ABSTRACT
This period began with the Boer War, contained the First World War and ended on the brink of the Second; it was a period dominated by economic difficulties and social conflict. It experienced a slump and a general strike; it saw major departures in social legislation, and great changes in mass communications, leisure and entertainment. The nineteenth century had been marked by sustained change; the acceleration of this process in the period up to the Second World War was accompanied by two related processes. First, the sense of collective responsibility for serious social problems (some of which became more prominent in this period of economic crisis) was quickened by, among other things, the very magnitude of the problems themselves and the voices of organized protest. Second, educational decision-making was becoming increasingly part of the struggle to determine financial priorities as the range of social services increased. The national economy itself was becoming subject to new international vicissitudes. Education became more and more a public service governed by public policy. It became a part of local and national government election manifestos, an issue in the conflict between the political parties (including, from its formal creation in 1906, the Labour Party). It became an element in a new pattern of social policy at a time when Britain's world economic dominance had begun to decline, in an age both of increasing international competition, not only between nations but between empires, and of world war.
