCRE Centre and the University of Glasgow Special Collections for access to data from the 6‐day sample of the Scottish Mental Survey 1947, and referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Renamed ‘Scottish’ in 1918.

2. Form L of the Terman‐Merrill revision of the Stanford Binet test.

3. Since this history is drawn from previous work that looked at three selected years (1911, 1924 and 1935) (Paterson, 2004), it strictly means only that these were schools that had at least one pupil presenting for a Leaving Certificate examination in at least one of these years. It is possible that a very few other junior‐secondary schools may have presented an occasional pupil in other years, and therefore would be wrongly classified here into the non‐academic junior‐secondary category. However, for reasons explained by Paterson (2004), 1924 was the peak year of presentations by schools that later became junior secondaries, and so any classification errors from this source are likely to be negligible.

4. That is, by applying the ‘old senior secondary’ row percentages in Table 1 to the pupil totals for the other two senior‐secondary sectors, and then, for each class in each of these sectors, comparing the resulting numbers to the actual numbers in the sample.

5. Deviance = 5.2, df = 4, p = 0.27.

6. Deviance of 10.8 on 12 degrees of freedom; p = 0.55.

7. Respectively: deviance = 2.1, df = 2, p = 0.35; deviance = 7.9, df = 6, p = 0.25.

8. For languages, respectively: deviance = 1.1, df = 2, p = 0.58; deviance = 3.1, df = 6, p = 0.80; for science, respectively: deviance = 0.39, df = 2, p = 0.82; deviance = 3.8, df = 6, p = 0.70.

9. Respectively, F‐value = 2.0, df = 2, 483, p = 0.13 and F‐value = 0.25, df = 6, 479, p = 0.96.

10. Gender main effect (female minus male): 0.24 (s.e. 0.17; p = 0.17).

11. Gender main effects: for any course, −0.081 (s.e. 0.25, p = 0.75); for languages, 0.19 (s.e. 0.27, p = 0.47).

12. Gender main effect: −0.66 (s.e. 0.31, p = 0.03).

13. For being on a five‐year course, deviance for interactive effect of gender and sector was 1.8 (4 df, p = 0.77); for taking any certificate course, it was 0.49 (2 df, p = 0.78); for taking a language course, it was 0.35 (2 df, p = 0.84); and for taking a science course, it was 2.7 (2 df, p = 0.25).

14. Main effect: 0.22 (s.e. 0.26, p = 0.38); interactive effect: F‐value 0.68 (2, 487 df; p = 0.51).