Abstract
The chapter reports on the growing independence of the labour movement marked by the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the election of twenty-nine Labour MPs in 1906. The Workers' Educational Association (WEA) emerged out of a mature working-class culture. The WEA was founded in May 1903 as the ‘Association to Promote the Higher Education of Workingmen’. Its name was changed two years later at its second annual meeting in Birmingham. Its founder, Albert Mansbridge, was an almost archetypal lower middle-class scholar. The chapter also highlights the reinvigoration of working-class education. The aim of the group, in essence, was to raise academic standards in the university and simultaneously broaden the social range of the intake. In other words, they stood for the same things that earnest young Liberals had advocated in the 1850s and 1860s when university extension was first contemplated.
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