ABSTRACT
The timeline at the start of this chapter picks out a number of significant historical points. From it you will see that schooling for the most exclusive echelon of British people started in 600 AD, through royal patronage. Schooling for the rest came only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Children had to work to contribute to their families’ income. That remained so until the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century aimed to prevent child labour and to restrict work to 10 hours a day. Today, the ‘working week’ generally covers 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday, although few people still work those exact hours and many are now employed on ‘flexi time’, with unfixed times for arriving at and leaving work. Britons work the longest hours in western Europe and attempt to express their real selves through leisure activities, both in the private space of the home and outside it. This chapter will look at the part played by education, work and leisure in forming British people’s identities, and will deal with those topics in sequence.
