ABSTRACT
The sense of solidarity in a nation under duress, the dislocations and destruction of the war, and heightened awareness of the weaknesses in the educational system, produced a widely expressed demand that what had been half done before the war should be completed, and a radical reappraisal of educational needs be made. Education and welfare assumed pivotal roles in thinking about post-war society. There was profound agreement on the need to finish remodelling post-primary education, to raise the school leaving age to fifteen (and eventually to sixteen), to implement a system of continued part-time education beyond the leaving age, and to provide adequate health and welfare services for schoolchildren. There was considerable wartime debate concerning the purposes of education; new books about education abounded, and political and educational organizations tried to define objectives for education after the war. One wartime committee, the McNair Committee on the supply of teachers, described in 1944 how 'the nation as a whole has woken up to the deficiencies of its public educational system . . . we are witnessing one of the most widespread and insistent of popular demands for its reform'. Another committee, the Norwood Committee on the secondary-school curriculum, found it necessary in 1943 to warn against 'a tendency to assume that because a thing existed before the war it must be changed after the war'.[2]
The outbreak of war seriously disrupted educational services. Some 750,000 children were evacuated from centres vulnerable
to air attack, though within six months more than half had drifted back to the towns, and the scheme was described in 1940 as having 'now frittered away'.[3] Heavy bombing in that year raised the number of evacuees to over 600,000, but early in 1941 the number again began to fall. Education in areas to which and from which children were evacuated was in a chaotic state in the early part of the war. Many urban schools closed and children who were not evacuated were often without schooling. Schools which were evacuated frequently shared premises with host schools on a half-time basis. Evacuation was a revelation to hundreds of thousands of people; to urban children from poor families the countryside and the homes to which they were sent lay totally outside their experience, and to many of those receiving the children their physical condition, behaviour, standards of speech and cleanliness were often a disappointment or a shock. At the beginning, the teachers who accompanied the children were more involved with social problems than education. A teacher evacuated to Brighton wrote that 'the first week of evacuation was unbearable. The rumours of lousy, dirty, illbehaved children bandied about Brighton were exasperating. We knew that 90% of the children were well behaved and happy. But the only stories regaled to me were of the horrors of the wild London children.' There were reports (some accurate, some exaggerated) of evacuees wrecking flower beds and furniture, and not knowing how to wash or what a nightgown was for. [4] Although by 1942 almost all children were on school registers there was a serious problem of attendance.
