Beveridge Report
<p>climate of opinion had changed about the role of education in the falling birth-rate.
For in 1940 there were still those who argued that "even if free secondary education
were State-provided for all children instead of for the miserable ten or twelve per
cent who receive it today, little improvement would be seen" [5]. But Churchill's
subsequent omission of any mention of an Education Bill in the King's speech led
Beveridge's brother-in-law, Professor Tawney, to launch the Council for Educational
Advance to rectify such an omission [6].
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Muscled by the T.U.C., the N.U.T., the W.E.A. and the Co-operative Union, its
twelve-point programme [7] carried the argument beyond the facile opportunism
afforded by falling numbers (two million less than in 1918) to re-organise the
schools and reduce the size of classes. And it was seen by the Journal of Education
as "making it plain that the birth rate in England is too low, and that it is in
everbody's interest to secure the physical and mental welfare of every child,
however humbly born" [8].
For R. H. Tawney, its chairman, had in 1940 introduced a study part-authored
by a research associate of the Population Investigation Committee in which "the
nemesis of a plutocratic educational system" was described as "the adjustment not
of education to the needs of the children but of the number of children to the
limitations of education" [9].
Just how far such sentiments had sunk into other journals aiming 'to lead rather
than to follow' can be seen in the Economist's editorial on 'Happy Families?', which
expected little from the Beveridge plan to bring about a rise in fertility as:
"social security means exactly what it says: security against want, the
maintenance of a minimum standard, but not the provision of a higher
standard".
• Stressing the connection between increased production and adequate manpower, it
urged that the Beveridge plan for children's allowances should have physical
counterparts in houses and schools of an adequate standard. And on schools it used
words suspiciously like Tawney's by arguing for:
"increasing the standard; not of restricting the children to the opportunities
available but of making far more opportunities available" [10].</p>