ABSTRACT
The 1944 Education Act is a landmark in the history of further education in that, for the first time, it placed upon every Local Education Authority a statutory duty to provide ‘adequate facilities’ for further education in its area, further education being defined as full-time or part-time education and leisure-time occupation for persons over compulsory school-leaving age. Since the end of the war, the growth in further education has been so phenomenal as to merit the term ‘explosion’. In terms of the growth in the numbers of students and staff, there was considerable progress in this decade over the whole field of further education. The publication of the government White Paper on ‘Technical Education’ made 1956 a landmark in the post-war history of further education. The Report has been criticized for concentrating on the technical education of the more able boys and girls, at the expense of the general education of the less able.
