Secondary education and social change in the United Kingdom since 1945

The 1944 Education (Butler) Act overhauled the structure of British education. For the first time secondary schooling became a mass experience, which would have an impact upon the life course of successive generations growing-up in late 20th century Britain. By 1961 3.2 million pupils were being educated in state funded secondary schools, and over 600,000 in the independent sector. Over the ensuing 50 years, educational reform has repeatedly divided political and popular opinion as successive governments have attempted to remodel the system. Yet while this narrative of political meddling has been exhaustively told, we know very little about what pupils and parents thought mass education was for after 1945. Reform of the system occurred against a backdrop of profound social and economic transformation across British society. Traditional social structures appeared to fragment as processes including affluence, social mobility, a decline in deference, individualism and consumerism reconfigured how individuals understood their position within wider society.

Drawing on an innovative range of sources, this project will provide a new social and cultural history of postwar secondary education, embedding education in the experience of rapid social and cultural change in late 20th century Britain. This represents an indispensable contribution to the existing picture of post-1945 education by moving beyond entrenched historiographical positions, which too often treat education as a proxy for other concerns, such as national decline or class realignment. Rather than relying entirely on 'expert voices' - politicians, commentators or teachers - we ask how the everyday experience of education shapes and reflects pupils' and parents' aspirations, expectations, and sense of self, across their lives from youth to employment to parenthood. Using the original data and interview transcripts from postwar longitudinal studies and post-1950 social surveys, we will explore the intersection of national, regional, local and individual histories of education, charting how these differed across the UK and changed over time. Our findings will combine a broad national overview with a series of local case-studies to root the experience of education within specific contexts. Unlike previous studies, our research looks beyond England and Wales to consider the whole of Britain and the complete spectrum of schools (secondary modern, grammar, comprehensive and independent). We will deliver a diverse range of outputs, including two academic monographs and 5 journal articles, as well as resources aimed at a wide public audience.

We will develop an interactive website to facilitate direct collaboration between the public and the project. It will incorporate short pieces written by the research team, alongside interactive maps and a database of archives holding material on education to help interested family and community historians. We will also curate content generated by the public as part of a 'School Days' memory blog. This will combine images, material from our archival research and users' own testimonies. Our archival research will be supplemented with new material produced through oral history workshops and interviews. A number of podcasts will be hosted on the website, featuring a series of conversations about educational experience between several generations within a family. Participants will be recruited through schools and local history groups with whom we will develop relationships during our research and also by drawing upon our Project Partner organizations. By reconnecting the history of post-war education with the story of wider social change, this study will offer an important new historical perspective on phenomena that remain at the forefront of contemporary political and sociological debate.

This project will generate interest amongst a diverse range of users, with our outputs designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Our research objectives are not limited by geographical location, school type, gender, or social class, meaning we can engage people across a broad age range and social spectrum. We have four core beneficiary communities: (a) former secondary school pupils and parents; (b) present secondary school pupils and teachers; (c) qualified secondary level history teachers; (d) policymakers and educational charities.

To ensure we are best able to reach these users, we have already contacted several intermediary organisations to act as Project Partners [PPs]. All PPs will have a representative on the project Advisory Board and will be involved in guiding impact initiatives. The project partners are: Historical Association [HA], History & Policy [H&P], and The Sutton Trust [ST]. We have received enthusiastic letters of support from all PPs.

Our impact initiatives and outputs are innovative and varied. We will combine the development of electronic resources with public events and workshops. Our principal public interface will be the project website and ongoing social media presence. These will maximize visibility and act as an initial point of contact with our beneficiary communities, and eventually help to generate co-production. The interactive website will include project information, a research blog written by the RAs, a 'School days' memory blog to encourage users to contribute their own memories of school, and a series of podcasts recounting personal experiences of education. It will be free to access and include mechanisms for user feedback. To ensure these outputs remain available beyond the life of the project, the website will be hosted in perpetuity by Cambridge University Library.

As the project progresses we will draw upon our archival research to develop links with local communities and schools. We will run 6 workshops on 'The History of our School and Community' with year 9 pupils in secondary schools in 6 different regions across the UK (chosen to reflect our local case studies, see 'Summary'). Pupils will engage with archival sources to produce new learning resources of their own. These workshops, and the resource packs for them, will be designed in collaboration with the HA. The packs will subsequently be made available to all teachers through the HA website.

The RAs will produce a database of useful archival holdings relating to secondary education and a corresponding interactive map. This will be published on our website and shared with the TNA to help family historians and independent researchers interested in researching school histories. During phase 4, we will organize a series of group oral history workshops in our focus regions to gather new qualitative data from participants. We will identify workshop participants through local advertising, as well as on our website. We will build feedback-gathering processes into our oral history workshops and the data from these workshops will be deposited with the UK Data Service [UKDS] for use by future researchers.

Policymakers are a key audience for this project. Throughout the grant the RAs will contribute opinion pieces to the H&P network. In conjunction with H&P we will offer an interactive source-based workshop with civil servants at the Department for Education (year 3). We will also work with the ST, to produce a co-published report on historical perspectives on secondary education (year 4). This will be extremely timely in light of the government's Social Mobility Commission and the May 2016 HE White Paper 'Success as a Knowledge Economy', as well as the recent endorsement for a revival of grammar schools. We aim to encourage our audiences to think about what increasing access to education has been thought to be for in modern Britain, and thus what its purpose might be in the future.