ABSTRACT
Norwood must have been very clearly aware of how it reproduces the narrow 'liberal education' ideology of the nineteenth-century public schools. A political consensus had been achieved on the direction that policy on secondary education should take. However, the policies initiated in the postwar period also had potential for undermining the sixth form as an institutional category. Expansion reflected both a new confidence in the value of education, and in social welfare programmes generally, which was expressed in the Education Act of 1944, and the start of a prolonged period of steady economic growth. Liberal education was for leaders, governors and captains, not for slaves. The ideal became an ideology - a frozen rhetoric, incapable of directing educational development in any coherent or responsive way. The Ministry of Education's 1951 Pamphlet the Road to the Sixth Form is about the grammar school curriculum and its title expresses the Ministry view of what the lower school curriculum was.
