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Background
Politics
In October 1964, after 13 years of Conservative government, Harold Wilson (1916-1995) (pictured) led the Labour Party to a general election victory with a Commons majority of just four seats. He called another election in March 1966 and was rewarded with a larger majority of 98.
In social policy terms Wilson was a liberal. Under his leadership, there were reforms in education, health, housing, gender equality, price controls, pensions, provisions for disabled people and child poverty.
His government abolished capital punishment (in 1965) and supported bills tabled by backbench MPs which
- decriminalised homosexuality (1967);
- legalised abortion (1967);
- abolished theatrical censorship (1968); and
- reformed divorce law (1969)
- a remarkable achievement by any standard.
Post-war reconstruction was now largely complete and the economy was growing, but the government inherited 'a concealed deficit of some £800 million in the balance of payments' (Middleton and Weitzman 1976:349) and Wilson was compelled to devalue the pound in 1967.
Internationally, the period was marked by the continuation of the 'cold war' between the USSR and the West, the disastrous US war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, as predicted by Macmillan, the decolonisation of Africa.
Labour lost the general election of June 1970 to the Conservatives, led by Edward (Ted) Heath, but returned to power in 1974.
There was one appalling human tragedy affecting schoolchildren during this period. At 9.15 on the morning of 21 October 1966, after three weeks of heavy rain, 110,000 cubic metres of colliery waste slid down a hillside and engulfed the junior school in the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil. 116 children and 28 adults died in the incident; many of the survivors suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (Wikipedia: Aberfan disaster).
Society
Most households now had radio, television and a refrigerator; many had a car; some had freezers.
Significant developments in science and technology included the laser, the first computer video game, audio cassette tapes, touch-tone telephones, colour television, automatic teller machines, the computer mouse and the Arpanet (forerunner of the internet). In 1961 Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go into orbit round the earth; just eight years later - in 1969 - the US put a man on the moon.
In entertainment, some hugely successful films were produced, including The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey; British popular music flourished with groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; and new fashions included Beatles haircuts, the bikini and the Mary Quant mini-skirt.
However, the period is probably best remembered for an explosion of fresh ideas and different lifestyles, and the rise of a youth culture which challenged authority. There were campaigns for women's rights and gay rights; new styles of clothing and popular music; and the use of psychedelic drugs (notably LSD). Many saw these developments as liberating and empowering; others regarded them with distaste and feared the collapse of the social order. In the universities, student protests led to conflict.
Brian Harrison argues that
Most people who lived through the 1960s did not feel that they were collectively experiencing an outlook special to a decade ... But once the decade could be viewed complete, the phrase 'the sixties' became identified with throwing off old inhibitions, conventions, and restraints (Harrison 2011:473).
Four themes, he says, characterised the decade: 'Youth in revolt', 'political radicalism', 'the challenge to the rigidities and formalities of the adult world', and 'the reaction against wartime austerity and puritanism' (Harrison 2011:473-9).
Education
The school was increasingly seen as an instrument for tackling social problems and for countering the power of the new mass media - television - which was becoming 'a ubiquitous experience for schoolchildren, helping to mould their musical tastes, their heroes, their aspirations and their language' (Lawson and Silver 1973:450).
This daily window gazing on the wider world gave contact with vocal skills and the exploration of all manner of questions by knowledgeable commentators. The resulting sophistication and experience of the world provided a further stimulus for more demanding education (Middleton and Weitzman 1976:332).
The economics of education had been 'a relatively untilled field' (Simon 1991:291). But in the 1960s the development of 'human capital theory', in which economic growth was seen, at least in part, as a function of investment in education, and of sociological theories about 'wastage', now persuaded economists that comprehensive education was a means of maximising economic outcomes.
The leading exponents of this theory in the 1960s were John (later Lord) Vaizey (1929-1984), 'an extremely prolific writer and analyst, who fully supported the swing to comprehensive education' (Simon 1991:291) and Maurice (later Lord) Peston (1931-2016), who founded the economics department at Queen Mary College London, and advised various government departments and Labour Secretaries of State over four decades.
Education became an 'expanding industry' (Simon 1991:293) in the 1960s as the school population increased. By the end of the decade the number of pupils in primary and secondary schools had risen by 700,000 and 300,000 respectively and, for the first time ever, a British government spent more on education - £2.3bn in 1969-70 - than on defence (Simon 1991:261). The number of university places also rose, as more women undertook higher education courses.
There was a corresponding expansion in school building, with innovative designs 'embodying new conceptions of the nature and purpose of education' (Simon 1991:293). In 1964, the Education Department's architects' unit, which had hitherto been restricted to work on grammar schools, designed its first comprehensive school. It soon gained a reputation for modern, eye-catching buildings.
Though Wilson supported change and expansion in education, his record on secondary education was disappointing: while the proportion of children attending comprehensive schools rose to thirty per cent during this period, his government, like the post-war Labour government under Attlee, failed to establish a fully comprehensive system.
The raising of the school leaving age to sixteen, first acknowledged as inevitable by Spens in 1938, recommended as soon as practicable by the 1944 Act, and made a major priority in the 1963 Crowther Report, was finally agreed by Wilson's government for implementation in 1970-71 - and then postponed until 1972 by the same government for economic reasons.
The Secretaries of State for Education and Science in this period were:
| 18 October 1964 | Michael Stewart (1906-1990) |
| 22 January 1965 | Anthony Crosland (1918-1977) |
| 29 August 1967 | Patrick Gordon-Walker (1907-1980) |
| 6 April 1968 | Edward Short (1912-2012) |
The sociology of education
As noted in the previous chapter, there had been a number of reasons for the growing dissatisfaction with selective secondary education - not least, the discrediting of the theory of innate intelligence on which it was based. Psychologists such as Philip Vernon had argued that children should not be segregated in different types of school, and had underlined the need for more open and flexible school structures to meet their needs.
Those concerns were now fuelled by the increasing influence of sociologists, who argued that the divided secondary system discriminated against children of working-class origin and that, in many cases, 'differences in academic performance and access to higher education ... were attributable to social class and regional differences' (Lawson and Silver 1973:446). The Gurney-Dixon Report Early Leaving (1954) and the Crowther Report 15 to 18 (1959) had already condemned the immense wastage of ability resulting from the divided school system. Now, leading sociologists such as AH Halsey (1923-2014) and Jean Floud (1915-2013) argued for the comprehensive school on the basis that it enhanced social mobility and helped create a more egalitarian society.
Anthony Crosland, who was 'well versed in the literature of the sociologists - particularly their educational analyses' (Simon 1991:291) appointed Halsey as his personal adviser at the Department of Education and Science (DES) - the first of such 'political' appointments.
National Survey of Health and Development
Evidence to support the sociologists' view was provided by the National Survey of Health and Development, a longitudinal study involving 5,000 children who were born in the first week of March 1946. It was led by Dr JWB (James) Douglas (1914-1991) (pictured), Director of the Medical Research Council Unit at the London School of Economics, who originated and developed the large birth-cohort study research method.
Two reports on the cohort had already been published: Maternity in Great Britain in 1948 and Children Under Five in 1958. In the third report, The Home and the School, published in 1964, Douglas described the findings of the survey relating to ability and attainment in the primary school.
In his introduction to the book, Professor DV Glass, Chair of the Population Investigation Committee, warned of 'the absence of sufficient informed and persistent action to compensate for built-in inequalities of conditions, attitudes and behaviour' (Glass 1964:xix). He went on:
Beginning with handicaps, in the sense of having a poorer physical and cultural environment, the children suffer an intensification of disadvantages, relative to middle class children, during their primary school years. If they live in poor housing conditions, they may well attend schools with a low record of success at the 11+ examination. Those who are least well cared for may find themselves allocated to the lower streams at school and their school performance will tend to conform accordingly. In general they are less likely to receive encouragement from their parents. Between the ages of 8 and 11 years, the working class and middle class children will thus tend to grow further apart in operational ability (Glass 1964:xix).
In the report, Douglas argued that working-class children were disadvantaged not only by the eleven plus selection system but by streaming within schools:
streaming by ability reinforces the process of social selection ... Children who come from well-kept homes and who are themselves clean, well clothed and shod, stand a greater chance of being put in the upper streams than their measured ability would seem to justify. Once there they are likely to stay and to improve in succeeding years. This is in striking contrast to the deterioration noticed in those children of similar initial measured ability who were placed in the lower streams. In this way the validity of the initial selection appears to be confirmed by the subsequent performance of the children, and an element of rigidity is introduced early into the primary schools system (Douglas 1964:118).
Douglas was modest in his claims for the survey:
Taken as a whole, this study provides strong evidence that between the ages of eight and eleven the performance of children in tests of mental ability and school achievement is greatly influenced by their homes and schools, influenced moreover in a predictable way. No claim is made that these tests measure innate ability; on the contrary, three out of the four given at each age were designed to measure the level of achievement in school subjects. All that has been shown is that a child's capacity to do well in his work at school is to a certain degree dependent on the encouragement he gets from his parents, the sort of home he has and the academic record of his school. The full influence of these factors on performance cannot be measured because tests were not given until the children were eight years old. But even if their influence is no greater than that suggested by the changes in score noted between eight and eleven years, which is unlikely, this represents an avoidable loss of ability which no system of selective examinations at eleven can eliminate, and which is likely to continue to lead to further loss through early leaving and academic failure in the secondary schools (Douglas 1964:120).
The national survey went on to look at the same children when they reached secondary schools. Its findings were published in All Our Future, by JWB Douglas, JM Ross and HR Simpson, in 1968. It concluded that
the social class differences in educational opportunity which were considerable at the primary school stage have increased at the secondary and extend now to pupils of high ability. Thus nearly half the lower manual working class pupils of high ability have left school before they are sixteen and a half years (Douglas, Ross and Simpson 1986:186).
(The National Survey of Health and Development is still (2017) in operation, the members of the cohort - who regard themselves as 'the Douglas children' - now aged 71. Further details can be found Another survey reached similar conclusions. Under the auspices of the Institute of Community Studies, it was conducted by the educationist Brian Jackson and the sociologist Dennis Marsden.
Dennis Marsden (1933-2009) also studied at Cambridge, after which he did supply teaching in a secondary modern school. In 1965 he became a Joseph Rowntree Research Fellow at the University of Essex, where he conducted a three-year study of poverty.
Addressing the North of England Education Conference in 1972, five years after the publication of her Committee's report, Lady Plowden said 'The solution to the problem of the inner city child eludes us and his failure to benefit from what is provided by our educational system still remains' (The Guardian 5 January 1972, quoted in Lawson and Silver 1973:465).
The problems, she said, were social as well as educational: in educational priority areas (EPAs - of which more below) the problems were 'outstripping our knowledge of how to deal with them'. She went on:
But the boldness was short-lived. Although the language of the Circular made it clear that the government expected local education authorities (LEAs) to go comprehensive, it stopped short of actually compelling them to do so. It presented some of the schemes which LEAs had put forward and invited others to adopt one: 'local education authorities are requested to submit plans to the Secretary of State for the reorganisation of secondary education in their areas on comprehensive lines' (DES 1965: para.43).
It concluded that the government had no desire to impose 'destructive or precipitate change on existing schools' and that 'the evolution of separate schools into a comprehensive system must be a constructive process requiring careful planning by local education authorities in consultation with all those concerned' (DES 1965: para.46).
For all its weaknesses, argues Brian Simon, the Circular was 'epoch-making' in that comprehensive secondary education was now national policy. Nevertheless, 'it was already clear that further battles lay ahead' (Simon 1991:281).
On 24 September 1965 a group of reformers - including Rhodes Boyson, Peter Townsend, Margaret Miles, Brian Simon and Caroline Benn - launched the Comprehensive Schools Committee to monitor developments and press for radical change. In the first number of its bulletin, the editorial argued that the future pattern of comprehensive education would be determined 'not by the Circular, nor by the initial plans submitted by the LEAs' but by the Secretary of State's decision as to 'which plans he accepts and which he rejects' (quoted in Simon 1991:282). The Committee noted that Crosland had accepted the plans of four authorities which involved a common school for eleven- to thirteen-year-olds followed by separate provision thereafter, but had rejected genuinely comprehensive schemes from three others.
Initial responses were mixed. Of the 163 local authorities, fifty already had, or were planning for, fully comprehensive schemes; around forty had set up working parties to produce plans (some more enthusiastically than others); and about twenty were unwilling to consider comprehensive reorganisation (Simon 1991:283). All the options in Circular 10/65 were being considered.
Wilson's government had grown in popularity during its seventeen months in office, but its small Commons majority had proved restrictive. Wilson therefore decided to call a general election in the hope of gaining a larger majority.
There would be more places in universities, colleges of education and leading technical colleges; and the Open University would be created to offer everyone the opportunity of studying for a full degree. Expenditure on the arts would rise by £2.5m in 1967.
Wilson's decision to call the election was justified: held on 31 March 1966, it resulted in a Labour majority of 98 seats.
Many hoped - and believed - that the new government, with its larger majority and its clear mandate for comprehensivisation, would now require all LEAs to go fully comprehensive.
Nonetheless, he set about 'rebuilding the machinery for salary negotiations and re-establishing trust between the central department and the profession'. His proposals for a self-governing profession were, however, 'viewed with some suspicion' (Middleton and Weitzman 1976:357).
Short's Green Paper setting out his proposals was ready for publication in the spring of 1970, but he was unhappy with the preface written by department officials and insisted on considerable revision. 'It was a fatal delay' (Middleton and Weitzman 1976:358): Wilson called an election in June, the Conservatives were returned to power, and Short's bill was lost.
Historically, the attitude of teachers had been mixed. Many had enthusiastically campaigned for comprehensivisation, but others - particularly in the grammar schools - had seen reorganisation as a threat to salaries and career prospects.
Support had grown during the 1950s and early 60s. Inside the Comprehensive School (1958) published by the National Union of Teachers (NUT), and Teaching in Comprehensive Schools (1960), published by the Assistant Masters' Association, had marked a growing interest in the issues involved.
At its annual conference in 1966, the NUT affirmed its support 'for the reorganisation of secondary education under a system of comprehensive schools' and specifically declared the union's opposition to systems of 'so-called comprehensive education' which involved 'a measure of selection of pupils at 13-plus and 14-plus for entry into different schools' (Simon 1991:286) - a specific attack on several schemes which Crosland had recently accepted.
Three years later, in April 1969, the NUT Conference called on the government to abolish selection for secondary education 'by incorporating the grammar schools and other selective secondary schools into the comprehensive system, thereby creating a unified system for all children'. The continued existence of the grammar schools, argued the motion, 'completely nullifies all attempts to create a fully comprehensive system' (quoted in Simon 1991:287).
It was certainly true that comprehensivisation in England had been implemented incoherently. Comprehensive schools 'lived in the shadow of selective education and in many cases perpetuated selective arrangements' (Jones 2003:78). Little wonder then, that radicals lost heart. Fife head teacher RF McKenzie spoke for many when he declared:
While parents in some areas had organised local campaigns to protect individual grammar schools, others had formed associations to argue for better primary education and comprehensive reorganisation. Among the first of these was the Association for the Advancement of State Education, established in Cambridge in 1960. Its members were 'well-informed about educational issues and articulate in expressing their views' (Chitty 1989:35) and soon gained considerable influence. In 1962, 26 such groups united to form the Confederation for the Advancement of State Education (CASE).
From 1966, both CASE and ACE began campaigning, not only for state (as opposed to private) education, but for a fully comprehensive system.
(The Confederation for the Advancement of State Education later became the Campaign for the Advancement of State Education, and is now known as the Campaign for State Education.)
Maude, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, represented 'the voice of English history, English traditions and experience'; Boyle 'adhered to the liberal Conservative tradition with its tendency to seek radical alterations in existing social welfare systems' (Knight 1990:23).
Both regarded selection as an essential part of the education system but they disagreed over comprehensivisation. Boyle 'defended the movement by local authorities towards more informal methods of selection, and to a less rigid conception of the role of the grammar school' (Knight 1990:23).
From 1964 Maude and others began formulating proposals for a change in Conservative Party policy.
Meanwhile, local groups continued their campaigns to save particular grammar schools. The National Education Association was formed in the autumn of 1965 to coordinate these groups. However, public support for such campaigns tended to dissipate once reorganisation had taken place, and the Association 'made no effective impact on the national scene' (Simon 1991:294).
By the end of 1966 six authorities were reported to be defying the government, but the real problems began in 1967, when municipal elections resulted in a Tory landslide: in addition to taking cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, the Conservatives also gained control of the Greater London Council, and with it, the Inner London Education Authority. This was 'the really shattering result ... Winning these exceeded the wildest Conservative hopes' (Education 21 April 1967 quoted in Simon 1991:294).
The Comprehensive Schools Committee argued that these results were not a verdict on reorganisation. 'There is no evidence', they said, 'that this issue contributed to the anti-government swing: rather the reverse.' In London, for example, the Tories had deliberately played down the issue 'because their own poll provided powerful evidence of the popularity of the comprehensive idea' (Simon 1991:294-5).
In Manchester, the new Conservative council decided that comprehensive reorganisation would go ahead as planned; and the new council in Bristol contented itself with a token gesture - restoring free places at local direct-grant grammar schools.
In London, Christopher Chataway, the new Conservative leader of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), was horrified to discover that some newly-elected Tory councillors were intent on breaking up comprehensive schools and replacing them with secondary modern and grammar schools. He made it clear that he had no intention of presiding over such destruction and eventually managed to persuade his colleagues to take a more moderate line.
In June 1967, aware that a substantial minority of Conservative Party members were still hostile to comprehensive schools, Ted Heath, who had replaced Douglas-Home as party leader in July 1965, made a major policy statement to the Conservative National Advisory Committee on Education. Supporting the line that Boyle, as official opposition spokesman, had been taking, Heath said:
At the following year's conference, Angus Maude made a powerful 'save-the-grammar-schools' speech in which he said that local education authorities were being 'bullied, bewildered and blackmailed' into implementing reorganisation schemes 'calculated to destroy established grammar schools and to lower academic standards'. He was given a standing ovation. Boyle replied that he would willingly fight against socialist dogmatism, but 'do not ask me to oppose it with an equal and opposite conservative dogmatism' (quoted in Simon 1991:296).
Meanwhile, many local authorities - including Conservative-controlled Manchester and London - continued to reorganise; Leicestershire completed the task and abolished the eleven plus in 1969, the first English county to do so. Writing in The Times (23 July 1970), David Donnison (who succeeded Newsom as Chair of the Public Schools Commission, of which more below) summed up the position that summer:
DES figures showed that the total number of comprehensive schools of all types had increased from 262 in 1965 to 748 in 1968 and would rise to more than 1,100 in 1970, by which time thirty per cent of secondary pupils in the maintained sector would be in comprehensive schools. Of the comprehensive schools open in 1970, more than a third would be 'all-through' schools catering for pupils up to the age of eighteen, a third would cater for pupils up to sixteen, a quarter would be two-tier schemes with a break at thirteen or fourteen (as in Leicestershire), the remainder being interim schemes such as Doncaster's (Simon 1991:298-9).
Brian Simon points out, however, that only 43 per cent of these schools were genuinely comprehensive, the rest having to co-exist with local grammar schools. This figure was not publicised by the DES, which classed all 'reorganised' schools as comprehensive. 'Ministers also tended to exaggerate success rates in their public statements' (Simon 1991:299).
Reformers were far from happy with the situation. In the Comprehensive Reorganisation Survey, published by the Comprehensive Schools' Committee in the autumn of 1968, Caroline Benn asked:
Dissatisfaction with the rate of progress was also forcibly expressed at Labour's 1968 conference. To loud applause, the party's Deputy Leader George Brown (1914-1985) declared that the government must 'make the comprehensive educational system really valid and really universal' (report in The Teacher 4 October 1968 quoted in Simon 1991:298).
Delegates called for a new education act to make the provision of comprehensive secondary education a statutory duty, and DES Minister Alice Bacon (1909-1993) assured them that the government intended to do so - but not before the publication of the Redcliffe-Maud Report on local government reform.
In the event, Edward Short's (short) bill requiring all local authorities in England and Wales to develop non-selective school systems was laid before Parliament early in 1970. But even here, the prevarication continued: the bill would, in some cases, have permitted schemes for partial comprehensivisation. No one bothered to explain how you could logically run comprehensive and grammar schools side by side. It received its second reading in February, but was lost when Wilson called a general election in June.
Nonetheless, as the election approached, 'there seemed every prospect that, soon after the assembly of the next parliament, comprehensive education would become a statutory duty' (Simon 1991:301). But it was not to be: the Tories were returned to power and, although the process of comprehensivisation continued - indeed, accelerated - the opportunity to create a fully comprehensive system had been missed.
The exam system increased the pressure on comprehensive schools to stream their pupils.
The General Certificate of Education (GCE), which had been introduced in 1951, was the only officially accredited exam leading to higher education and the professions. It was 'clearly and specifically designed as a grammar school examination' (Simon 1991:303): Attlee's post-war Labour government had actually banned secondary modern pupils from taking it. As a result, the grammar school curriculum and its pedagogy were 'transferred wholesale, and without serious modification' (Simon 1991:303) into the new comprehensive schools.
As noted in the previous chapter, the 1960 Beloe Report had recommended the creation of a new Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE). This was introduced in 1965 and made the position even worse. There were now two distinct exams running in parallel - GCE for the top twenty per cent of the ability range and CSE for the next twenty per cent, resulting in even greater pressure on schools to divide students between 'academic' and 'non-academic' streams:
In October 1967 the Schools Council (of which more below) began working on ideas for a single examination system - something most comprehensive heads wanted, according to a survey in 1968. The Council published its recommendations in July 1970 but the elitist views of the civil service, the universities and successive education secretaries ensured that no reform of the exam system was undertaken for almost twenty years. In the meantime, some schools effectively abolished the GCE by entering pupils only for the CSE.
Comprehensivisation in England and Wales, argues Brian Simon, had been undertaken in a half-hearted manner, with 'no overall planning, ... no serious thinking through of its implications on a national basis', and with no 'official thought, enquiry or study made as to what should comprise an appropriate curriculum for the new comprehensive schools' (Simon 1991:305).
The effect had been to impose a differentiated structure on comprehensive schools which was precisely what they were supposed - and expected - to overcome.
The concept of the unstreamed comprehensive school had been around for a long time, but the idea that all 'normal' children should follow a common curriculum was 'new and, in a sense, revolutionary' (Simon 1991:308). The Organisation of Comprehensive Secondary Schools, published by London County Council in 1953, had recommended that pupils of different levels and abilities should be taught together in some subjects, though it accepted that streams or sets might be needed for more academic subjects.
By the mid-1960s it was clear from research undertaken by sociologists that streaming predetermined a child's development, and many primary schools were abandoning the practice. Teachers in comprehensive schools (and also in secondary modern and grammar schools) began to debate whether streaming was appropriate for 11- to 13-year-olds.
He argued that 'Streaming should not be accepted uncritically'. It was probably beneficial to 'some bright children and the very weak', but there was 'little to commend it for the large majority of children' (Thompson 1965:88).
Further conferences on the issue, organised by universities and local authorities, followed in Nottingham, Gloucestershire, Bedfordshire, Exeter, Reading and York.
Surveys conducted in 1968 and 1971 showed that the number of comprehensive schools experimenting with more flexible forms of grouping was growing. The proportion of schools using some form of mixed ability grouping for first-year pupils rose from 22 per cent in 1968 to almost 35 per cent in 1971; while the proportion using traditional streaming fell from 20 per cent to 5 per cent. The most popular system was banding - a 'transitional mode between strict streaming on the one hand, and full non-streaming on the other' (Simon 1991:310).
The sociologist Dennis Marsden argued that there were now two opposing concepts of the comprehensive school - the 'egalitarian' and the 'meritocratic':
Brian Jackson (1932-1983) (pictured) grew up in a working-class home in Huddersfield. He attended a local grammar school, went on to gain a First in English at Cambridge, and then taught in primary schools for four years. He and Michael Young (of whom more below) founded the Advisory Centre for Education in 1960, and the National Extension College at Cambridge in 1963.
Bridget Plowden (1910-2000) (pictured), whose father was Master of Downing College Cambridge, became a juvenile magistrate and enjoyed charitable work, but first came to public attention when Boyle asked her to chair the enquiry into primary schools. She went on to become vice-chair of the BBC governors and then chair of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. In her eighties she was still involved with several charities, including the Council for Gypsy and Travellers' Children and the volunteer reading help programme in schools.
Planning for the Open University began in 1965. Jennie Lee (1904-1988) (pictured), Minister of State for Education, produced a White Paper outlining the government's proposals and appointed Sir Peter Venables as chair of a planning committee whose members included university vice-chancellors, educationalists and broadcasters.
