Tripartite System 1944 Flashcards
1
From 1944, education began to be influenced by the idea of meritocracy – that individuals should achieve their status in life through their own efforts & abilities.
The 1944 Butler Education Act brought in the tripartite system, so called because children were to be selected & allocated to one of three different types of secondary school, supposedly according to their aptitudes & abilities. These were to be identified by the 11+ exam & this policy change aimed to abolish class-based inequalities within state education
idea being that everyone would have an equal, meritocratic chance of success to gain a place into a grammar school depending on the effort they put in & their ability.
Types of schools
- Grammar schools offered an academic curriculum & access to non-manual jobs & higher education. They were for pupils with academic ability who passed the 11+.
- Secondary modern schools offered a non-academic ‘practical’ curriculum & access to manual work for pupils who failed the 11+. These pupils were mainly working class.
- Technical schools were aimed at pupils who would study a basic curriculum while gaining experience & training for manual work such as carpentry. However, these schools only existed in a few areas & so in practise this was more of a bipartite than a tripartite system.
A03
Rather than promoting meritocracy, the tripartite system & 11+ reproduced class inequality by channelling the two social classes into two different types of schools that offered unequal opportunities. It involved labelling on a massive scale & may well have contributed to the underachievement of huge numbers of students who were already labelled as ‘failures’ at 11 years old
(justified) inequality through the ideology that ability is inborn. the tests favoured middle class students in a number of ways. Test questions that were intended only to test intelligence often also tested cultural capital
