Peter Mandler has received a four-year grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to study “Secondary Education and Social Change in the United Kingdom since 1945.” The grant, which amounts to just over £1m including Cambridge’s contribution, will bring back to Cambridge two former PhD students and NYCTC members, Laura Carter and Chris Jeppesen, as postdoctoral research fellows, with the addition halfway through the grant of a public engagement fellow to lead the team’s work with schools and educational charities. The idea of the project is assess for the first time the impact of universal secondary education on individual lives, aspirations, identities and social relations across the United Kingdom in the second half of the twentieth century. It is often forgotten that perhaps only 20% of the population had any experience of secondary education before the Second World War. Understanding what difference it makes that this minority experience extended to the whole of the population should enhance our appreciation of the place of schooling in individual lives and also of how dramatically education has changed the social and cultural landscape of this country within living memory.
Read more about the project here.