ABSTRACT
As Britain’s economic position worsened through the 1970s, the purposes of education came under question. James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976 is generally regarded as a tone setter for many of the subsequent changes:
I am concerned…to find complaints from industry that new recruits from the schools sometimes do not have the basic tools to do the job that is required…there seems to be a need for a more technological bias in science teaching that will lead towards practical applications in industry rather than towards academic studies.
