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Crowther (1959) Volume I Report Preliminary pages (i-xxxi)
Part 1 Education in a Changing World
Part 2 The Development of the Modern School
Part 3 'Secondary Education for All'
Part 4 The Way to County Colleges
Part 5 The Sixth Form
Part 6 Technical Challenge and Educational Response
Part 7 Institutions and Teachers
Appendices
Glossary (506-513)
Volume II Surveys Preliminary pages (i-xviii)
Part 1 The Social Survey
Part 2 The National Service Survey
Part 3 The Technical Courses Survey
Index of Tables (237-240) |
The Crowther Report (1959) 15 to 18 A report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1959
Volume I [page 400] 586. Flexibility must be a characteristic of any educational system which attempts efficiently to serve the needs of a wide variety of occupations, each with its own different economic structure. Most of this part of our report has been concerned with what happens in manufacturing and constructional industry; this note is designed by way of contrast and supplement to identify some of the common tasks and different conditions which exist in agriculture. We are informed that the Minister has under consideration the recommendations made in December, 1958 by Lord De La Warr's Committee on "Further Education for Agriculture Provided by Local Education Authorities", and that a series of practical proposals based on these recommendations are being discussed with a special sub-committee of the National Advisory Council on Education for Industry and Commerce under the chairmanship of Mr. B. G. Lampard-Vachell, a member of our Council. This would, therefore, be an inappropriate moment for us to attempt the kind of detailed discussion which gives rise to recommendations; but it is perhaps an appropriate one to draw attention to certain considerations of a broad nature which have arisen in the course of our discussions. There is no doubt that agriculture is as much in the middle of a technological revolution as any part of the economic structure. Some instances may be given. The improvement of both crops and stock receives a concentrated attention from research workers and from practical farmers which would have delighted the pioneers of Scientific agriculture in the eighteenth century. Mechanisation has been extensively introduced, and the internal combustion engine is now used everywhere. The coming of electricity to the farm has changed out of recognition the conditions of life and of work. The labour force is contracting; the output is rising. The need for skill of a mechanical kind and for knowledge of a scientific character increases. Technical education is as necessary in agriculture as in engineering. 587. But it is not as generally provided. There are many reasons. One of the most intractable is the small size of many holdings and the small number of workers they employ. Half the agricultural workers in 1957 are estimated to have been employed on farms where there were less than 5 workers, and a further quarter on farms with not more than 10. Half the agricultural holdings employ no full-time paid workers. The smallness of the units not only makes release for technical education difficult, it also makes technical education in breadth more necessary. Virtually all regular workers in agriculture [page 401] need to be skilled; few can be specialised; most need, in the words of the De La Warr report, to be "masters of a variety of jobs requiring such diverse skills as the care of different types of animals, the maintenance and use of several machines, the handling of different soils under varying conditions, the use of fertilizers and so on". It is necessary to remember too that, although agriculture may be one industry, it differs widely from one part of the country to another in what it does, how it does it and how it is organised. No one educational pattern is likely to meet all the varying circumstances. 588. The De La Warr Committee recommended universal part-time day release for all young workers in agriculture. At present, however, agriculture (as may be seen from Table 55 in Chapter 29) provides release for only 3 per cent of the boys it employs, a lower percentage than in any other industrial group except insurance, banking and finance. Day release will therefore have to start almost from the beginning. Part-time education for all young workers is recommended because all who work on farms need skill. A period of full-time education after practical farm experience is recommended from the age of about 18 for many more than now get it, because of the very high proportion in the industry (over one-third) who have some managerial or supervisory function. Remarkably enough, the proportion of those entering the industry who go to a farm institute as full-time students is as high as 10 per cent. In Part Four of our report we were concerned with the difficult problem of the large number of boys and girls for whom there was no obvious vocational need for education - agriculture is an occupation in which this class of employee seems not to exist, and one in which the proportion who require to carry their technical education to a relatively high level is unusually high. From the point of view of educational possibilities it ranks high, even if at the moment it ranks low in the provision of educational opportunities. The difficulties in the way of educational advance are administrative and economic, neither educational nor intrinsic. 589. These considerations point unmistakably in our view to the desirability of a longer school life than the minimum for those who wish to enter agriculture. We hope that before long the minimum school-leaving age will be raised to 16, but we believe that even before this is done it is important that there should be a great development of extended courses with a rural bias but with a continued emphasis on the basic subjects, so that recruitment to agriculture may normally take place at 16 and not at 15 as at present. The need for education in agriculture is indeed a striking example of the case for raising the school-leaving age as a form of that national capital investment to which we devoted Chapter 12. [page 402] 590. The drift from the country to the towns is an old complaint. Some compensating movement is desirable but difficult to set in motion. For this reason we attach importance to a real development of the farm apprenticeship scheme, whose progress so far has been disappointingly slow. In 1953 the industry established an Agricultural Apprenticeship Scheme with a normal age of entry at 15 providing a three-year period of practical training on a farm or horticultural holding, combined with day or block release courses for the first two years totalling 80 days. The total number of apprentices on farms in 1954 was 303, and in the four succeeding years 522, 609, 540 and 567 respectively. The majority were concentrated in a few counties, and one county in the south of England at present accounts for 205. Two major factors that inhibit the development of the apprenticeship scheme are, first, the organisation of the industry itself, and secondly the fact that there is at present no distinctive recognition either in status or official wage rate for a worker who has passed through an apprenticeship. Subsidiary but important factors that also apply include the difficulty of releasing young workers from the smaller farm units to attend classes, the problem of arranging viable class groups in scattered rural areas without making abnormal demands on time for travelling to them, and the problem of arranging for living accommodation near the place of employment. 591. One other important human factor must be borne in mind. The boy who enters farming is often going to be a lonely person. He may well come into contact at work with only one adult and seldom meet boys of his own age either at work or during his leisure time. His need to rub shoulders with his peers is very real. For this reason we believe that consideration should be given to the development of various kinds of provision for block release. This might often be centred appropriately at the farm institute, where additional boarding accommodation might be provided to meet the need. Block release would have the added advantage of eliminating wasteful travelling time and of making it possible to fit release into the seasonal demands of the industry. Block release involving a continuous period of boarding could not, however, provide more than a proportion of the facilities needed. In some cases the solution might be found by the local education authority providing day classes, either through the development of an extra-mural department of the farm institute, or by a centrally organised staff. The work could be done in collaboration with technical colleges and "village colleges" where these exist, and also possibly at large farms which could offer facilities for practical work and demonstration "on the job". The first-class herdsman cannot learn his craft away from the animals he tends. [page 403] 592. The isolation of so many farm workers during working hours makes it more necessary than in other occupations to provide for communal pursuits to be available at leisure periods. Imaginative provision for leisure-time educational and recreational facilities is particularly important. It so happens that in agriculture, as in few other industries, there has been developed a youth organisation with strong educational activities. The Young Farmers' Clubs have developed effective informal methods of education which we believe ought to be still more widely used and copied. We do not, however, believe that all the education of young agricultural workers should take place in separation from their fellows. The isolation of so many workers on the land should be broken down as far as possible by joint activities in which they continue to meet after school years those boys and girls who were their friends at school but who have gone into other jobs. There are plenty of villagers who are not farm workers, and a village college ought to be representative of the whole community and not of one section of it alone. 
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