ABSTRACT
The foundation of state education in Britain was laid by the Education Act of 1870. There was a network of private, charitable and government supported schools before that, but the 1870 Act for the first time established a major role for government spending on schooling and did several important things. The next landmark in education was the Butler Act of 1944. When the Act was finally passed, it established free, compulsory schooling for children aged 5-15, under Local Education Authorities for the state sector. The last Labour government had the Tomlinson Report of 2004 on 14-19 education, which proposed a radical change to secondary education, with specified paths to higher and further education, flexibility for students between those paths, and new methods of assessment. The pattern of the industrialisation laid the conditions for the profound inequality of the country, with the middle classes enjoying health and education vastly superior to that of working men and women.
