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The article offers information on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Swann Report in Great Britain in 2005. The issues investigated by Swann remains resonating both in Great Britain and beyond and the significance and the legacy of the report remain subjects of significant debate. There were 51 papers presented over the two days conference at the University of Birmingham. The subject of Gary McCulloch's article is about class and more particularly the education of the middle age class. Christine Mayer's article is providing details on the changing educational practices for girls and women between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Germany.

This paper analyses the factors central to the practices and realities of historical educational support for destitute and neglected children in the Manchester Certified Industrial Schools (MCIS) to determine how the schools acted to support the lives of children who were removed from parental guardianship. In nineteenth-century England, the most vulnerable children, destitute and often neglected (specifically, those considered to have improper guardianship), posed a serious challenge to public order in urban society. This study employs primary records to trace the experiences of four children during and after MCIS enrolment. Prior to the current study, none of these records had been used in research. The analysis of records demonstrates that MCIS officers supported and followed up students even after they were discharged to help them survive without their parents and become conventional members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first situates King Alfred in Winchester, in Wessex, in Anglo-Saxon England, and in the Christendom of the ninth century. Attention is drawn to Alfred’s education, which included experience of court life in Wessex, Rome and Francia. The paper argues that Alfred prioritised vernacular literacy as a means of educating elites in a shared culture of service. This project required the attraction to his kingdom of scholars from abroad, the translating of foundational Christian texts into Old English, and the use of the court as a school. The king provided the context, and the resources, for supporting craftsmen engaged in the manufacture of, among other items, book-pointers, small high-value objects intimately associated with literacy and at the same time badges of service as well as of honour. The concluding section assesses Alfred’s sustained promotion of his educational project as connected to the rest of his political and ideological agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines controversy concerning the televising of the documentary This Is the BBC (1959) and situates the dispute in a wider cultural context of media criticism of Oxford University in particular, and academic educators more generally, in the period 1956–1960. Technological change, increased television ownership and a growing interest in the irreverent portrayal of educators in popular culture all need to be considered when examining what the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin and the filmmaker Richard Cawston considered to be at stake when they squabbled over the right to use a few seconds of film footage of Berlin. Berlin objected to his voice and moving image being edited to present him not as a don but as a clown. The article also addresses the ongoing silences that become apparent when the montage is broken down frame by frame and the visual rhetoric is translated into written argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an account of the historic and ongoing international interchange between Britain and Japan in the field of progressive education. Concentrating on the last half-century, it takes two reference points from Roy Lowe’s writings in 1977 and 2006. Eveline Lowe Primary was a newly built model progressive school when documented by him in a seminal work on school architecture, later becoming a key point of interest for Japanese educationists. The British educational policy context against which this exchange of ideas and practices occurred was later documented by Lowe in a major book. Contemporaneous debates and events within Japanese society and government meanwhile provided the impetus for networks of research and transmission of progressive practices. The most recent turn in the narrative presented here demonstrates Japanese support for independent progressive practice continuing in the UK. Responding to an extensive historical research literature on transnational migration of educational ideals and practices this paper constitutes a micro-study that draws on personal memory, oral testimony, records of classroom observation on site and by means of video-conferencing, in addition to more formal documentation of conference proceedings and policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the voluntary work of girls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Historians have so far neglected to study social work as an integral part of middle-class girls' formal and informal education. The paper uses records of several little-known girls' service leagues including Time and Talents, Girl's Realm Guild of Service, Girls' Diocesan Association and United Girls' School Mission. It argues that the priority accorded to training, social study and self-development made membership of a service league a valuable source of further education before 1914. The paper begins with an overview of such leagues and a discussion of the training, study and social work undertaken. It considers how the work of service leagues was framed by broader debates around active citizenship. Finally the paper looks at some of the impacts of service leagues both on members and on the working-class women and children they aimed to serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel letters as sources of learning, this paper studies Bodichon’s correspondence as epistolary articulations of herBildung(self-cultivation). It argues that, conforming toBildung’s idea of forging one’s individuality in interaction with the world, her travelling provided her with a variety of settings through which she extended towards the unknown and incorporated it into her sense of being. In turn, letters functioned as forums where she made sense of encountering the difference through which she individualised her subjectivity. Notwithstanding, a revised reading ofBildungpermits teasing out to what extent Bodichon’s self-cultivation was developed at the expense of certain social categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the scope and range of Christian involvement in establishing the field of education in England as a distinct area for scholarship between 1930 and 1960. It advocates greater study of the range of various denominational positions held in the period. This paper also illustrates the public debates of the time by focusing on the examples of a number of prominent educationists in leadership positions who were directly associated with the founding and running of major British education journals and societies. This article uses newly released personal archival records not previously available to accounts of the period. It begins by situating their perspectives in the wider historical context, particularly the intellectual background of ideas that influenced and set the tone for their work. It then introduces some of their beliefs and assumptions, as well as their achievements and failures, in the realm of religion and education. It reviews and critiques their different Christian conceptualisations of education, and offers reasons why they failed to make a lasting Christian impact on the subject under a newly emergent secular culture in the 1960s. This article argues that researchers have generally neglected the influence of Christianity in the early establishment of education as a discrete area of academic study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper data are used from the University of Winchester Alumni oral history project to suggest how the historic culture of the institution, as one of the original church training colleges, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, might have been transmitted to those who attended it as trainee teachers from the 1930s, the earliest data that are available, to the late 1970s when its courses diversified. Two questions will be posed. The first will ask what might have been distinctive about teacher training at a church college. The second will consider the possible effects of such training on the professional lives of the alumni as teachers, and beyond, in the community more generally. In their analysis of the data the authors utilise Pierre Bourdieu's key concepts of 'field', 'capital' and 'habitus'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anglican clergymen in England contributed significantly to the development of archaeology and local history as, first, subjects for polite study, but secondly as academic disciplines at the heart of the university extension and extra-mural movements. Initially working as lone antiquarian scholars, clergymen formed networks amongst themselves and the gentry, dominated the emerging national and county societies, and moved into university work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the establishment of formal courses for adults. With their broad Oxbridge education and ready-made audiences, clergymen disseminated 'safe' secular knowledge via the tutorial class. But this contribution had diminished by the mid-twentieth century, by which time the education of the clergy had become more narrowly focused upon vocation, and as new academic posts facilitated the establishment of mainstream university Departments of Archaeology and Local History. This paper explores the contribution of the Anglican clergy to the education of adults in the period c.1750-1960 and suggests reasons for its initial strength and eventual decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the educational experiences of a specific group of refugees, namely academic women refugees who were members of various branches of the International Federation of University Women, and who came to Britain under the auspices of the British Federation of University Women from 1933. As a result of voluntary or forced migration some 400 such women from Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria sought entry to Britain following Hitler's accession to power in Germany in 1933. The help they received from the specially formed Emergency Refugee Committee of the British Federation of University Women, not only in gaining entry to the country but in refashioning their pre-migration educational and academic achievements, is looked at in detail, and the extent to which the women were able to retrain, re-qualify or complete training courses curtailed by political events and migration is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article encourages, where possible and appropriate, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to identify trends and patterns in education and facilitate their contextualisation in terms of processes and meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the importance of character placed with regard to citizenship, education and psychology in Great Britain from 1880 to 1914. Late Victorians and Edwardians thought much more critically about character than is often implied in accounts of its role in the culture of turn of the century in England. A number of recent studies have rightly emphasized the significant role of character in the culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This paper seeks to point out some of the limitations of conceiving of character in this way and to highlight some of the alternative contemporary readings of character.