Locating 'parent power' in the history of post-1945 British secondary education (DOMUS Seminar)

Speaker Dr Chris Jeppesen, University of Cambridge

This paper emerges from the ongoing ESRC-funded project Secondary Education and Social Change in the UK since 1945 [SESC]. This collaborative project, led by Professor Peter Mandler and based at the University of Cambridge, aims to write a history of secondary education after the Second World War from the bottom-up, foregrounding the voices and experiences of parents, pupils, and teachers over policy makers and expert commentators. Our research examines the ways in which the introduction of universal secondary education after 1945 intersected with, and contributed to, wider processes of social and cultural change in the second half of the twentieth century, making schools crucibles of social change.

Writing in the late 1950s, sociologist Jean Floud observed that ‘there has undoubtably been a post-war revolution in parents’ attitudes towards their children’s education, especially at the bottom of the social scale’. This observation, marginalized by policy makers and schools at the time and underplayed in the secondary literature since, is crucial to understanding the shape and pace of educational reform after 1945. Across all social classes parents expressed rising expectations for their children’s educational prospects, often pushing hard against the limitations imposed by the structures of the tripartite and comprehensive systems. Historians of education have tended to attribute the rise of ‘parent power’ in education to the introduction of neo-liberal, market-led reforms after 1979, however. This paper recovers earlier demands by parents for greater influence over their children’s education and situates this within the context of growing parent activism during the 1960s and 70s. Drawing on sociological research from this period, alongside the papers of various parent activist groups, it explores how parents operated simultaneously as individuals guarding the interests of their children but also came to understand themselves as part of wider constituencies with the capacity to initiate (or inhibit) change through collective action. Inevitably, these alliances splintered along lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and locality: those with the greatest cultural and economic resources were most likely to realise their demands in a system seemingly designed to meet their needs. Nonetheless, ongoing inequality of outcome should not blind us to the multifaceted ways in which parents sought to influence their children’s education across this period. By charting how contradictory and competing individualist and social democratic traditions were mobilized by parents, we gain fresh insight into how this diverse group contributed to the formation of new modes of democratic citizenship in postwar Britain.

 This talk will be followed by Q&A with Professor Jane Martin (Director of DOMUS).

All welcome at this free seminar