Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

bibliography, but this omission is repaired by the authors' full discussion in their introduction of the dramatic search for sources and the role of the Coalfield History project in rescuing many of these on the very point of destruction. They have not produced a seamless robe of history: joint authorship inevitably creates some discontinuities. Our History it may be, but the best of its kind, which has resulted in a book all labour historians would have been proud to have written. PATRICK RENSHAW Sheffield THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGES OF EDUCATION IN WALES, 1925-78. By D. Gerwyn Lewis. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1980. Pp. 280. £ 12.95. The training colleges of Wales are rare among its educational institutions in not having earned a place in Welsh historical mythology. The reason is that the early history of the colleges, as Dr. Lewis indicates, has none of that epic quality associated with the birth of the University and the county schools. The first two training colleges in Wales were founded by the Anglican National Society, while Hugh Owen and the nonconformists were happy, initially, to see Welsh students trained at Borough Road. The University of Wales has been linked with the training colleges only since 1929, when the Teacher's Certificate, previously awarded by the Board of Education, was taken over by the University Board for Training Colleges, The relationship was not one of equals in higher education. The University not only possessed an academic status to which the colleges aspired but its products, then as now, were differentiated by their economic status in society. True across the professions, this was particularly marked in teaching when government policy sharply distinguished between the secondary and elementary sectors-and the pay of teachers in those sectors. However, it is apparent from Dr. Lewis's analysis that University influence on the examination system of the training colleges was less malign than on the secondary schools through the matriculation system. In any case links at this stage were limited. It is fascinating to read of the lack of protest by the University Board when training college numbers were cut substantially in the 1930s. The author next takes us through post-war, post-McNair (1944) changes, which transformed what was substantially an examining relationship into close collaboration, based on the University of Wales School of Education. The School acted as the Area Training Organisation until 1975. The events of these years are fully analysed-rightly, since this was a period of unprecedented change. In the colleges there was the dizzy expansion of the 1960s, the introduction of the B.Ed. degree awarded by the University, and a growing sense of identity and confidence in the colleges to which the University