Education Act 1944
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The Education Act 1944 changed the education system for secondary schools in England and Wales. This Act, commonly named after the Conservative politician Rab Butler, introduced the "Tripartite System" of secondary education and made secondary education free for all pupils. The tripartite system consisted of three different types of secondary school: grammar schools; secondary technical schools; and secondary modern schools.
To assess which pupils should attend which school, they took an exam known as the 11 plus. The system was intended to allocate pupils to the schools best suited to their “abilities and aptitudes”, but in practice the number of grammar schools, for the academically inclined, remained unchanged, and few technical schools were ever established. As a result, most pupils went to secondary modern schools, whether they were suitable or not, while most funding went to grammar schools.
One of the ground-breaking results of the Act was to educate and mobilise the working class. It opened secondary school to the working class, and as a result, a far higher percentage attended higher education after secondary school. This newly found education increased working class awareness of their disadvantaged social position and created a bitter class division between the working and middle class. Such division was illustrated in the theatrical works of John Osbourne in the late 1950s.
The Act renamed the Board of Education as the Ministry of Education, giving it greater powers and a bigger budget; ended fee-paying for state secondary schools; and enforced the division between primary (5-11 years old) and secondary (11-15 years old) that many local authorities had already introduced. It also proposed raising the school-leaving age to 16, a measure that was not followed through until 1972; and provided for community colleges, offering education for both children and adults, a measure that was never followed through except in Cambridgeshire. The Act also introduced compulsory prayer into all state-funded schools on a daily basis. This clause was amended by the Education Reform Act 1988, which specified that the act of worship should be of a broadly Christian message unless such a message was deemed to be inappropriate for a particular school or group of children. The amendment also specified that the act of worship could now take place in classes, rather than the previous system of conducting worship in assemblies.
source: { Dunford, John, Paul Sharp, The Education System in England and Wales, London: Longman, 1990, 17-24.}
The act was repealed by the Education Act 1996.
