Secondary Technical School

A secondary technical school was a type of secondary school in the United Kingdom that existed in the mid-20th century under the Tripartite System of education. For various reasons few were ever built, and their main interest is on a theoretical level.

The 1944 Butler Education Act promised a secondary schooling system with three tiers. In addition to grammar schools and secondary moderns, the government intended there to be a series of ‘Secondary Technical Schools’. These would teach mechanical, scientific and engineering skills to serve industry and science.

The 1944 Act (the Butler Act) replaced all previous education law, removed the Board of Education and replaced it with Ministry of Education. It established that all maintained schooling was to be free. Secondary state schools were to be organised on a three-tier model: grammar (entrance based on ability with the option of an 11-plus), technical schools and secondary modern, with further education delivered through county colleges for school-leavers to 18 years of age.

This reasoning had been based on the 1943 Norwood Report, and the experiences gained in the 1930s and the skills shortages encountered during the ongoing war.

"the various kinds of technical schools, which were not instituted to satisfy the intellectual needs of an arbitrarily assumed group of children, but to prepare boys and girls for taking up certain crafts -engineering, agriculture and the like. Nevertheless it is usual to think of the engineer or other craftsman as possessing a particular set of interests or aptitudes by virtue of which he becomes a successful engineering or whatever he may become".

Local authorities were given a deal of freedom on how this was to be implemented, and while it was easy to create two branches from existing building stock, technical school were more problematic and often had to be built afresh. As a result, in most LEA areas, pupils were not selected from the 11-plus as originally proposed, but from a separate, voluntary set of examinations taken at the age of 12 or 13. Kent was one authority that embraced the changes and implemented the system according to the letter of the law. These schools were invariably single sex, and usually recruited their entrants from the lower end of the 'selective' band (as measured at the age of 11). Admission was at first at the age of 13, but later at 11. There was still a difficulty in providing suitable accommodation, and the Wilmington schools provide an interesting case study.

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