BRITISH EMPLOYERS AND EDUCATION POLICY, 1935-45 - A DECADE OF MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

The purpose of this paper is to reassess the attitudes of British empl oyers towards education policy during the period 1935-45. This decade has often been seen as one of 'missed opportunities' to reconstruct ed ucational provision in response to the economy's changing skill requir ements. Yet, contrary to much received wisdom, the findings of this re search indicate that this was not the result of an entrenched anti-tec hnology and anti-business bias among ministers and civil servants. It is argued that the government was sensitive to the views of employers but the latter failed to present a case for fundamental educational re form, despite the propaganda of a minority of 'progressive' firms acti ve in the British Association for Commercial and Industrial Education. This is attributed, in part, to the way employers articulated their c onception of educational 'quality', which paid insufficient attention to a knowledge of the principles of production processes. The latter w as not only an outcome of the long-term influence of the division in B ritain between employers and the professional middle class, which made the former sceptical of formal educational qualifications, but also r eflected their lack of conviction that such qualifications promised mo re suitable training than workplace experience.