Post War Education Policy in the United Kingdom - Essay Example

?Post-War Policy and Meritocratic Education in England Introduction Has post-war policy made education in England more meritocratic? This seemingly simple question is actually confusing because as Sen (2000) has noted, the root word of meritocracy, ‘merit’ could mean many things, like intelligence, ability, or talent, thus the need to explain ‘meritocracy’ first. Furthermore, this question is very broad in the sense that post-war policy addressed many issues like monetary and fiscal, foreign, social, and more. To delimit the topic for better focus and grasp, the policy review centres on the British Nationality Act 1948 (BNA) and the Education Act 1944 (EA) structured into brief introduction, purpose, perspectives, impact, and policy evaluation. These social policies are important because they both aim to achieve meritocracy and they are interrelated. The BNA 1948, in the course of its implementation, exposed the limitations of EA 1944 in its purpose to making English education more meritocratic. Furthermore, the impact of the BNA 1948 to the effectiveness of the EA 1944 and the need of the latter to address the need of the former illustrates the central role education had played in Britain’s post-war reconstruction (Tomlinson 2001). Understanding Meritocracy Meritocracy can be simply understood as promotion and inclusion based on merit – e.g., A meritocratic education system accepts, promotes, and rewards students based on ability, not on social status, ethnicity or gender (Llewellyn et al. 2008). However Sen (2000, p. 14) explains that it is actually the concept of ‘merit’, itself, which complicates the definition of meritocracy because “the rewarding… and the very concept of merit itself depend on the way we see a good society and the criteria we… assess the success and failures of societies.” It was after WWII that Britain started to walk the road of meritocracy. After Britain lost its world supremacy, it had no other recourse to survive international competition but to make better use of its human resources which for the past century were left wasted due to class discrimination. To do so, Young (1961) explains, Britain had to give up its century-old feudal principle of selection by family, and use instead the principle of selection by merit. Thus, Britain progressively opened its schools and industries to clever children and workers, giving equal opportunities for social mobility to those who have the ability and will to do so. Since meritocracy presupposes that boundless opportunities for success exist for all regardless of class, colour, ethnicity, and gender, many perceive meritocracy an ideal justice principle (Yuan 2013). On the contrary Young (1961, p.14) concludes that “the rate of social progress depends upon the degree to which power is matched with intelligence.” It is no different from the social class-based hierarchy of power, wherein power and wealth is distributed only to the few to the detriment of a wider group of ordinary people. The only difference is in meritocracy what matters is ability or intelligence. Eventually, elites of talents would be created, further justifying the socio-economic ladder more convincingly. Nonetheless, Allen (2011, p. 371) still asserts that meritocratic system is just on the basis that “social status was a direct expression of their intellectual worth. The system was now “just” because it was justly unequal.” Policy Review 1: British Nationality Act 1948 Introduction. Post-war migration to Britain, to Hansen’s (2000) analysis, is actually an issue of British citizenship, which the BNA 1948 legally conferred on Britons and ‘colonial’ British subjects, giving them equal rights to enter Britain and enjoy all the socio-economic-political benefits any Briton could legally enjoy. Although prior and subsequent to this Act were the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 and BNA 1964, the BNA 1948, Hansen (2000) notes, was most influential because it had dramatically reoriented the British migration policy, lifting its former strict restrictions and bringing-in hundreds of thousands of new Commonwealth immigrants which transformed Britain into a multi-ethnic society – a phenomenon of post-war that would impact on the education system. Purpose. Post-WWII western economies, Britain included, was confronted with a manpower shortage. Hence, the purpose of the BNA 1948 was to address the manpower needs of post-war reconstruction. (Isaac n. d.) Perspective. Although big quantity of migrants was legally integrated into Britain, Isaac (n. d.) clarifies that this did not change Britain’s attitude toward migration – Britain’s Migration attitude is determined by the perceived value of the migrating group and the racial animus of the dominant whites against the minority blacks (Paul 1997, cited in Julios 2008, p. 87). Thus, subsequent migration policies would impose further controls. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 initiated the British government’s attempt to massively control immigration excluding even those who had no other citizenship than that of the British Commonwealth and those who being born in the UK should have the natural right of citizenship. The Immigration Act 1971 claimed back the migrant’s automatic citizenship by categorising citizenship claims based on how much British the person’s origin. (Julios 2008) Impact. The qualifying criteria of BNA 1948 for citizenship were ‘good character, English proficiency, and swore of allegiance. These criteria had essentially put migrants under watch because they were assumed to be bad, and in a disadvantaged position because they were linguistically alienated. The good thing about this Act though was the formal inclusion of migrants and their children to Britain’s educational system, hence making the education population more complex. For example, the primary need of migrant learners of English was neglected, because the EA 1944 despite making education accessible to all never bothered to include the educational needs of migrants. Evaluation. In this sense, these policies failed to make education more meritocratic because effective education was denied of migrants due to their ethnic tongue. “Meritocracy requires administrative overview and the careful redistribution of human ability” (Allen 2011, p.369). In fact, it was only until the second half of the 20th century that a systematic ESL education program was developed (Julios 2008). This only shows how marginalised the ethnic minority migrants were in the English educational system. Policy Review 2: Education Act 1944 Introduction. With education at the centre of post-war social reconstruction, the EA 1944, also known the Butler’s Education Act, “along with the National Insurance Act 1946 and the National Health Service Act 1948, was regarded as one of the three pillars of the welfare state” (Tomlinson 2001, p. 1). In fact, EA 1944 was the foundation of England and Wale’s modern education system (O’Sullivan 2013). By virtue of this Act the full responsibility to provide universal free primary and secondary education until the age of 15 was passed on the central government, although school supervision was left to Local Authorities (Julios 2008). Purpose. The aim of the 1944 Education Act was to overhaul the deficient education systems of England and Wales (Julios 2008), making it more inclusive and accessible to every school-aged children. Perspective. One of the contending issues in the EA 1944 was the structure of the secondary school system. Though the Act did not specify the structure of the new State Secondary Education System, considerable debate ensued as to the single secondary school system against the tripartite system based on selection by intelligence, with the latter getting the favourable vote (Bates et al. 2011). Even the significance of the Act was being contested. Dent (1955), cited in Julios (2008, p. 89), found it a very great act as it had advanced public education and addressed the education needs of the 20th century British Society. However for Tomlinson (2001), subsequent education developments would negate EA 1944’s claim to be a pillar of the post-welfare society. For her, it failed to satisfy any of the needs of the society and individual. Impact. Though the Act opened secondary education to all, its tripartite system essentially continued the class-based system of English education because it was similarly socially divisive. Grammar schools catered to academically able students using a bias and unreliable measuring tool, the secondary modern schools to less academic students, and the technical schools to academically able and technically inclined students. However in practice, technical schools failed to materialise due to lack of qualified teachers. Hence, students were simply clustered between the academic grammar and practical secondary modern schools. The impact of this to non-English speaker ethnic-minority migrant students, who happened to be children of the working class, was to be stereotyped as low in intelligence. Evaluation. This post-war policy failed to make education in England more meritocratic, because the structure of education and the process of selection, which later would also determine the student’s college education, appears to open education to the working class not to really make them better, but to simply prepare them to provide the needs of industries for cheap labour. Conclusion Although two policies were only discussed, the socio-politico context in which they were implemented could generally apply to all post-war policies. It was this very context that hindered post-war policies to make education in England more meritocratic. Therefore, it appears that post-war policies in migration and education had not made education in England more meritocratic. Reference List Allen, A. (2011). Michael Young’s the rise of meritocracy: a philosophical ethic. British Journal of Educational Studies 59 (4), pp. 367-82. Bates, J., Lewis, S., and Pickard, A. (2011). Education policy, practice and the professional. London: Continuum International Publishing Hansen, R. S. (2000). Citizenship and immigration in post-war Britain: the institutional origins of a multicultural nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isaac, J. (n. d.). British post-war migration. London: The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Julios, C. (2008). Contemporary British identity: English language, migrants, and public discourse. GB: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Llewellyn, A., Agu, L., and Mercer, D. (2008). Sociology for social workers. UK: Polity Press. O’Sullivan, G. (2013). Design and technology education: vocational or academic: a case of yin and yang. In Owen-Jackson, G. (ed.). Debates in design and technology education. OX: Routledge, pp.74-86. Sen, A. (2000). Merit and justice. In Arrow, K. J., Bowles, S., and Durlauf, S. N. (eds.). Meritocracy and economic inequality.UK: Princeton University Press, pp. 5-16. Tomlinson, S. (2001). Education in a post-welfare society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Young, M. (1961). The rise of the meritocracy, 1870-2033. London: Penguin Books. Yuan, L. (2013). Wise and virtuous leadership: the contribution of Confucian values to business leadership. Pp.106-21. In Thompson, M. J. and Bevan, D. (eds.) Wise management in organisational complexity.UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Read More