ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at how policy emerged in the 1960s and how it continued to develop a modernist and institutional top-down approach to welfare. Although made up of disparate social groups, each with their own issues, the poor were homogenised. Apart from the overriding focus on slum clearance and housing, education was one of the first urban issues to concern policy-makers in the 1960s. Despite the 1944 Butler Education Act, which guaranteed free universal education for everyone after the war, children from poor backgrounds continued to underachieve. Young, firmly established by this time as a social reformer, Labour and intellectual heavyweight and no lover of grammar schools, was particularly interested in the relationship between the family and education and in American approaches to race and the urban environment. Organisations such as the London Boroughs Association and the Urban District Council Association remained sceptical. Urban areas had expanded into rural county areas, leading to a division of power between different authorities.