Education Policy And Party Politics - The British Secondary Education Policy Research (1918-1979)

The Great Britain is the earliest country with a bipartisan system in its form of government. Since the twentieth century, the Labor Party and the Conservative Party have been taking turns on government. Because of the ideological differences between the two parties, their educational policies are showing different positions. Among other things, the comprehensive school policy has been the focus of the disputes by the two parties in educational policy during the most time of the 20s. The theme of this dissertation is the complicated relationship between of the political assertions of the two parties and their policy on the comprehensive school.The dissertation consists of seven parts including an introduction, five chapters in the development and conclusion. In the introduction the author chiefly explains the significance of the theme and defines some key conceptions, such as educational policy, bipartisan politics, comprehensivisation of secondary education; in addition, both domestic and foreign literature in this regard have been reviewed so as to rationalize the theme. In the end, the research methods used in the paper such as literature research and case-study are illustrated.Chapter 1 presents a picture of the background of the development of Britain's secondary education, clarifying the characteristics of the Labor and the Conservative's secondary educational policy in the first half of the twentieth century. During this period of time, the idea of comprehensive school was in its early shape, only a reform plan conceived by some grass-root organizations, and yet an educational policy of any political party. But the time was indispensable to the review of the theme simply because the issue of the comprehensivisation of secondary education became a policy problem, and appeared in the central consultative committee's discussion of the future organization of secondary education. Although the result of the discussion was to abandon the policy of taking comprehensive school as a common secondary education institution, the idea of comprehensive school was kept. Within the period, the evident feature of the policy of secondary education comprehensiveness was the vitality of the reform plan at the grass level, whereas the tripartite system was advocated by central decision-makers at the upper level. The Labour brought forward a policy of secondary education for everyone.Chapter 2 mainly dicusses the process of Labour's adoption of comprehensive school policy. In so doing, the author indicates that the Labour is not a consistent advocator of the comprehensive school policy in the immediate post-war years, and explains why the leaders of the party rejected this policy. The characteristic of this period is the conflict of different wings within the Labour on the comprehensive school policy, especially the conflict between the resolutions passed on the Annual Conference and the policy applied by the government. In other words, in this period, the conflict within the Labour is more obvious than that of the two parties.Chapter 3 emphasizes the troubles and weaknesses of Labour's adoption of comprehensive school policy in the election and the situations in which the policy was taken advantages of by the Conservatives. The Conservatives exploited the rigidity of Labour's comprehensive school policy and its grounding in doctrinaire socialist principles by subjecting them to a wide range of criticisms. The Labour's comprehensive school policy was characterized by its perspicuity and rigidity, whichmade a great contrast to the Conservative's maintaining the status quo policy. As the Labour adopted comprehensive school policy, the consensus between the two parties on secondary school organization disappeared.The topic of the Chapter 4 is the modification of Labour's comprehensive school policy. Under the pressure of electoral politics, the two parties were all compromised. Influenced by the Revisionism and the attack of the Conservatives, the Labour's comprehensive school policy got rid of the weaknesses of uniformit...