Welsh Journals

WHICH NATION'S SCHOOLS? DIRECTION AND DEVOLUTION IN WELSH EDUCATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Gareth Elwyn Jones. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1990. Pp. xi, 231. £ 19.95. In 1947 the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Education opened an office in Cardiff. By 1952 80 per cent of its work was conducted from there and most of its confidential files were transferred there. In the 1960s the Taff flooded the basements in which the files were stored and many were destroyed. Most fortunately those containing the plans of Welsh local education authorities for the development of education in their areas in response to the Education Act of 1944 were saved. These files have recently become available under the thirty-year rule and Professor Gareth Jones has drawn extensively upon them. The result is an extremely valuable work which complements his earlier book, Controls and Conflicts in Welsh Secondary Education, 1889-1944 (1982), which was also published on behalf of the University of Wales Faculty of Education. Two of the themes of the work were the failure of Welsh secondary education to develop a distinctive character and the great difference between the provision of secondary education in urban and rural Wales. These themes occur again in the period immediately following the Second World War, and Gareth Jones shows that the lack of distinctiveness and homogeneity in Welsh secondary education during this period can be blamed on the Welsh Department. The development plans for the reorganisation of secondary education submitted by local education authorities to the Welsh Department in the late 1940s, and the Department's responses, are examined in detail. A few of the plans, those which accorded fairly closely with the view of the Welsh Department and its parent body, the Ministry of Education, were approved with only minor amendments, after close bureaucratic scrutiny and detailed negotiations. Other plans, like the Swansea development plan of 1947, were only approved after fundamental changes, after bitterness and controversy, and after a considerable passage of time. Indeed, the revised Swansea plan, which eventually met the wishes of the minister and the views of the civil servants in the Welsh Department, was, in 1958, the last to be approved in England and Wales. The original Swansea plan was extremely radical. It proposed that all secondary education within the borough should be in six eleven-to-eighteen multilateral schools. It did not have the whole-hearted support of the director of education, and there was collusion between the director and the district HMI to delay matters so that the authority could think again. Neither did it have the support of the civil servants in the Welsh Department who, as always, were preoccupied with the need to make adequate provision for the grammar-school type of pupil. In this they had the backing of HMIs who were eager to preserve the grammar schools in which they had been educated, not because they were against multilateralism per se but because they wanted to preserve what they saw as a ladder of opportunity which would help to succeed those, who, like themselves, were of relatively humble origins.