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Plowden (1967) Notes on the text Volume 1 (page numbers in brackets) Preliminary pages (i-xxii)
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 The growth of the child
Part 3 The home, school and neighbourhood
Part 4 The structure of primary education
Part 5 The children in the schools: curriculum and internal organisation
Part 6 The adults in the schools
Part 7 Independent schools
Part 8 Primary school buildings and equipment; status; and research
Part 9 Conclusions and recommendations
Notes (486-495)
Research and Surveys about Plowden |
The Plowden Report (1967)
A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1967
[page 429 (unnumbered)]
[page 431] we must spend with an open hand.' 1167. This is not the best time in our history to attempt to follow the advice given to Marcus Aurelius. Throughout the three years in which we have studied our subject it has been borne in on us that even in our sphere of enquiry - only one part of the educational system - more money, manpower and new buildings are needed; and this at a time when demands for all public services are on the increase. Accordingly we have tried to assess the costs as well as the benefits of our proposals; and to match our assessment of educational and social needs against the resources we think might be available. We have asked what demands our proposals make on overall resources, on specific resources like teachers and buildings, and we have looked at the time-scale over which costs have to be met. In trying to assess the resources of money, manpower and buildings required to achieve our objectives, we have adjusted the scale and timing of our proposals and fitted them into a pattern which reflects their relative importance and which we hope will be realistic in the light of available resources. Nevertheless our recommendations will cost both resources and money; although we have looked for improvements in the most economical ways, what we suggest will entail new priorities as between education and other services and within education itself. The Present Position 1168. The first question to be asked is, indeed, not so much what more needs to be spent as whether what is being spent is being well spent. Our answer to this question, which might legitimately be posed by ratepayers and taxpayers, is that the primary schools are giving good value for the inadequate amount of money spent on them. Teachers, for example, who are the most costly element in expenditure, are not too many, but are too few and too unevenly distributed to do the job adequately. 1169. In none of our visits to schools did we see lavish provision of equipment, books, mechanical aids, tape recorders or film projectors. Nor was there sufficient secretarial or other ancillary assistance. On the contrary, we found an attitude of making do with the materials that were to hand. Far from there being unnecessary expense, increased provision of such aids would enable teachers to be more effective. As much as in any of the social services, the quality of the educational process depends on the nature and richness of the interaction between those who provide and those who receive the service. Those of our proposals which will improve the quality of the contact between teacher and pupil should be given high priority. It is for this reason that we stress the importance of recruiting large numbers of teachers' aides. For the same reason, we argue for better equipment and book allowances. 1170. There is a strong feeling that primary education, more than any other sector of education, is failing to secure its share of educational and of national expenditure. Some of the evidence is quoted in Chapter 28 where we have [page 432] brought together facts concerning the relatively poor treatment of primary teachers and schools, in terms of cash and other resources. Here we need only note that the staffing ratios, the condition of school building in many primary schools, and the treatment of primary schools in respect of equipment and capitation allowances all combine to provide for primary education less than it needs to do the job properly. The Economic Yield of Primary Education 1171. Before setting out the economic cost of our proposals we discuss the economic yields of primary education. We have noted the work which has been done, principally in the United States, to estimate the economic return to education (1, 2). Much of the work relates to education generally; data have been presented to show that the total amount of education received, and hence the stock of educated human capital, is growing faster than that of physical capital and estimates have been made of the contribution of education to economic growth. From this work it is clear that investment in education in Britain could make a substantial contribution to faster growth. 1172. It is difficult to quantify the educational benefits of primary education, and in the present state of knowledge it is also difficult to disentangle the economic contribution of primary from other stages of education. Primary education equips children to benefit from later schooling and further higher education. As the foundation laid in the primary schools is improved, more children will get on to more specific training after the school leaving age. The Robbins Report (3) argued that there is much untapped ability at present in this country. Improvements in primary education will begin the process of tapping it. 1173. We have noted American attempts to calculate a rate of return on successive years of primary and later education* (4, 5). This suggests returns for primary education as a whole which are no lower than those for later stages of education. But we do not consider that such calculations are appropriate for Britain. Here, where virtually all children complete primary education, what is of interest is the return on extra expenditure on children already being educated rather than the return on successive years of primary education. Further study of matters which might be helpful, such as the costs and benefits of reduced class size and of a relatively greater use of mechanical aids or other help in the classroom, is badly needed. 1174. Good primary education will help to equip children to live and work in a rapidly changing economy. Unlike the economy of the nineteenth century *The technique used is that based on the rate of return, which attempts to evaluate the economic return of additional years of schooling. The additional life time earnings of those with additional years of schooling is expressed as a rate of return on the cost of the extra years of schooling. For the United States income data are available for people who left school before completing the primary stage and W Lee Hansen has calculated incremental rates of return for all stages of education from the ages of six to 20. His results suggest that the average rate of return in the years up to 11 was as high as the average return up to the age of 20 - in both cases 12 per cent. The highest returns are shown for education between the ages of 12 and 13. Very high economic returns for the later stages of elementary education - returns considerably in excess of those shown by college education - are also suggested by Schultz. The actual figures (29 per cent and 35 per cent) shown by Hansen and Schultz may well be overestimates as the differences in life time earnings underlying the results are not attributable to education alone. [page 433] our present society does not require a small number of highly qualified men supported by an army of workers with routine skills owing little to education. It requires a highly adaptable labour force, which is not only more skilled, but is better able to learn new skills, to tackle new jobs and face new problems. Workers change their job and their homes frequently.* The educational assumptions that were appropriate for the economy of the nineteenth century have been largely superseded. 1175. The qualities needed in a modern economy extend far beyond skills such as accurate spelling and arithmetic. They include greater curiosity and adaptability, a high level of aspiration, and others which are difficult to measure. To assess these yields from primary education would require long term study of the effects of different systems and different approaches to the education of younger children. 1176. There are, besides, the more specific economic yields which may follow from the improvement of education in the most deprived areas. Those who receive their education under the handicaps described in Chapter 5 are often ill suited to the complex society in which they must live, unable to acquire skills and adapt to industrial change, unable to manage their family financial affairs, unable to adjust to social changes, and unable to pass on to their children abilities they have never themselves acquired. The support that society must give them is costly. Delinquency, family breakdown and long term dependence on public services are among the economic losses they impose on society as well as on themselves. Research may show whether such expensive consequences of poor early upbringing can be diminished if the quality of primary education is improved. Overall Resources 1177. Present policies allow for some improvement in terms of overall resources. During the first half of the sixties expenditure per child in real terms for the primary schools was stagnant, largely because they were unable to secure enough teachers. In 1963 there were fewer qualified teachers in the primary schools than in 1960, but the same number of pupils. But the National Plan (7) assumed an increase of about 25 per cent in expenditure on primary education in England and Wales between 1964/65 and 1969/70. Taking into account the increase of 16 per cent in the number of children in this period, the estimated increase per child is small - only some one and a half per cent a year - but it is a substantial improvement on the recent past. This point is also brought out by our own projections of expenditure. (Table 44, Column 2). If we assume that teacher supply improves at the rate recently announced by the Secretary of State, and that non-teaching costs per child rise at the annual rate of two and a half per cent predicted by the National Plan, expenditure per child will rise by eight per cent in the four years from 1966. 1178. The raising of the school leaving age in 1971 may cause difficulties for the primary schools. It will pre-empt nearly a quarter of the total capital investment in primary and secondary schools in the years 1969-72 and, unless *In a decade, a quarter of the labour force in a region like North West England may enter or leave the region. (6) [page 434] the positive steps we have advised in Chapter 23 are taken to stop the transfer of teachers, may retard the improvement of staffing standards in the primary schools. But the teacher supply programme in Chapter 23 implies that increased manpower and money will be needed at a growing rate by the middle of the decade. Our projections in Table 44 show an increase of 30 per cent in total current expenditure in primary schools between 1970/71 and 1978/79. This would be an increase of 17 per cent per child, or two per cent per child a year. Teachers 1179. The prospects for teacher supply have been set out in Chapter 23. Additions to staff will cause an increase of £118m in the cost of teachers at constant prices, 58 per cent between 1966/7 and 1978/9 or an average increase a child of 12 per cent. The schools are already making heavy demands on highly qualified manpower. We are anxious that primary education, with its poor staffing ratios, should not be left behind other stages of education; but we are bound to remember that in a fully employed and growing economy highly trained manpower is likely to remain scarce and that education will face continual competition from other parts of the economy. If so, teacher shortage may persist. 1180. Economic growth will normally lead to relative increases in the cost of teachers compared with other educational costs. Education is 'labour intensive' - a large proportion of its costs are labour costs, and in the whole economy it will be labour that will become scarcer and dearer and physical goods that will become relatively more abundant and cheaper. As incomes rise, those of teachers can be expected to rise roughly in line.* Compared with this the cost of materials, equipment, books, mechanical aids and the like, can be expected to fall. Aides and Assistants 1181. The scarcity of highly trained manpower, the poor staffing situation in primary education, and the virtual impossibility of expanding nursery education under present staffing policies have led us to see whether trained workers can be found who would serve as aides in the primary schools and could, as nursery assistants, provide the main staffing of the nursery groups. More than half of them will be married women. The National Plan has already called attention to this untapped source of labour supply. We are reporting in advance of the Ministry of Labour's Survey of married women which should produce fuller and up to date data, but there is already evidence that more of these women want to work. In Annex A to this chapter we argue that our recruitment proposals are not unreasonable. Although the employment of these married women will lead to an increase in public expenditure, their resource cost will be less than the money cost implies. Many of them will be additional to the labour force and will not be diverted from other jobs. The provision of nursery groups will of itself provide some of the supply of aides and assistants by releasing the time of mothers. There is a further offset to be made because nursery provision will release married women with *The Robbins Report (Appendix 4, Pt. IV) estimated the effect of this by increasing the salary component in its expenditure projections by 3¼ per cent a year. [page 435] small children to work outside the educational sector. They will be an important addition to the labour force at a time when an attempt to increase the pace of economic growth is producing the labour shortage forecast in the National Plan. We argue in Annex B to this chapter that the sum of these offsets may be of the order of £16-22 million a year by 1974. When the full number of nursery places is provided it will be greater. This will offset a significant proportion of the cost of employing married women as aides and nursery assistants. 1182. We also suggest recruiting girl school leavers whose ability level is largely, but not exclusively, represented by one to four O Level passes or the equivalent in CSE [Certificate of Secondary Education]. If our argument for expansion of the educational service by using less expensively trained manpower is accepted, it will mean cutting into a tranche likely to be increasingly needed for such jobs as nursing, the social and welfare services and other services, trades and professions. In the late sixties recruitment may be particularly difficult as numbers in this group will not increase for the years 1968-71, at a time when demand for such labour is rising. But from 1971, the number will grow, especially during the second half of the seventies. We discuss the chance of recruiting these girls in Annex A to this chapter; the evidence presented there suggests that it should be possible to recruit the numbers needed. 1183. The rise in the number of pupils in the primary schools, as predicted by the Registrar-General and the Department of Education and Science, and the consequence of shifts in population in the near future will require considerable new building. To meet this a programme for primary schools in England and Wales of £44-£45m a year at June 1966 prices is scheduled for the three years 1967/68-1969/70.* In the first half of the seventies, on the assumption that the pattern of provision for the increase in the primary school population and for population shift remains much as at present, primary school building for these basic needs is expected to run at a rate of about £40m a year. But secondary school building for basic needs, which will run at between £40 and £50m a year in the late sixties (excluding provision for raising of the school leaving age), is estimated to rise to about £70m in the first half of the seventies. Thus, simply to meet basic needs, a rise in the building programme from about £90m a year in the late 60s to over £110m in the first half of the seventies can be foreseen. Programmes are expected to fall in the late seventies when the school population is estimated to increase less rapidly. In the 1967/68 programme, about one quarter of the resources allocated to approved projects at the end of June 1966 (over £20m) was for the improvement of existing schools, mainly the replacement of primary schools. It cannot be assumed that such substantial allocations for improvement will be possible in the programmes for the two subsequent years. However, in the 1970s, elimination of some of the bottlenecks in the construction industry may remove one of the obstacles in the way of allocating more resources to the improvement of existing schools. Moreover, requirements of other sectors of the economy, notably house building, may ease as the rate of new household formation falls off in the seventies. *All figures relate to starts. Actual expenditure which includes the cost of land, fees and equipment will be about 35 to 40 per cent above this level. [page 436] Priorities 1184. Although the word 'priority' can mean both to have a stronger claim and to have a first claim in point of time, most of our proposals need not conflict with each other. There are several criteria by which priorities can be assessed. The first criterion is based on our judgements of educational and social needs. The second criterion is the measurable costs and benefits which can be balanced against each other. In making our recommendations on priorities we have asked ourselves the following questions about each proposal. What demands do they make on the overall resources of money or manpower? How far do they create demands on specific and limited resources and hence conflict directly with other schemes? Are there differences in the time scale over which costs have to be met and benefits felt? These are the main economic criteria. But economic costs must be set against educational and social objectives; educational and social objectives may still have priority even if they prove costly. 1185. We have taken account of the criteria and the constraints on additional expenditure discussed in earlier paragraphs in deciding the priorities that should be given to our main proposals. Otherwise we have fitted them into a pattern partly dictated by the available resources. We have given absolute priority to only one of our proposals - the creation of educational priority areas [EPAs]. Our Proposals in More Detail Educational Priority Areas 1186. Our first priority is the creation of the educational priority areas defined in Chapter 5. We assume, as a maximum, that ten per cent of the child population will be in educational priority areas by 1972/3 with a steady build up from perhaps two per cent of the child population over five years from 1968. By 1973, surveys should show whether further extensions will be necessary. The following specific points affect costings: Manpower: Teachers (Tables 35 and 36) (a) To reduce all oversize classes in educational priority areas to 40 would require about an additional 400* teachers in those areas in 1968 and 1,000 in 1972. Inducements to Teacher Recruitment (Table 40) (a) Additions to pay (£120) should be awarded at the rate of one for every teacher in educational priority areas. The cost will be about £0.5m in 1968 and about £3 million in 1972. *Throughout this chapter we have given our figures with some precision to enable us to cost our proposals. They are, of course, open to error. [page 437] Manpower: Teachers' Aides (Table 36) (d) Teachers' aides for the whole country can be recruited in six years. But we propose that there should be a somewhat more generous recruitment of them in the educational priority areas - one to each two classes in the first and middle schools. The numbers required above those for recruiting aides at the rate to be adopted for the whole country will be 700 in 1968, rising to 3,700 in 1972, an additional cost of over £3 million in 1972.Nursery Education (Table 36) (e) In the first five years, we propose that the full scale nursery provision suggested in Chapter 9 should be made at least for the four to five year olds. In these areas we assume that 40 per cent would require part-time places and 50 per cent full-time places. This might, at peak, create a demand for an additional 1,400 teachers, some of whom might be diverted from elsewhere, while others might be diverted from the infant classes when admission arrangements are changed. These changes might, however, take place at different times in different areas. This provision would not be additional to what we propose for the country as a whole. We have had the needs of children in educational priority areas in mind when assessing the total number of children who might need full-time nursery provision. That is to say, the staff required for nurseries in the priority areas do not constitute an addition to the numbers we have assumed for the whole country.Buildings (Table 39) (f) Special minor works allocations for the rapid improvement of schools are proposed. If it is assumed, arbitrarily, that every primary school in an area (although some will be new) will need a minor works job of, say, £5,000, and that 2,100 primary schools (that is one tenth of the total of all primary schools) will be in educational priority areas, the cost will total £10.5m by 1972, or £2.1m each year between 1968 and 1972.1187. Three main points need to be made about the proposals discussed in paragraph 1186. First, the money and other resources needed for the creation of the educational priority areas will not all be net additions to the total cost of primary education even though more teachers' aides will be needed than elsewhere. Many of our proposals represent either a diversion of resources or an acceleration of the improvements called for elsewhere. Secondly, we have not tried to estimate the rate of development beyond 1972/3. A further review will be called for after the completion of the first five years. Thirdly, what we propose will inevitably and rightly have chain effects on secondary education. The proposals which were made in the report of our predecessors (8) have so far hardly been implemented. Plainly, children in depressed areas should continue to benefit from improvements when they leave the primary schools. The more detailed working out of proposals for secondary education are not, however, within our province. Improvement of Staffing Elsewhere: Teachers Table 24 and 35) 1188. We assume here that teachers will be recruited at the rate stated by the Secretary of State in his speech at Eastbourne in April 1966, and that the [page 438] secondary schools will face the raising of the school leaving age with the additions of staff that can be recruited up to the autumn of 1971. As we prepare this report, recent figures of births suggest that the child population may not become as great as is currently forecast. It is too early to be certain and all our calculations and costings are based on figures available in July 1966. On these assumptions our proposals are as follows: (a) as Column 3 of Table 35 shows, there will be a steady improvement in the numbers of qualified teachers reaching the primary schools from now on and through the 1970s. If no primary teachers are diverted to the secondary schools, and if recruitment to the schools generally continues as we hope, classes with more than 40 pupils could be abolished by 1974/75 over the country as a whole and steady progress made with the elimination of classes over 30 from then onwards;Staffing: Aides and Assistants (Table 37) 1189. We think it is more important to concentrate first on the recruitment of teachers' aides for primary schools than to recruit nursery assistants. Our reasons are threefold. First, the schools need help to cope with large classes as soon as it can be given to them. It will be right to help them before adding substantially to the school system by introducing nursery groups. Secondly, the employment of teachers' aides will provide substantial benefits quickly and at a relatively low cost. Thirdly, although we believe that a start should be made immediately on expanding nursery education, it is unlikely that a large scale expansion can take place in the near future. Therefore, we suggest that 70 per cent of the older women recruited from 1968 to 1972 should train as teachers' aides. This proportion should fall to 25 per cent by 1975 and continue at this figure. Initially, 80 per cent of the girls recruited will train as teachers' aides, but this proportion will fall to 37 per cent in 1975 when the targets for the primary schools are achieved, and to 26 per cent by 1979 by which time the number of qualified school leavers will have risen by 40 per cent over the 1968 figure. These calculations relate to the country as a whole. There will however, be variations throughout the country as in, for example, educational priority areas. [page 439] Building (Table 39) 1190. Our proposals will involve a great deal of building. Our first priority outside the educational priority areas is a programme of minor improvements to primary school buildings which lack essentials. The proposals detailed in Chapter 28 will cost £50-£70m to be phased over a period of seven years. The total size of building programme up to 1969/70 has been announced and in any case we do not imagine that additional resources will be forthcoming during the next few years. Thus our proposed programme would begin in 1970/71. 1191. We cannot say how much building will be needed for our proposals on the ages and stages of primary education. A full exercise proved impossible because we were advised that many local education authorities would be too busy on secondary reorganisation to be able to help us. We attempted an exercise of our own which with its many imperfections tended to show that our proposed transfer ages might make better use of the stock of existing primary school buildings than a later age of transfer. We were not able to extend our exercise to secondary buildings, and so could not work out the relative costs of different ages of transfer. Moreover, the costs are in any case unpredictable because Circular 13/66 (May 1966) allows for a degree of local option for the age of transfer to secondary education. 1192. We link our proposals for a change in transfer ages to a single date of entry and nursery provision; we think that it will be difficult to achieve sufficient nursery provision to put our changes in transfer ages into operation until the second half of the seventies. Table 38 suggests that it would be possible, if an early enough start were made on recruiting nursery assistants, to introduce the single date of entry nationally by around 1977. In some areas it may be possible to achieve this earlier. But the prospect of finding class spaces is less certain. It will depend on the disposition of buildings and of the school population using them, as well as on the school building which takes place in the first half of the seventies. It is impossible for us to make useful estimates of these factors. 1193. Our nursery proposals will involve much building. In Chapter 9, we have estimated that of the 776,000 places which will be needed, between 175,000 and 250,000 places can be found in existing buildings. For purposes of calculation we assume that 200,000 places will be available. In Table 38 we show the likely pattern and possible scale of building. These figures are however speculative; ten years ahead, other uncertainties will replace present uncertainties about the extent to which we can use the present stock of places. We have no firm cost figures for nursery places. As we have said in Chapter 28, we consider that the standards now set should be reconsidered. Some nursery groups could be housed in existing non-educational building, for example in adequately converted houses. The full number of places in nurseries for all children of three and four cannot be provided until the early 1980s, a time for which the population figures are uncertain. For these reasons it is impossible for us to cost them accurately. We propose there should be a build up of the equivalent of 650,000 full-time places by 1979 which might involve new building of over 400,000 places, or a total building programme of about £110m. In Table 39 we assume that 50 per cent of the new places will be provided in groups detached from existing primary [page 440] schools, and that these places will cost £300 each. The rest will be housed, we have assumed, in buildings added to existing schools at a cost of £242 a place. 1194. Because of the shortage of teachers, our scheme for the expansion of nursery education is based largely on the use of teachers set free from the primary schools when, first, the rising fives are excluded and then a single term of entry is adopted. Just as the introduction of the single term of entry depends on the provision of nursery education for at least one year before children reach the age of entry to the infant school, so the provision of nursery education depends on the release of teachers and buildings by the later entry to the primary school. They are interdependent. 1195. The critical path we have chosen, therefore, for our nursery build-up is the supply of nursery assistants. (See Table 37). As we have given priority to teachers' aides, the supply of nursery assistants does not become substantial until the middle 1970s. There should be enough nursery assistants by 1972 to provide for the 15 per cent of four to five year olds who need full-time nursery education. By 1977 it will be possible to provide nursery education for a further 75 per cent of the four year olds part-time, and by 1979 for 15 per cent of the three year olds full-time. Not until the 1980s will it be possible to provide for the full proportion of the three and four year olds who should have nursery education. The relative proportions of older women and school leavers determine the numbers of aides and assistants actually in the schools and nursery groups because they will have different wastage rates. 1196. If the main expansion of nursery education is to take place in the middle and late seventies, it will be less difficult to divert teachers to nursery groups than if it took place earlier; by then the worst shortages of teachers should have been eliminated. Other Proposals 1197. So far, we have discussed those proposals which might create large demands on resources and where there might be conflict between different priorities. Our report also contains proposals which, whilst not easy to cost, will undoubtedly lead to increased expenditure. 1198. We have not attempted to cost all of these proposals in detail: indeed, it would not be possible to gauge the response to some of them so that costings would be artificial. We have instead noted in Chapter 32, where we summarise our conclusions and recommendations, those proposals which will create additional expenditure. Here we mention briefly other proposals which deserve to be singled out. 1199. They are as follows: (a) In Chapter 7 we have suggested ways of strengthening the social and welfare services that affect school children. We cannot cost our recommendations although additional costs will be inevitable if staffing is brought up to the necessary standards. We have also suggested that multiple teams should be established experimentally in areas of special difficulty. These proposals do not involve expenditure that is exclusively educational or attributable to primary education alone. [page 441] 1200. It will be seen that our report calls for additional money and labour at almost every point. Such additions are inevitable if a service of the size and complexity of primary education is to reach maximum efficiency and effectiveness. The Order of Priorities 1201. In this chapter we have tried to consider educational and social objectives within the restrictions that will be imposed by money and other resource costs. For all of the reasons given in this chapter and throughout the rest of the Report we here state the order of priorities that should result:
[page 442] 1202. We have listed the main new policies that we wish to see adopted and the order in which they should be tackled. Nothing that we say diminishes the need for continued advances throughout the system. School building programmes must continue to be large enough to ensure that all children have a place in school. The improvement of staffing in all primary schools ought to proceed steadily throughout the 1970s until classes with more than 40 children are eliminated and a start thus made on achieving parity between primary and lower secondary school class sizes. These are the continuing policies which we have discussed fully in earlier chapters but have not considered in detail here. Existing policies and the new policies suggested in this report ought to be considered together as soon as possible so that plans can be laid down for them, even though their fulfilment must in some cases lie in the future. Costs and Benefits 1203. In this chapter, we have been more ambitious than our predecessors in trying to cost our recommendations. We have not however been able for the most part to quantify the economic benefits of primary education. Such issues as the extent to which delinquency will diminish as primary education improves are beyond our ability to discuss since the long term studies required to inform such a discussion have not been undertaken. We hope that future studies of primary education will be able to explore these issues further. The Total Costs 1204. In Tables 39 and 40 we estimate the total additional costs of our proposals. By 1979 the additional running cost which would result from the adoption of our proposals is £74m. Additional capital expenditure rises to a peak of £40m by 1974 and then falls to a much lower figure by 1979. In order to show the scale of our proposals we have made our own projections (Table 43) of the cost of primary education on present policies. We recognise that such long range projections are hazardous but we hope they will be helpful. Table 44 shows that our proposals for the primary schools, excluding our nursery proposals, will raise current expenditure by £5 a child or by nearly six per cent by 1978/79. This increase is modest compared with the increase of £18 a child between 1966/67 and 1978/79 which we estimate will take place on present policies. When our nursery proposals are included, as Table 45 shows, our proposals will result in an increase in the total current costs of primary and nursery education of eight per cent by 1972/3 and 14 per cent by 1978/79. 1. Assessing the Economic Contribution of Education: The Appraisal of Alternative Approaches, WG Bowen. Report of the Committee on Higher Education, 1963. Cmnd. 2154. Appendix 4, pp 73-96.
[page 443] In this and subsequent tables in this chapter figures are given for statistical convenience with an apparent precision which is not justified by the margins of error inherent in them. [page 444] [page 445] [page 446] [page 447] [page 448] [page 449] [page 450] [page 451] [page 452] [page 453] 1205. Nursery assistants and teachers' aides will be drawn from the same groups of girl leavers and older married women; here we discuss the size of the group from which they will be recruited. 1206. We have suggested that school leavers who begin training should have between one and four passes in the ordinary level of the General Certificate of Education, or the equivalent in Group I and II of CSE. The number of girls leaving school with five or more O Level passes will rise substantially. The Department's projections show a rise in the number of girls leaving school with five or more O Level passes from 15 per cent in 1962/63 to 20 per cent in 1970/71 and 24 per cent in 1979/80 (1). The 1963/64 number of girls leaving with one to four O Level passes was less than the number leaving with five O Level passes and above. For the period after 1968 we made one projection of the numbers of girls with one to four O Level passes or equivalent ability by assuming that they were equal to the number of girls with five or more O Level passes. This is in accordance with the assumption made in the Seventh Report of the Secondary School Examinations Council (2) and is consistent with the basic hypothesis that as school opportunities increase, the stock of qualified school leavers will increase pari passu. [Means 'with equal pace, simultaneously and equally', OED] Another projection was based on the assumption that the relevant ability range comprised roughly 20 per cent of the 16 year old girl school leavers. This second projection gave slightly higher numbers than the first up to about 1972/73, and then rather lower numbers. The two projections were averaged. 1207. The proportion of these school leavers who could be recruited for work in the schools is more difficult to estimate. Nursing provides strong competition. In 1962/63 the number of new entrants to nursing courses leading to the qualifications of State Registered Nurse and State Enrolled Nurse were together over 25,000 for England and Wales. The minimum qualifications for these courses were either two O Level passes or success in the GNC's [General Nursing Council's] suitability test, approximately the ability range from which nursery assistants might be recruited. Competition between the two groups is thus inevitable although if the Platt Committee's (3) recommendations are accepted that all entrants to nursing should have a minimum of five O Level passes the competition will be much reduced. However, office employment, which will also compete heavily for these girls, is growing rapidly. Service employment will overlap with office employment in demanding their labour; the Ministry of Labour estimates that service employment, which rose from 44 per cent of employees in 1953 to 48 per cent in 1963, will rise to 49 per cent by 1968. This increase can be expected to persist. Forecasts of local authorities' staffing needs in the health and welfare services in the next ten years show a substantial rise in the demand for the employment of women. (4) The trend to earlier marriage will reduce the supply of single women, and will lead to a strong demand for the services of girls leaving school. [page 454] 1208. In 1964/65 there were over 4,000 candidates for NNEB courses. The figure is considerably greater than the number of girls accepted for these courses even though it may contain some duplicate applications. There would probably be more applications if the chance of acceptance were greater. In 1962/63 36,350 and in 1963/64 38,000 girls with one to four O Level passes left school to enter employment (not further forms of full-time education or training). With an expansion of nursery education, some girls would transfer from other forms of further education. 1209. From these admittedly rather speculative calculations, we think that recruitment of around 7,500 a year in the early seventies would be possible. The recruitment figure we use throughout the period is 11 per cent of the mean of the projections described above. These are set out in Table 46.
1210. The wastage rates of these girls will be high; we assume ten per cent a year during training during the first two years of service, the rates assumed for non-graduate women teachers in the years immediately following the completion of their training. (5) Thus we are tacitly assuming that they would leave to get married roughly two years before non-graduate women teachers do. We assume also that they would return into service two years before the women non-graduate teachers, but otherwise at the same re-entry rate. (6) With this rate of recruitment wastage and re-entry, the build up of aides and assistants in service will be slow; ten years after the beginning of the scheme only 34,000 aides and assistants will be in service from this source. 1211. The build up of aides and assistants, especially in the early years, is heavily dependent on the recruitment of older married women, who we assume will stay longer than the school leavers. When girl entrants begin to re-enter after marriage a much smaller number of new recruits will be needed from among the older married women. But this stage will not come until some 15 years from the beginning of the scheme. 1212. It is more difficult to estimate the recruitment of mature women than of girls. We know that there are many married women not at present employed. The National Plan states that there are 3m married women over the age of 45 not in employment. (7) Surveys have suggested considerable willingness among married women to enter employment; if sufficient oppor- [page 455] tunities are available for part-time employment, the number which could be recruited might be very considerable. One survey (8) gave an overall estimate of 700,000 women who if they had the choice would work full time and 4.5m who would like to work part-time. If as many married as single women in 1960 had worked, there would have been an additional 2.5m workers under 35 and 3.25m between 35 and 60. Most of the younger women might only be prepared to work part-time but many of the elder ones might work full-time. 1213. It would be unrealistic to conclude too much from the absolute numbers of women not employed at the moment. However, it is clear that there is increasing employment of married women. As homes become mechanised women wish to spend less time in them. There are strong reasons for supposing that the rising propensity for married women to work will continue. 1214. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research [NIESR] has projected the number of married women who are likely to work up to 1975. (9) They calculate that there will be a yearly increase of 70,000 married women seeking work between 1967 and 1975. These figures are based on long term trends and may underestimate the growth of the married women labour force, as there may be an acceleration in the willingness of married women to return to work. 1215. The educational system is in a favourable position to recruit married women. The total number of hours worked by nursery assistants or teachers' aides would be considerably less than the hours worked by other full-time employees. Part-time employment would be fairly easy to arrange both in the primary schools, and in the nurseries. It would be conveniently close to their homes. The expansion of nursery education will create some of its own supply of assistants insofar as these are drawn from married women with young families. Surveys show that the proportion of married women working is particularly low where there are children below school age in the family. For these reasons we conclude that the NIESR estimates of the increase in the supply of married women workers is an underestimate of the pool of women workers which the schools might draw on for nursery assistants and aides. 1216. We hope to recruit the equivalent of 10,000 older women a year. At the moment roughly half the married women in employment work part-time; if this proportion were applied to the new teachers' aides and nursery assistants this would involve a recruitment of 13,340 per annum. Many women who would only take part-time jobs outside the schools may be persuaded to take full-time ones in schools so that less than this number may be required. Although recruitment of 11 to 12,000 married women a year may look large compared with the probable increase of the married women labour force over this period it looks very much smaller when it is remembered that much of the demand will be for nursery assistants who will release women for this and other work. 1217. We assume that these older married women would have a wastage rate of ten per cent during training and five per cent per annum thereafter. This wastage rate is higher than the wastage rate for non-graduate women teachers in comparable age ranges; but much depends on the age at which [page 456] these married women are recruited. In ten years there would, on these assumptions, be 77,000 married women aides and assistants in the schools (not counting any of the girls who may by now have returned). 1218. Only experience with the scheme will show whether the assumptions about the relative numbers of girls and older married women who can be recruited and their wastage are reasonably correct. But the build-up of the scheme is in many ways more critical than the continuation of it. 1. Statistics of Education, 1963, Part 3, Table 21. HMSO. 1964.
[page 457] AND THE USE OF TEACHERS' AIDES: AN ESTIMATE OF THE OUTPUT OF MOTHERS WHO RETURN TO WORK 1219. An important offset to the cost of the additional resources required for our proposed expansion of nursery education and the recruitment of married women as teachers' aides is the increased production which we expect will take place as some of the mothers of the three and four year olds return to work, either as assistants or aides, or to other jobs. The recruitment of married women as aides and assistants will lead to an increase in the numbers of mothers with children of school age who will work as well as some diversion from other jobs. Much as we may deplore the increasing tendency of mothers of young children to work, it would be unrealistic not to count its economic yields. We have already quoted evidence showing the increased willingness of successive generations of married women to return to work: there are important economic trends underlying this movement, and we expect them to continue. Thus our proposals will tap unused reserves of labour. 1220. Expenditure on labour saving devices will increase more rapidly than household income, and the total stock of them will be substantially higher in the seventies than it is now (1, 2). In other ways housewives are able to run their homes more easily at a somewhat higher money cost. Even more important than household appliances may be the purchase of the services of factories, shops and restaurants who now undertake much of the preparation of clothing and partial preparation of food which once took place at home. The declining size of family has also substantially reduced housework*. 1221. These changes reduce the amount of housework; they produce the social problem of under employment and bored housewives. The housewife has both the time and the need to take up some outside work, and herself provides some of the paid labour which reduces the need for housework. At the same time there has been a substantial increase in the demand for labour traditionally performed by women** (4). 1222. There are now more small families with less support than in the past from the extended family. This produces economic strains during periods of sickness and temporary low earnings for other reasons, as well as demands for help from outside the family for child minding, baby sitting and the like. It makes it more necessary for housewives to work for money. *It is not easy to quantify these factors. We note the work of CD Long in the United States. He estimates that changes in technology (increases in the number of household appliances and the switch to buying food and clothing outside the home) may have 'saved' eight per cent of the work of women above 14 between 1890 and 1940, and that by 1950 a further three per cent was thus 'saved'. Reductions in family size similarly 'saved' a further eight per cent between 1890 and 1940, and two per cent from 1940 to 1950. Not all this work was actually saved and available for employment; some of it no doubt went into higher standards of housework. (3)
**US studies of female employment have shown that while there are many instances of women moving into occupations formerly thought to be exclusively men's, most of the increase in the employment of women has been due to the rapid increase in the jobs traditionally held by women. (6) [page 458] 1223. More married women are working. On the figures given in paragraph 1214 it seems possible that the figure will rise to 38 per cent by 1975. (5) The big increase is expected in the age groups over 35. Because of the continuing trend to early child bearing a slight fall in participation rates is forecast for married women between 25 and 35.* 1224. The provision of nursery education will enable some younger mothers of children aged three to five to undertake part-time, and in some cases full-time, work but their ability to do so may be complicated by school holidays. It will also depend on the availability of part-time work and the extent to which the short periods of nursery attendance can be used, that is, on mothers being able to make arrangements for work near home or for their children to be taken to and from school by other mothers. In an important sense the demand for the women's work is there; the attempt to force the pace of growth has produced a forecast 'labour shortage'. Increasingly employers are making arrangements for part-time employment. Between 1960 and 1965 the number of part-time employees has increased by 22 per cent. (12) But official policies may need to be changed if full use is to be made of this labour reserve. 1225. Given the poor information at our disposal on this vital part of the labour force and the dependence of the outcome on a number of factors in the labour market outside the field of educational policy, we can only make a tentative estimate of the size of this important offset to the resource cost of nursery provision. 1226. Many of the older women who become nursery assistants or teachers' aides may have children in nursery groups or for other reasons will enter the labour force. In our hypothetical build-up we assume that there will be some 82,000 full-time equivalent older women in service as aides and assistants by 1979**. We assume that 25 to 35 thousand full-time equivalents of these will be mothers of children in the nursery groups, or women with older school children who are not already at work. Their earnings will be £506 a year (including superannuation) on 1966 prices making a total of £13-£18m a year. 1227. There will be many mothers of children attending full or part-time who do not become teachers' aides or nursery assistants. We assume that the *The presence of young children is an important deterrent to a married woman working. Kelsall and Mitchell, working on 1949 data, show that only 12 per cent of women with a child under school age worked, while 26 per cent of those with a child of school age did. Thirty-seven per cent of married women without children were at work (7). Klein reaches a similar conclusion (8). An American study which attempted to quantify some of the reasons for married women working concluded that the existence of a child under six in the family was the most important determinant of whether the housewife worked or not, when factors related to the secular rise in participation rates are held constant (9). US data show that the participation rate for mothers with children under five is a quarter to a third of that of mothers of children over five (10). In Britain there are substantial differences between the participation rates of women aged 25-30 and those 35-40, ages when there are substantially different probabilities of having children below and above five. Allowing for the upward trend in participation rates generally, comparison of the NIESR's projected participation rates for married women age 35-40 in 1967, 1972 and 1977 with the actual and projected ones for the age group 25-30 in 1957, 1962 and 1967 reveals a difference of 11-13 percentage points (11). This is an underestimate of the difference resulting from the presence or not of children below school age in the family.
**During the 1980s the recruitment of married women may fall off, but there will be substantial re-entry of those initially recruited as girls returning after child bearing. [page 459] proportion who work will rise to nearly that of mothers with children of school age, a rise of between ten and 15 percentage points. Perhaps a third of mothers with children aged three to five will have other children below school age. Klein (13) has shown that often married women returners take less skilled jobs than they held previously. There will be important exceptions and in some cases professional women will be able to return to fill posts where there are severe shortages. In addition, as the economy becomes geared to the employment of women part-time, they will be used more in skilled jobs. Thus in taking the average earnings of women manual workers (five shillings [25p] an hour in 1965) (14) as the appropriate value of their time we are being cautious. We also assume that they are only employed for 200 days a year - full-time workers for five hours and part-time workers for two hours. On this basis 50-70,000 additional women may be released for full or part-time work as a consequence of nursery provision. Of these, perhaps 5,000 will work as nursery assistants or teachers' aides. On all these assumptions the value of the extra production of women who begin work outside the educational sector (50-70,000 less 5,000) may be of the order of £3-4m a year by 1979. This figure is small because some children are giving up full-time school to be provided with part-time nursery education. 1228. Adding this to the range estimated in paragraph 1226 we have a full offset which may be between £16m and £22m per annum by 1979. 1. Needleman L, 'The Demand for Domestic Appliances', National Institute Economic Review, 1960.
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