Education Policies

Abstract

Chapter one, ‘Education Policies’, explores the policies that framed teachers’ careers, especially from the perspective of teachers. Seen this way, the history of policies looks quite different. It begins in 1846, more than two decades before the 1870 Education Act which so much scholarship on the history of education takes as its starting point. In the very year of laissez-faire’s supposed triumph, the state undertook a massive social intervention by creating two remarkable—and quite expensive—institutions open to girls and boys alike: pupil teaching and training colleges. Hundreds of thousands of British girls and boys took advantage of the clear, state-funded path which these institutions offered to becoming a teacher.