Phillip Brown - Routledge Revivals: Schooling Ordinary Kids (1987): Inequality, Unemployment, and the New Vocationalism

First published in 1987
by Tavistock Publications

This edition first published in 2018 by Routledge

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1987 Phillip Brown

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-54205-1 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-351-00972-0 (ebk)

In post-war Britain there has always been a minority of working-class pupils who appeared to accept the school, usually because they believed that by arming themselves with enough qualifications to compete for middle-class jobs, they could get out of their class of origin. Another minority have rejected the school as boring, irrelevant, and frequently repressive. This book, however, is about the invisible majority of ordinary working-class pupils (Kahl 1961; Jenkins 1983) who neither left their names engraved on the schools honours boards, nor gouged them into the top of classroom desks. It explains why these ordinary kids did not conform with the school ethos but were nevertheless willing to make an effort, and why they are now at the centre of a major educational crisis.

This crisis is closely connected to broader social and economic changes which have taken place outside the school over the last decade. Britains economy has been seriously affected by world recession and much of the countrys manufacturing industries languish in the shadow of international competition. There have been mass redundancies and unemployment on a scale which even at the time of Callaghans great debate on education in 1976, were unthinkable. We have also witnessed the rapid expansion of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) as the problem of unemployment among both young and old alike has become more acute and apparently more intractable. Job opportunities for school leavers have virtually collapsed in many parts of England and Wales. In Britain as a whole only 18 per cent of 16-year-olds entered employment in 1984 compared with over 60 per cent a decade earlier (DES 1985). These changing circumstances outside the school have been accompanied by the rise of Thatcherism and the new right (Hall and Jacques 1983). According to one of its main protagonists, Sir Keith Joseph, Thatcherism represents a political doctrine motivated by a desire to convert romantic and outmoded socialist aspirations into the acceptance of the new common ground of reality (Hillard 1986) which enshrines the principle of individual free enterprise.

It is hardly surprising therefore that the right have sought to define the present educational crisis as a consequence of ill-conceived egalitarian liberal democratic reforms in the post-war period, which they argue has resulted in an unprecedented decline in educational and moral standards. They also identify the educational system as having contributed to the massive increase in youth unemployment as a result of teachers inculcating anti-business and industrial attitudes into pupils who, as a result, are believed to be grossly ill-prepared for the economic realities of the late twentieth century. Consequently the Thatcher government has engaged in a major programme of educational reform in an attempt to ensure that the educational system meets the needs of industry. This new vocationalism (Bates et al. 1984; Ranson et al. 1986) has manifested itself in a number of recent programmes such as the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI); the Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE); and more recently the launch of twenty City Technology Colleges (CTCs).