Recruitment to Teaching in the Years of Expansion

Abstract

Most of what we know about the social background of new teachers in Britain derives from survey material gathered a good many years ago. National figures come from the 196 2 survey carried out for the Robbins' committee which described the characteristics of entrants to teacher training colleges' and Kelsall, Poole and Kuhn's survey of 1960 graduates2 or from the even earlier study of serving teachers surveyed by Floud and Scott in 1955 which distinguished ently cohorts, the rnost recent being for teachers beginning their careers in 1945-55.3 The 1 g60s saw a very substantial expansion of the teaching profession in the United Kingdomfrom 315,000 teachers in 1960 to 483,ooo in 1974, an increase of 53 per cent, while teacher training more than doubled.4 Overlapping this period there was, it would seem, an increasing number of men of manual worker origin who found employrnent in white-collar and professional occupations.5 Evidence is regrettably lacking on how far women may have experienced this increase in upward intergenerational mobility. Yet, even though since the Second World War more than half the men in white collar jobs had working class fathers, at the same time, and despite the increased numberofsuch jobs, the proportion recruited from working-class origins does not seem to have increased.6 The pressure to expand opportunities in secondary and subsequently further and higher education has stemmed in part from a belief that such expansion would lead to a higher take up rate on the part of children from the working class.7 Yet several studies have shown that the expanded facilities have been largely to the advantage of the middle classes,8 with the result that there has been less than anticipated impact on mobility. The question arises how far this general pattern has characterized entry to the teaching profession. Floud and Scott9 suggest that since the Second World War the attractiveness of the teaching profession to children of manual workers may have been declining. On the other hand, teaching has long been one of the more attractive occupations for the occupationally mobile'° and we might reasonably expect to find proportionately more teachers in the