EDUCATION IN A 
CLASS SOCIETY 

The Queen and her Horses Reign 

JOHN VAllEY 



TWO SHILLINGS 



JOHN VAIZEY is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, 
and an economist. He was previously director of the 
Research Unit In the Economics and Administration of 
Education at the London University Institute of Education. 

FABIAN TRACT 342 

This pamphlet is based on a lecture given before a Fabian 
audience in London in November, 1962. 

THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 
11 Dartmouth Street, S.W.l 

Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of 
the FABIAN SOCIETY, represents not the collective 
view of the Society but only the view of tl~e 
individual who prepared it. The responsibility ot 
the Snciety is limited to approving the publications 
which it issues as worthy of consideration within 
the Labour Movement . 

January, 1962 



EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 


The Queen and Her Horses Reign 

I. A Stagnant, Divided Society 
JF you ride down Whitehall, unless I dream, I believe that as you look 

up from your bus you will see on the wall of the Foreign Office a series 
of sculpted bas reliefs which show (in series) Europe, Asia, America, Africa. 
Australasia and Education. This strange succession symbolises, I think, the 
place of education in contemporary discussion; it is the odd man out. It 
comes, of course, a long way after foreign policy and defence as a topic 
of world importance: next to the issues of peace and war, the eleven-plus 
does not loom large. Yet in the long run our position in the world depends 
directly upon what the education system does; its place on the Foreign 
Offi·ce wall, though odd, is not so odd. But education is the odd man out 
domestically as well as in foreign affairs. There is a yearning that all good 
men and true might come to some common agreement about the future 
of education. The 1944 Act (we are told) is the best creation of the coalition 
Government; the essence of modern Conservatism and solid Labour thinking. 

It is my purpose to challenge this point of view and to suggest 
to you why I think education should take a major part in the current 
controversies about the future of this country, and why it will play an 
increasingly crucial role in the development of our society and our economy. 

When we talk about schools in this country we talk autobiographically, 
and we talk about class. I speak as one who is a don at Oxford and has been a 
don at Cambridge; I speak, in other words, as a working-class boy who has 
"made good" (if that might be the right phrase) largely through the education 
system. I sympathise, nevertheless, with those who feel to some degree 
excluded from our present day society; fairly often I agree with them. 

Why should they feel thus? I think the answer is quite clear. This 
society is extremely stratified; power quite obviously lies with the possessors 
of vast wealth; with the hereditary and social advantages which are theirs, 
they rule us; and the extent to which other people have been able to break 
into this charmed circle is extremely limited. I will not bore you 
with statistical tables of quotations from percentages, but J a'TI satisfied, 
having looked at the evidence, that all things considered, there are singularly 
few sources of power in this country which to any great degree are 
yet available to those outside the category of those born to inherited 
wealth or established position. Ten Etonians are in the Cabinet. This is 
part joke (one thinks of Lord Dilhorne-the Widmerpool model), part 
tragedy (one thinks of Macmillan), but it is intolerable. 

It is true, of course, that there are places in Parliament, in the Civil 
Service, and even in business, which are open to those born outside these 
ranks. Between a third and a half of the places at the older universities are 
already open to us. But I insist that the evidence is clear that these are 


2 EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

exceptions. I have been struck in recent months by the degree to which 
inherited wealth still dominates the country. I have been astonished to go 
and see the houses in .London which are advertised at £10,000 and £12,000 
and to find them being bought by ex-debutantes and their chinless wonders 
of husbands (just down from Oxford-earning under £1,000 a year in stockbrokers' 
offices) and I have discovered that most of these houses are being 
bought outright through the family trusts (and therefore, by the taxpayer) 
which furnish comfort-tax exempt comfort-and provide for the privileged 
in our society. 

But if this were all it would not be, I think, an overwhelming criticism 
of our society. It might be that <:hange is occurring, that the situation is 
disappearing. Claus Maser's study of town life showed that in 1951 a fifth of 
the people in Gateshead were overcrowded, and only one in fifty in Coulsdon; 
but (you could say) this is the inheritance of the past; we are eroding 
these differences. Are you sure? The rate of economic growth in this society 
is so low that the prospects of the erosion of this situation or even of the 
general amelioration of the lot of the average person are remote. We have 
an average rate of growth of between one and two per cent a year, and 
simple arithmetic will tell you that any prospect of really significant material 
improvement in our standard of living is remote indeed, let alone any significant 
shift in its quality. 

The Queen and Her Horses Reign* 

Now I ask myself, why is our rate of growth so low? As an economist, 
the technical reasons seem to me to be fairly obvious. The rate of investment 
until recent years has been low, ·an acceptable incomes policy is impossible 
under this government, the pound is over-valued, the internal affairs of this 
country are dependent upon an irrational attempt to maintain the international 
role of sterling. But it is more than this. Fundamentally, one suspects, 
there is a basic lack of desire for economic growth; an impotence which 
arises because the positions of power are largely in the hands of those who 
are comfortably off-those who have inherited money, and see no great 
reason for change. More fundamentally, perhaps, the rest of us, most of us, 
are convinced by the nature of the society that we live in, and above all 
by the nature of the upbringing that we have been given, that to seek change 
is to seek to destroy; that to rub along nicely with things as they are is 
the best of things in this vale of tears which is what modern England seems 
to be. Between us and our betters a great gulf is fixed ; the Queen and her 
horses reign, and to seek to bridge the gulf is to seek to overthrow the 
Queen, common decency, and fate itself. Perhaps this situation is made 
more dismal by the atmosphere of lamentation and constant recrimination 

*Author's Note.-I intend no disrespect to the Royal Family by this. They 
must be as bored by the flow of continual adulation as the rest of us are 
nauseated by its emptiness. And do they wonder, too, when their unwelcome 
lickspittles will turn and rend them as they rent the Duke of Windsor? 

EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

which prevails; our time and energy is being spent in continual lament for 
our lot. I travel frequently abroad and I think the rulers of this country 
are unhappily out of touch with what is happening elsewhere in the arts, 
in the sciences, and in the common decencies of organised life. They have 
become unaware in their smug complacency (and we in our introspective 
depression) of the degree to which this country has fallen behind. 

Now, there are many explanations for this: the war itself; the fact that 
we were preserved from invasion means that the traumatic experience of 
defeat passed us largely by. We are confirmed in our fundamental beliefs 
that because things are English, they are right; although Dunkirk was a 
defeat it nevertheless saved us; because the country was inefficient we were 
providentially guarded (by nonconformist and low-Church Gods) in the 
decency of our remote Island Monarchy. 

This, it seems to me, will not do. Times are changing, and changing 
fast, and we need to begin to think about catching up with the foreigners 
-a thought as deeply repugnant to xenophobic social democrats as it is 
to those who rest comfortable in their country houses on the basis of their 
virtually untaxed family trusts. In short, I think we have rarely been in 
worse case; but if there is hope, it comes from a new generation and a nev. 
atmosphere. 


4 EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

2. Education as a Priority
JWILL try to explain why I think that education should take first place 

in our domestic policy. First, our economy (in comparison with other 
economies) is short of skilled man-power; and the supply of skill depends 
directly upon the education system. Furthermore, such prognostications as 
may be made of the implications of a higher rate of economic growth, 
suggest that improvement depends in large part upon the recruitment of 
skilled workers and increasingly requires a greater use of skills than we 
have previously been accustomed to. 

Second, the quality and decency of life itself depends upon there 
being an adequate school and university system available to anybody who 
wishes to make use of it. I need not enlarge on this point. 

Third, this country's economic and social progress is handicapped 
by the existence of rigid class divisions-divisions which are an affront to 
our own sense of decency. 

Now what does this mean? 
It means first that we must try to raise the average standard of education 
to that of the best; to close-or at least to narrow the gap-between 
the secondary modern schools and Eton. We must try to give every child 
what we now only give to the grammar school child and to the public 
school child-to the clever few and the middle class-an education which 
is worthy of the name. This would involve increasing expenditure on the 
primary and secondary schools attended by average children by a factor 
of between 5 and 10-just to put it in money terms. 
How do I relate this point of view to what a Labour Government 
must do as soon as its comes into office? What will happen on that blissful 
day when some bright young man, ~ome solid female, some grizzled elder 
worn with service in the T.U.C., faces the dry and cynicaJl-and impeccably 
upper-class-people at the top of the Ministry of Education? (It is only 
recently that a non-public-school boy has risen above the level of Principal 
in the Ministry of Education, I understand). Let us not flinch from the 
prospect; let us assume we get a good Labour Minister. What will be do? 
I think you can look at two areas of public policy. You can look first at 
industry and society and say what their needs are and translate them into 
educational terms. Secondly, you can look at education itself and say what 
its needs are; what is needed just to keep the education service going. 

1 This i unfair in its over-emphasis. What they arc interested in, too often, 
admini !ration, not education. The result as a dislike of "enthu ia m". 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCfETY 

Industrial and Social Needs 

Now to take the first thing first-industrial and social needs. At the 
moment, compared with other countries and by any absolute standard, 
we are short of skilled people at all levels. We are short of nurses, architects, 
teachers, skilled clerical workers, social workers, engineers and scientists. 
If the rate of growth of the economy were to rise from its present 
lamentable level, acute shortages of these and other categories of skill would 
reveal themselves. Furthermore, there are many industries where the existing 
skilled workers are not skilled enough; where they have been given an 
inappropriate, traditional form of training which makes them unadaptable, 
lacking in resilience and unprepared either to accept or promote rapid 
technological change. Now this leads immediately, I think, to policy conclusions. 
It leads to the conclusion that our system of giving industrial and 
commercial skills must be changed-if indeed it is appropriate to refer to a 
"system" at all when we talk about the way we give people skills in this 
country. We have to provide an adequate apprenticeship system closely 
linked with the education system. Furthermore, we have to make sure 
that the higher education system expands in order to provide the number 
of highly qualified people which the advancing economy requires. The 
shortages of skilled people could be acutely handicapping to a Labour 
Government. For example, shortages of skilled social workers will undoubtedly 
limit the growth of the probation service and of the mental 
health service. The shortage of nurses will handicap the National Health 
Service; the shortage of teachers will, itself, limit the growth of education. 

Now, I am usually criticised by Godly people when I suggest that the 
provision of skills is the first and most important task of the education 
service, but if we think it is quite clear that practically everything 
that we hope to do in improving the quality of life here, and in the 
poorer parts of the world, depends upon the country being richer, then 
it is increasingly clear that one of the reasons why our rate of growth 
is low is that people are insufficiently skilled. So I must emphasise that the 
basic problem to which we have to turn the attention of the whole country 
is the problem of generating suffi·cient economic growth. This is, of course, 
the chief reason for wishing to change the present state of things in education, 
and especially in apprenticeship. 

But what then of the quality of life? What can we say about the education 
service? 

Downward Bound 

I think there are a number of defects in education to whi'Ch we can 
draw people's attention. The most striking is the stratification of our society 
which adversely affects the quality of life. First, because it frustrates people 
who otherwise would rise to positions which they would fill more adequately 
than the people holding them at present. Second, because it just divides 
people from each other in unnecessary and unpleasant ways. Third, because 
the people who hold the governing power in our society are people 
who are culturally, in many respects, inferior. Fourth, because an educa



6 EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

tion service based on rejection itself inhibits human growth. 

Therefore, one of the major tasks that we must set ourselves is to 
reduce the degree of segregation at present taking place in our schools. 
There are a number of ways in which this must be done. One is to bring 
the "Public" schools into the public sector. Another is to try and reverse the 
present appalling trend towards single sex schools. The persistence of girls' 
schools is one of the major reasons for the low status of women in our 
society. Yet a third way to reduce segregation would be to bridge the division 
between the grammar schools and the other secondary schools. Thus far, 
I am sure, most people would agree with me: we would see a pattern emerging 
in which the schools at secondary level, although widely diverse in 
size and in their special emphasis, would be largely non-selective, largely 
co-educational. They would lead on to a system of industrial training for 
those who leave school at 16 or 17, with the provision for such people of 
recreational and cultural fa-cilities no less adequate than those provided 
for the grammar and public school children and the university students. This 
should in itself lead to far greater relaxation and happiness in our schools 
and to a far greater degree of cultural and social integration than we have 
at present. 

Of course, in a more relaxed and egalitarian set up a number of 
imaginative and amusing things can be done. In a country belonging to the 
Common Market is there any reason why whole age groups of children 
shouldn't be sent to France for six months at a time, while whole groups 
of French children are brought here? This, I am sure, is the best way of 
learning French and, of course, an incomparable way of understanding a 
foreign culture. Is there any reason why travel should not be subsidised 
for young people generally in the way that it is now for those lucky enough 
to get travel awards from the universities? Should not art galleries and art 
schools be as widely available as they are at Dartington or Bryanston? 

These and other schemes, I am sure, could help to redress the present 
appalling balance in sheer access to good and jolly things which is at present 
so alarmingly tipped against the working class-and would also tend to 
counterbalance people's enthusiasm for the Boy Scoutism of the Duke of 
1 / Edinburgh's award. Why not get an award, for example, for going to see 
modern Italian painting at the Venice Biennnale rather than for walking up 
11-N.J,~ Snowdon in bare feet or whatever it is you have to do to gain a Gold 
Medal at present? The Gordonstoun heresy is as awful in its way as public 
school orthodoxy. Let us rescue Prince Andrew and throw to him the key 
to the Tate Gallery, assuming the pictures haven't been pinched by then. 

Now all this implies vigorous and imaginative changes in the way in 
which the schools are organised; it means a shift towards comprehensive 
schools; it means a real passion on the part of the authorities to give young 
workers the amenities and decencies of cultivated middle-class life. 

Hoggart in Curzon Street 

I have tried to spell out the inevitable changes in some detail in a 
number of recent books and articles. I don't want to deal with them now 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

because 1 want to turn your attention directly to the central question which 
we all of us have to consider-and which will face a Labour Minister the 
moment he passes through the air-raid shelter which is the way in to that 
hideous building in Curzon Street that houses-one almost says, entombs 
-the Minist"y of Education. He will put down our manifesto on his desk. 
"That," he will say in a sturdy yeoman accent, "That, Secretary, is our 
pclicy. Your job is to carry it out, so that our boys and girls at last have 
access to their birthrights: l remember," he will go on, a finger in his 
Albert watchchain, "1 remember Professor Tawney saying to me when 1 
were in his class at Stoke...." At which point, the Secretary will say: 
''Minister, these things are Good-or some might feel them to be so. But 
how on earth is this to be done?" For two facts, surely, dominate our present 
situation. The fir&t is the acute shortage of teachers. The second is the 
enormous expense of educational reform. Now, obviously the expense will 

not matter if we cau't get the teachers; there won't be anything to spend 
the money on. The expense only matters if we can get the teac!:lers. How 
then can we find the teachers in the next few years to give an opportunit) 
to our children to have an adequate education? 

Now there are two lots of people to blame for the shortage-only it 
is too late now to start blaming the people in the Registrar General's office 
who are responsible for the miscalculations about child population. All 
competent demographers have long mistrusted these calculations and the 
Ministry of Education itself, not hitherto notorious for its statistical excellence, 
has been forced to require its own calculations to be made.2 We are 
also the direct inheritors of the appalling decision of the U.G.C. in 1952 
to use the next five years as a period of consolidation, a period during which 
they enthusiasti·cally cited Cardinal Newman's idea of a University and 
the comforts of academic communities as an excuse for doing nothing, 
while the country was crying out for the creation of an adequate higher 
education system. The people who sat on the U.G.C. in those years carr} 
a gre:lt load on their consciences. But even if they were stripped of their 
titles and honours in an Admiral Byng-like episode, we cannot, alas. undo 
the harm they have done. We have to start with the present shortage. 

The Supply of Teachers 

The long-run solution to the supply of teachers is quite dear. Thi~ 
is a drastic, radical expansion of higher education. There is no reason wh) 
this cannot be taken in hand immediately by means of a crash programme. 
phasing into a long-term period of expansion leading to at least six to seven 
hundred thousand students in our universities and colleges by 1980. 

But in the short run we are faced with an acute crisis, which can 

only be overcome by the rapid return of married women to the schools 

and the rapid training of a number of people with other qualifications who 

could do temporary duties as teachers. In addition all the devices and tech


2 The Ministry's Statistical Branch is now good. though not yet up to 
Scandinavian or U.S. standards. 


EDUCATIO~ IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

niques of modern technology will have to be used in order to make large 
classes more suitable mechanisms for modern teaching methods than they 
have been in the past. I emphasise that this is only a temporary expedient. 
but it is a temporary expedient which could yield large dividends in the 
long run, because technological research applied to the teaching of large 
d asses could yield remarkable results, not only in the improvement of 
learning, but in the happiness of teachers and taught. 

The third policy which I think we shall have to consider seriously is 
to raise the school entry age from 5 to 6t next year. If this were accompanied 
by a firm commitment to raise the school-leaving age to 16t in 1967 
no child would have less than 10 years' schooling, and at the same time the 
size of infant classes generally could be drastically reduced, thus considerably 
improving the quality of the schools.3 

I have put these three suggestions forward very quickly and very 
succintly because they represent the sort of policies which may have to be 
adopted in the short run in some form or other by a progressive Minister 
of Education. Having scared you by my brief and brutal presentation, 1 
will spell them out a little more carefully, if I may, because they present 
us with certain policy characteristics which will be of general interest to 
those who are not immediately concerned with education. 

a I assume that the extension of nursery education for the children of \\Ori-.lng 
mothers (and other urgent cases) would take place; this would require 
leachers. but there would be a net savlng. 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

3. The short run and the long run 
QNE thing that we must immediately note is that in the short run there 

will be an abundance of urgent problems which will have to be coped 
with. They must be coped with in such a way that the short-term solutions 
do not interfere with the long-term solutions. I will take as an example 
one of the consequences of the shortage of teachers in the present and of 
the remedies which we shall have to adopt to cope with it. Whatever we 
do for the next five to seven years, the schools in the public sector will be 
seriously overcrowded. In order to overcome the difficulties inherent in this 
overcrowding there will have to be experiment and change. Inevitably some 
of the experiments will be great successes, some will be failures. I have suggested 
elsewhere what these experiments are likely to be. But whether they 
succeed or fail, one thing is certain: a large and growing proportion of 
our population will buy their way out of this crisis. The private schools will 
bid away teachers and resources from the maintained schools. If we seriously 
believe that the urgent task of the present is to build up the maintained 
sector, somehow or other we shall have to prevent this rapid expansion 
of the private sector because by its expansion it will slow up the growth 
of the maintained schools.• 

In saying this, we lay ourselves open to many objections, some legitimate 
and some not. The major objection will be that we are interfering with 
people's freedom in its most fundamental aspect; their right to have their 
children educated as they want. To this we have a legitimate response, that 
their right is only at the expense of the children of the great mass of the 
people of the country. Their exercise of their "right" uses teachers that we 
need in our own schools. Some public schools have 12 or more mathematics 
and science masters with good degrees; many maintained grammar schools 
have one; most secondary modern schools have none. But, to any one 
individual, any one parent, I must admit such a statement sounds a little 
hollow. We shall be driven therefore by our short-term problems to find a 
policy which leads to the integration of the public and the private sector. 
Now this is one of our long-term aims, and we must be careful that our 
short-term policies make it possible for us to do it without too much 
heart searching, without too much conflict of interest, without too much 
'·fundamental" debate-or apparently "fundamental" debate-designed to 
obscure the very simple point that with limited resources an expensive 
education for the rich means a bad education for the poor. 

'See Appendix. 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

I will take another example of the interaction of short-term and longterm 
policies. Because of the lamentable decisions of the eleven years of 
policies of "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof", we have an appalling 
shortage of university places. Just in order to accommodate the children 
coming out of the sixth forms, we shall have to adopt expedients like double-
banking, prefabricated huts, incentives to existing university teachers to 
teach longer hours. We must be very careful indeed that this policy of rapid 
expansion of existing institutions, of the up-grading of existing technical 
colleges and teacher-training colleges into universities, does not interfere 
with our long-term plans for the expansion and the unification of higher 
education. We, in this Society, are now committed to 70 or 80 universities. 
many of them fairly big ones, throughout the country, catering for the bulk 
of those people over the age of 18 who are qualified to continue in full-
time education. The arguments for rapid long-term expansion are familiar. 
So are the arguments for a unified higher education system. In our view 
the perpetuation of teacher training colleges and of technical colleges in 
their present form would be a perpetuation of a quite unnecessary and a 
very harmful division of higher education. 

Yet we have to face the fact that, as things are at present organised, 
in the short run it is far easier and far cheaper (and probably more efficient) 
to expand the technical colleges and the teacher training colleges as they 
are than it is to expand the universities. And we have also to recognise that 
in attempting to expand the universities faster even than they have hitherto 
themselves asked that they should expand, we shall probably stir up opposition 
(opposition no less from the <:ivic universities than from the ancient 
universities) which could be very serious and could handicap the long-term 
programme. The objection to teaching longer hours in prefabricated buildings 
will come on legitimate and illegitimate grounds-but whatever the 
reasons, the attack will be powerful. 

So the Minister of Education will have a great deal of complex 
subtle political manoeuvring to do if his short-term expedients are not to 
jeopardise the long-term chances of our programme. 

A Heart-rending Choice 

Or let us take another serious problem-this is the question of whether 
you should raise the school-leaving age or whether you should try and 
concentrate all your resources on providing adequate nursery schools. I am 
sure myself that in the short run the raising of the school-leaving age has 
the highest possible priority in our society. Only thus, I think, in the long 
run can the present evils of the social division be eradicated. But in the 
short run the consequences to young children who might otherwise have 
had a fairly decent nursery or infant education will be bad. And what 
possible guarantee can anybody give that within the foreseeable future the 
shortage of teachers will have eased in such a way as to allow the expansion 
of nursery education? I put it as bluntly as this because I want to 
make it quite clear that, in my view. unless we take emergency steps to add 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

to the number of teachers as rapidly as possible, we shall continue to be 
faced with choices of this kind---<:hoices which are not only heart-rending 
(heart-rending because of the human beings involved, heart-rending because 
they could easily have been averted by a little forethought) but also 
full of political dynamite because they could, in a very real sense, wreck 
the long-term development of the education services. The decisions that 
<..re taken could make people disillusioned and angry. Instead of being 
angry at the necessity for choice they will be angry at the choice that is 
made. And although those whom they should be angry with grace the 
House of Lords (there are no fewer than four ex-Ministers of Education in 
t!"!e House of Lords at the moment),5 the people they will be angry with will 
be those who are forced to take the decisions. We saw that last time. 

I think that this general problem of how to phase the short run emergency 
measures into the long run programme is one which is going to be 
of importance to every single member of the Government. And consequently 
I think it behoves us to make all our long-term plans as flexible 
as possible, and to make quite sure that they are based upon certain simple 
elementary principles which can be embodied in the short-term expedients. 
And then we have to make the short-term policies exciting and bold. The 
moment we take office the 100 days must begin. But let us not forget bow 
hard the choices will be-or their long-term consequences. 

I wonder, for example, how far we should be driven to make a choice 
between the needs of the teaching profession for professional improvement 
-for longer and longer courses for intending teachers, or compulsory 
training for the graduates-and the needs of the children to be taught by 
somebody who has some kind of training? Will we not be faced with a 
similar problem in the case of social workers and nurses? Even perhaps 
with doctors? Is not the growing professionalism of our society making it 
more difficult every year for certain elementary social needs to be met, 
even though when the needs are met they are perhaps met by more adequately 
trained people than in the past? It is common knowledge that at 
the present moment the training of teachers gives a great deal of satisfaction 
and pleasure to the trainers of teachers, but that the teachers themselves 
(and particularly the graduates) regard their training as in part a waste of 
time. 

Team Teaching 

I am convinced myself that a great deal could be done in the reorganisation 
of the methods of teaching in our schools to make use of people 
of good average educational background who can perform some, but not 
all, professional duties. This requires new kinds of training. Obviously many 
married women fall into this category, and I am also convinced that a large 
number of students could be used in the schools to very good effect-and 

s Lord Soul bury (formerly Rams bottom), Lady Horsbrugh, Viscount Hailsham 
(formerly Hogg) and Lord Eccles. 


12 EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

remember we expect to have more students at university than there are 
te3.chers in the schools. What this requires, of course, is constant flexibility 
in the organisation of our classes. It is a very striking fact that at the present 
moment a quarter of the teachers in America are involved in some sort 
of experiment with team-teaching. That quarter may be a fairly small proportion 
but it represents in absolute numbers as many teachers as we have 
in our maintained schools. It is only by using teachers in teams, I think, 
that we shall be able to make use of people of perfectly good ability but 
lacking experience, or lacking confidence, who could make a considerable 
contribution to the schools. 

What I am saying is this: a good, progressive Minister looking at this 
problem of the shortage of teachers can use it, I think, to experiment with 
social and educational organisation, to bring out the strength of individual 
people, so that there is a substantial jump forward in what is actually done 
in the schools. Instead of using the shortage of teachers as an excuse for 
not raising the school-leaving age, instead of lamenting the fact that the 
shortage of teachers prevents desirable things from being done, the shortage 
could be used creatively. There is no doubt, for example, that television can 
be used far more effectively in education than it has been up till now. 
There is no doubt that the teaching of modern languages in England today 
is a public scandal, and that the use of tape recorders, of films, of educational 
journeys and so on could rapidly improve the level of attainment. 
My argument is that the shortage of teachers forces the schools to experiment-
and that the experiments may yield results which will be surprising 
in their effectiveness. 

The same goes for a number of other fields. I have in mind, for example, 
the re-designing of houses or the re-organisation of the Health Service. In 
both these fields, present methods of provision are expensive and inefficient 
and can be improved. Be that as it may, it is abundantly true of education. 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

4. More -and cheaper -education ? 
NOW what I have just said has a considerable lesson for the finance of 

the education service. I cannot imagine that the education service can 
cope with the rising tide of children and the rising tide of expectations 
without an expansion of 6 per cent a year at least. It would be unwise to 
expect that the national income, even under a Labour Government, would 
rise by more than 4 per cent a year. Simple arithmetic leads immediately 
to the conclusion that the result must be a rapid increase in expenditure on 
education; an increase which will exceed the rising yield of taxes. I have 
said before that I suspect this is going to prove to be generally true of a 
large range of public services under the Labour Government, and it therefore 
follows that there is a problem of financing the public services which 
will become an increasingly serious one. It is quite true that in the long 
run the logic of compound interest will solve a large number of these problems. 
It is quite true that by 1980 we shall be able to afford a lavish education 
service, a lavish health service, a lavish road system. We know this is 
so if only because other countries have done it and are doing it. But in 
the short run when we are trying to make up the appalling leeway that we 
have to make up, the problems will be hard and difficult. We have a number 
of choices before us. I will take three : one is concerned with the future of 
Local Government. It is going to be increasingly true that the Central 
Government will have to find the resources for the expansion of education, 
not only because the local rates are an obsolete and inefficient tax, but 
because people increasingly expect national standards in education. By 
local diversity we now mean diversity of organisation, we do not mean 
diversity in the standards of provision, and it is only by differing standards 
that you get different rates of expenditure per head. So there is little justification 
for local finance on any substantial scale. 

Therefore, quite early on there will have to be some sort of reversion 
from the present Block Grant to a higher rate of percentage grant for 
education. How far it will be possible to make this into a one hundred 
per cent grant I am not sure. How far will it be possible to take certain 
services entirely out of local Government finance--say all further education? 
Or certain parts of education expenditure, say teachers' salaries? But 
that something like this will be done there can be little doubt. (fhe only 
exception that I would put to this would be a fundamental re-casting of 
Local Government on a regional basis which gave the regional authorities 
an adequate basis of taxation. But this would be an immense and complicated 
piece of legislation which could not come into operation until some 
years after the immediate crisis in the finance of education has been dealt 
with). 

Another major problem which we shall face in financing the education 


14 EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOC!El Y 

service is the finance of higher education. The rate of expansion which we 
are looking forward to (and which is essential, not only to the future of 
the country, but to the future of the education service itself) is a high 
one. The unit costs of higher education in Great Britain are certainly 
among the highest in the world. Now, therefore, the whole question 
of the finance of higher education needs to be looked at because the 
rapid expansion of a high cost service means that it will become 
a major item in Government finance. The sources of finance from 
private industry and from local authorities will , I am quite certain. 
dwindle as a proportion of the whole. We have to ask ourselves here, I 
think, how far we are prepared to make higher education a hundred per 
cent Government financed service; how far we expect contributions from 
industry; how far we expect parents and students themselves to make contributions 
to their university education. There are legitimate grounds for 
expecting industry to contribute to higher education. The universities not 
only provide industry with the fruits of their research, but they provide 
industry with their most highly skilled workers. And we have to remember, 
too, that people with higher education, by that very fact become entitled 
to much higher incomes throughout life than they would otherwise have 
received. There is a considerable case (by no means an overwhelming case, 
but there is a considerable case) for expecting them to contribute to the 
cost of this education. 

The Canning of Peas and the Carting of Books 

Anyway, whatever their merits these are certainly arguments we shall 
hear a great deal more oL But if I may take the specific case of student 
grants and student labour, it will lead me into a third point about the finance 
of the education service which I think is important. Many of us agreed, 
wholeheartedly, with Professor Brinley Thomas's Minority Report to the 
Anderson Committee on Student Grants, in which he brilliantly argued 
the case for a Means Test on students. At first sight it seems illiberal to 
support means tests. but when you have regard to the social origins and 
the financial backgrounds of the bulk of students in higher education, it 
becomes quite clear that to abolish the Means Test is to redistribute income 
in favour of the well-to-do and I, for one, find that difficult to stomach. 
Now the more we throw open higher education to ·the people at large (and 
that, after all, will be a major effect of returning a Labour Government to 
office), the higher will become the cost of student grants. Tf you have 600.000 
students in 1980, each getting a grant of £500 a year, that is £300 million a 
year of government money going in student grants. Now, it is true that by 
then the country will be much richer, but even so, the cost of student grants 
will be a significant element in Government finance. I wonder whether we 
are not going in the wrong direction in expecting students to live on State 
grants, and in frowning on their doing work during term-time-and even 
during the vacation. I am not at all sure that in view of the steady increases 
in the cost of domestic labour which the univer ities experience. their 
growing difficulties in staffing libraries and finding junior research assistants 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

and laboratory technicians, there isn't a great deal to be said for 
making more use of student labour in an efficient and organised way than 
has ever been done before. I cannot see the logic of our hiring people to 
carry books about in libraries at £12 to £14 a week, while the students are 
all canning peas at £12 or £14 a week. 

In the long run we all shop at Marks and Spencers 

This seems to be a particular case of the general point that we must 
try all that we can to reduce the unit cost of education if we are to make 
it available to all classes of society equally. This is the thing which we 
all of us believe in, which we all of us want to see done, and yet so many 
of the reforms that we advocate imply raising the unit cost of education to 
new heights. It costs between five and ten times as much to educate a 
boy at a prep. school, at Eton and King's as it does to produce somebody 
from a secondary modern school, and it therefore seems a democrati: 
argument that we must raise expenditure on the poorer boy. But on 
reflection, surely we are saying that the policy of raising the worst to the 
best can only be fulfilled after decades and decades of raising Government 
expenditure. In the short run we cannot hope to do much along these 
line~. That is depressing. 

Then optimism breaks through. The significant changes which have 
raised the standard of living of ordinary people in this country have been 
accomplished quite largely by reducing the cost of the services which 
they are able to make use of. Rich and poor alike, we are told. shop at 
Marks and Spencers. because St. Michael is better than the Boutiques. 
What we have to do is to try to discover how to produce a much better 
education by using the whole resources of our technological discoveries in 
such a way that it can be provided lavishly and generously for everybody-
a St. Michael's education to replace the boutiques. If this is not so, if I 
am wrong, if we cannot improve the output of education-then it does 
seem to me that we have a tough battle on our hands. Because equality 
will then only come through getting rid of the lavish parts of the education 
system. And harmful though Eton and King's may be, such a course is 
fraught with political and educational danger. But unless we end the 
divisions in education there is no hope. 

APPENDIX: PUBLIC SCHOOLS 

The integration of the public schools with the rest of the education 
system raises serious problems. The crucial issue is what to do with the 
hundred or so leading independent schools which are members of the 
Headmasters' Conference. If they were thrown open to a much wider social 
range than they are at present, the existence of the other independent schools 
would be less serious. 

The following proposal is taken from a letter I wrote to Mr. Anthony 
Crosland, M.P., which he reproduced in Encounter in his essay on education-
an essay which has since been reprinted, without the letter, in his 
distinguished volume, The Conservative Enemy. 

" The public schools are often exceptionally good as schools. 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 

Their bad characteristics-the emphasis on leadership and 'character,' 
and the snobbery-spring directly from their socially selective entry. 
An intellectually selective entry would be nearly as disastrous, because 
it would harm the grammar schools, be purely ' meritocratic,' and 
impossible to select. So the problem is to keep them going while 
changing the entry. 

Fortunately they are public bodies in more than name, nine of 
them having been reorganised by public authority in the nineteenth 
century; so Parliament has a special right to intervene. Our argument 
starts from the proposition that existing schools must be kept 
going, whatever we as individuals may think of them, so long as 
they are recognised as efficient by Her Majesty's Inspectors. It would 
not be necessary to deal with all private schools which, including 
preparatory and days schools, educate half-a-million children. The 
leading 100 or 150 public schools (the Headmasters' Conference ones) 
are those which most of us would like to see 'democratised.' And 
within the system there are many teachers (including headmasters) 
who believe in their work, but object strongly to the social basis 
of their schools. Why not try to help them, rather than antagonise 
them? We should certainly try for an agreed scheme first; and if 
most of the major schools came in, this might be sufficient. Only 
if a majority declined would the Government have to consider compulsion. 


All these 'top ' schools, specified by statute, would be put under 
an Educational Trust consisting of independent and impartial persons. 
The Trust would be charged with maintaining, so far as possible, the 
existing character of the schools-whether religious as at Downside, 
pedagogic as at Dartington, or occupational as at the Royal Commercial 
Travellers' School. But the schools would be required to 
take only boys and girls of at least 15 (in order to make the problem 
of educating children from non-preparatory schools easier), and to 
take their entrants from a pool composed of a completely representative 
sample, socially and intellectually, of the whole population 
aged 15. Within this limit the schools would be free to choose their 
own recruits, although they would have to explain to the Trust any 
serious deviation from their representative character. · , 

The pool would be chosen by asking every secondary school 
(private and maintained) to nominate, in strict proportion to the 
number of its pupils aged 15, several pupils for a 'pool ' of those 
who wished to go on to the Educational Trust schools. For example, 
if there are 800,000 pupil> in the age-group and 20,000 places in the 
Educational Trust schools, each school (grammar, comprehensive, 
secondary-modern, technical and private) would get one place in the 
pool for each 40 pupils in the age-group. Each Educational Tru~t 
school would be required to draw all (or most) of its pupils from this 
pool, having regard to its special characteristics. Thus, Downsid..:, 
for example, would still recruit Roman Catholics; but its entrants 
would be dravm from all Roman Catholic schools and not a fe\\ 


EDUCATION IN A CLASS SOCIETY 17 

expensive preparatory schools. 

Tuition fees would be abolished, but the boarding element of 
charges would be subject to a means test. The cost to public funds 
would be of the order of £15 million. 

There would be two main snags. First, the choice of the children 
to go into the 'pool ' might be invidious. I doubt whether this IS 
likely to be so. If a secondary modern school has to choose tw;, 
boys, it will ask parents for nominations and draw up a list of its own. 
There will be discussion and argument; certainly jealousy and annoyance 
in the grammar schools ; but I doubt whether a great many 
parents will really want to choose these schools on other than educational 
grounds when the social cachet they hold has gone. If they 
are chosen on educational grounds, then we should simply build more 
of them. 

Secondly, it will be argued, each school will choose its ' best' 
boys and girls; the most middle-class child in each school will 
be nominated. This is obviously possible. But everyone who knows 
about the social class distribution of school populations knows that 
there are hundreds of non-grammar schools with no child who could 
remotely be called middle-class. And once the social cachet is gone, 
it is extremely unlikely that schools will be anxious to push their 
' best' pupils away from them. Scalp-collecting ('I got 6 Winchesters 
and 12 Royal Commercial Travellers this spring') would be prevented 
by the quota system. 

At the same time, it is urgently necessary to make entry t'J 
direct-grant schools wholly non-fee-paying. This will further reduce 
the ' social cachet' element in education. It would also be necessary 
to apply the same teacher-rationing scheme now prevailing in the 
maintained sector to the independent schools. If we added to this ;~. 
tightening up of the various public subsidies (through tax remission 
and payment of fees) now given to independent schools, the public 
school problem would effectively disappear, while the good schools 
would survive to do a worthwhile job. 

11he prep schools, for example, would no longer be able to 
ensure entry to the 'top' schools, because their quota would be the 
same as that of every other school-and if they had no pupils of 15 
they would not have one. Only parents who positively believed in 
sending boys of 7 or 8 away from home would continue to do si). 
It would be interesting to see what would happen to the schools in 
that case. 

As I see it, there are two contradictory principles of selection. 
One is that the race is to the swiftest-the Grand National principle-
with all its disastrous consequences in enforcing narrow curricula, 
intense competitiveness at an early age, and a close correlation between 
merit, social origin, and prestige education. The other is the principle 
of food rationing. These places are scarce and there should be a 
roughly equal chance of going to them. Is this not the better English 
tradition? 


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• Printed in London by Devonport Press Ltd. (T.U.) W./2