History of education in Wales (1939–present)

During World War II around 200,000 children were moved from London, Liverpool and the West Midlands of England to Wales as part of the evacuation scheme.

[6] Equal status between different school types was also not established: secondary moderns were seen as a poor alternative to grammars, and the latter group received more than twice as much money for each child.

[12] Local authorities were generally resistant to the creation of state secondary schools intended to cater to particular religious groups and relatively few were established in Wales.

[17] The Hadow Report of 1931, which was an influence on junior schools in the postwar years, argued that the main priority of education at this age should be children's health and happiness.

The 1948 school inspection report on Ysgol Gymraeg Aberystwyth, the first formally Welsh-medium primary school, was very positive, commenting that teaching included "lively and varied activities with plenty of exercise for imagination and for creative work in language, in movement and in art"[24] which taught children "treasures of Welsh lore, song and legend"[25] and "later... knowledge of English language, literature, song and story, and... some understanding of the ways of peoples of other lands".

The report recommended that:[26]"The main concern of the teacher should be to establish every child securely in the control of his mother tongue, Welsh or English.

Alun Morgan says this was due to a focus on gaining qualifications in English and a feeling in some areas that a heavy emphasis on Welsh matters was too narrow for secondary schools.

He also suggests a "strongly Welsh-speaking and Nonconformist"[27] school inspectorate was finding it difficult to persuade "an increasingly English-speaking and more secular Wales"[27] to follow its advice.

However, there continued to be shortages of teachers and the number of pupils staying at school after the minimum leaving age increased but remained relatively low.

Concern about a breakdown in traditional structures of authority, and an increase in teenage rebellion along with juvenile delinquency, focused on the group of young people in their mid-teens who were not in formal education.

However, there was a degree of reluctance both towards the principle of losing grammar schools and to another major upheaval in secondary education not long after the immediate postwar reforms.

[36] This caused much worry among education officials at the time; studies attributed the issue to grammar school-style teaching methods which neglected lower-ability pupils.

[38] The Hadow report had argued that the curriculum for this age group should "be thought of in terms of activity and experience rather than of knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored".

[39] This new situation became deeply politically controversial; by the end of the 1970s, the central government had reasserted a greater degree of control over primary schools.

Various studies found that reading books for young children emphasised traditional gender roles, the subjects taught differed by sex at all ages, boys were encouraged to be more assertive and given more attention by their teachers.

[44] However, historians Gareth Elwyn Jones and Gordon Wynne Roderick say this had a limited effect on the overall direction of the government concerning education in Wales.

According to Jones and Roderick, this essentially turned schools into competing businesses aiming to attract more pupils to get more money, breaking down the spirit of cooperation that had often existed between them previously.

The idea that every child should receive the same set of subjects taught to the same level was new in the history of state-funded education, and certainly unlike the way the system had been run since World War II.

[47] Previously, schools, and to a large extent individual teachers, had a great deal of autonomy over what they taught, leading to inconsistent standards.

[77] A 2005 report argued that in the years after devolution, education policy in the four constituent countries of the UK had diverged: for example, England had pursued reforms intended to create a wider range of options for families while Wales (and Scotland) focused on a more universal experience of schooling.

Finally, he concluded that performance data did not suggest that Wales had improved more rapidly than England, although there were considerable difficulties in making this type of assessment.

[81] Egan has argued that the difficulties faced by children from English-speaking households in Welsh-medium education contributed to the results as well as Wales' relative poverty.

[82] This led to Leighton Andrews, the Welsh education minister, instituting a variety of policies in the early 2010s intended to push school improvements more forcefully.

Standardised testing was reintroduced in literacy and numeracy, schools were put into groups based on performance and regional consortia were given more power to push improvement.

The report noted that the Welsh education system tended to have poorer outcomes than its English counterpart including a greater gap in GCSE performance based on economic background, higher youth unemployment and lower university enrolment.

[96] The Welsh university colleges experienced difficulties during World War II with staff shortages, neglected repairs, falling student numbers and shared accommodation with other institutions.

This was a result of the Cold War, a desire for Britain to remain a great power after the end of the British Empire and economic competition from abroad.

[107] Access to university remained very limited with only 15% of the relevant age group across England and Wales reaching the necessary level of qualification for admission in 1962 and only 4% enrolling.

An enquiry into the subject concluded that, at a time when young people were feeling newly liberated in various ways, travelling far away from their family homes to study appeared as an attractive option to assert their autonomy and ambition.

The argument given in favour of this at the time was that the state could not afford to pay for far higher numbers of young people attending university than in the past.