page_title: Ellen Wilkinson
section_title: Minister of education
hierarchical_section_title: Ellen Wilkinson / Life / Postwar career / Minister of education
caption_attribution_description: English: Machanhill Primary School HORSA Huts Part of the Machanhill Primary School campus housing the kitchen and dining halls. HORSA huts were constructed circa 1947, supposedly as a short term measure (10 year lifespan!), to meet educational needs caused by buildings being destroyed in the war, the post war baby boom and the raising of the school leaving age by the 1944 Education Act (the 'Butler' Act). HORSA = Hut Operation for the Raising of School leaving Age
context_page_description: Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death. Earlier in her career, as the Member of Parliament for Jarrow, she became a national figure when she played a prominent role in the 1936 Jarrow March of the town's unemployed to London to petition for the right to work. Although unsuccessful at that time, the March provided an iconic image for the 1930s and helped to form post-Second World War attitudes to unemployment and social justice.
  Wilkinson was born into a poor though ambitious Manchester family and she embraced socialism at an early age. After graduating from the University of Manchester, she worked for a women's suffrage organisation and later as a trade union officer. Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, Wilkinson joined the British Communist Party, and preached revolutionary socialism while seeking constitutional routes to political power through the Labour Party. She was elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough East in 1924, and supported the 1926 General Strike. In the 1929–31 Labour government, she served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the junior Health Minister.
context_section_description: Wilkinson was the second woman, after Margaret Bondfield, to achieve a place in the British cabinet. As Minister of Education she saw as her main task the implementation of the 1944 Education Act passed by the wartime coalition. This Act provided universal free secondary education, and raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 with effect from 1947. It said nothing about how secondary education should be organised; Labour's education specialist, James Chuter Ede, who had put the Act through Parliament along with Rab Butler, felt this should be decided at a local authority level.  Many experts felt that children should take an examination — the "11-plus" — which would determine whether their secondary education would be in a grammar (academic), technical or "modern" school. However, many in the Labour Party saw this tripartite arrangement as perpetuating elitism, and wanted a scheme based on "multilateral" schools, or what later became known as the "comprehensive" system (Chuter Ede preferred this). The system envisaged large schools under a single roof, each with a range of appropriate courses of study for different levels of ability, and flexible movement between courses as children's aptitudes changed. Wilkinson believed, however, that such a major reconstruction was unachievable at that time, and limited herself to more attainable reforms. Her cautious attitude disappointed and angered some of the Labour left wing and teacher' representatives, who considered that a great opportunity to incorporate socialist principles into education had been missed. Wilkinson, however, was persuaded to the view that selection at 11 would allow all those with higher IQs, irrespective of class background, to obtain a grammar school education.
  Wilkinson made her first priority the raising of the school leaving age. This required the recruitment and training of thousands of extra teachers, and creating classroom space for almost 400,000 extra children. Under the Emergency Training Scheme (ETS), ex-servicemen and women were given grants to train as teachers on an accelerated one-year programme; more than 37,000 had been or were being trained by the end of 1946. The rapid expansion of school premises was achieved by the erection of temporary huts—some of which became long-term features of schools. Wilkinson was determined that the higher leaving age be implemented by 1 April 1947—the date set by the 1944 Act—and in the face of parliamentary scepticism insisted that her plans were on track. Final cabinet approval to honour the April date was given on 16 January 1947.
  Other reforms during Wilkinson's tenure as minister included free school milk, improvements in the school meals service, an increase in university scholarships, and an expansion in the provision of part-time adult education through county colleges. In October 1945 she went to Germany to report on how the destroyed German education system could best be reactivated. She was astonished by the speed with which, five months after its defeat, the country's schools and universities were reopening. Other trips included visits to Gibraltar, Malta and Czechoslovakia. In November 1945 she chaired an international conference in London that led to the establishment, a year later, of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). In one of her final speeches in parliament, on 22 November 1946, she emphasised that UNESCO stood for "standards of value ... putting aside the idea that only practical things matter". She prophesied that the organisation "will do great things", and urged the government to give it its full backing.
caption: Temporary classroom huts, built to accommodate the rise in school pupils following the raising of the leaving age
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