ABSTRACT
Without the existence of training colleges, opportunities for the higher education of women in the first half of the twentieth century would have been largely confined to the few, largely middle-class, women who were admitted to the universities. The inadequate education available to women had been central to feminist pressure for reform in the nineteenth century. Unlike the campaign for the suffrage, the right to an education and more particularly a higher education, previously only available to men was ceded to women with comparatively little resistance. Changing social and economic conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century had increased the state’s need for a well-educated and skilled workforce. The role of the teacher, a profession dominated by women, was crucial to this process. It was the training colleges’ achievement that they transformed the narrow vocational training of the nineteenth century into the wider educational and cultural attainments of the twentieth. This gave clever girls from lower middle-class homes, who wished to train as elementary school teachers, access to a higher education which would otherwise have been denied them. Moreover, after the Second World War and until the expansion of the university sector in the late 1960s, many middle-class girls also received their higher education at a training college.
