A Journalist’s View

Abstract

In his chapter George Low foresees the final dissolution of the 1944 Education Act,. In it the Coalition government with R. A. Butler as Education Minister set up the British public education system near the end of the war. This was a ‘national system set up by Parliament but locally administered councils and religious bodies’. Low’s chapter relates the steady erosion of this central-local system, first by increased centralisation from Westminster and Whitehall and then by privatisation under the Thatcher and Cameron regimes. But now, in this modern era of distrust of central government and political parties, Low detects a public desire to return to localism and public involvement in services like education. Also, in the age of the internet there is a rapidly expanding opportunity for families and individuals to follow their own paths through education from the cradle to the grave. So there could be a Renaissance for the Butler dream of ‘education for all to meet both national aims and local needs’.