ABSTRACT
The Scottish Education Department (SED) faced many problems in the immediate post-war period arising both from the legacy of the war itself and from the requirements of the 1945 Act. ‘Roofs over heads’ was one pressing concern and the modernisation of the secondary-school curriculum came, in the early 1950s, to be acknowledged as another. But the problem to which the department attached particular importance was that of the ‘wastage’ of able pupils. High proportions of pupils were leaving school at the minimum age of 15, as it became in 1947, despite the fact that they had been allocated at 12 years of age to a course that could have led to certificate presentation at 17 years. A departmental survey of pupils who transferred to secondary-school in 1949 found, for example, that among pupils originally allocated to selective secondary-schools, two-thirds (67 per cent) had left school by the beginning of what would have been their fifth year of secondary-schooling (Scottish Office, 1954). (Here and elsewhere we use the term ‘selective’ in relation to a course or a type of school to designate the entity into which abler pupils were selected.) The publication of the results of this survey coincided with, and in the accompanying press release were explicitly linked to, the publication of the report on Early Leaving in England and Wales (Central Advisory Council for Education (England), 1954). From the outset, therefore, the SED’s approach was dominated by a UK concern to identify and retain in Secondary-Education future sources of trained manpower.
