The Training Colleges, 1945–59

Abstract

In the nineteenth century and later, enlarged opportunities for schooling produced at critical periods a demand for emergency schemes to provide additional teachers. This happened after Forster’s Elementary Education Act of 1870, the Balfour Act of 1902, after the end of the First World War with the Fisher Act in 1918 and at the end of the Second World War in 1945. In 1944 the Board of Education provided plans for the financial support of students coming direct from military or war-related service to be taught by staff appointed or seconded specially for a short-term scheme of emergency training. Temporary buildings were found and it was anticipated that from 1945 to 1955 about 70000 additional teachers would be needed to staff new and renovated schools and to bear the brunt of raising the school-leaving age from 14 to 15, which had been planned for 1945 but was ultimately decreed for 1947. Trying also to bring to the schools a framework of staffing, pupil-intake, equipment, location and building, was a planning operation demanding skill in improvising and the ability to decide and act quickly, if necessary without all the official pieces of paper, but with a consistent realism.1 KeywordsLocal AuthorityTraining CollegeEmergency SchemeEmergency TrainingAdditional TeacherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.