ABSTRACT
Hadow Reports During the inter-war period, when Sir William Hadow, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, was chairman of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, three important reports were issued. The first, The Education of the Adolescent, was published in 1926, the second, Primary Education, in 1931, and the third, Infant and Nursery Schools, in 1933. The return of the first Labour Government in 1924, committed to a policy of secondary education for all, led to a study of the organisation, objectives and curriculum of children up to the age of 15. (The leaving age at this time was 14.) As secondary schools were outside the Committee’s remit, the study was only a partial one. Psychological evidence was prominent in the Report. Its introduction includes the statement, ‘There is a tide which begins to rise in the veins of youth at the age of 11 or 12. It is called by the name of adolescence.’ The Committee recommended a separation of primary and secondary education at the age of 11. Some type of secondary education should be available to all, either grammar or modern: pupils would be allocated as the result of an examination. The curriculum would differ between the schools, the modern being more ‘realistic’. A leaving age of 15 was recommended by the Report, but this was postponed and did not come into force until 1947. The findings were accepted by the Board, and from the 1930s schools were reorganised on Hadow lines. With the break in school life at 11 now official policy, the Consultative Committee’s 1931 report on the primary school turned its attention to the consequences flowing from this move. It advocated close cooperation between the primary and secondary stages and the transfer of children at seven from the infant department. The curriculum was to be thought of in terms of ‘activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’. Differences in intellectual capacity between pupils, it believed, should be dealt with by dividing an age group into streams by the age of ten. The third Hadow Report examined infant and nursery schools. It encouraged enlightened approaches, giving approval to Froebelian and Montessorian methods, and stressed the need for separate infant schools.
