ABSTRACT

The political settlement between the estates of the realm - Labour, Capital and the State - was designed to constitute a new world, one which would replace 1930s' mass unemployment, poverty, exclusion and hopelessness with opportunities for all to learn, gain a career, work hard and achieve a comfortable, independent life. There has been over the decades an agonistic struggle between rival traditions of education reflecting fundamentally different conceptions of democracy and society: elite, social democratic, and neo-liberal. Following the First World War, there was a growing demand for secondary schooling. In the planning, however, expansion was balanced by considerable restriction on opportunity. In the post-war period extending to the mid-1970s, education substantially expanded opportunity to ameliorate class disadvantage and division. Education has been central to the modernising of society, key to the securing of a more democratic polity and expansive citizenship.