A Century of Education sets out to provide an overview of the role and nature of education in 20th-century Britain: no small task, in the compass of a crisp 200 pages. For anyone interested in what has become the most important issue of our time, it will become, its editor says, “a classic text: a work of information, interpretation and reference”.

To some extent it is all of these. Its organisation is by topic, and 10 chapters deal in turn with primary education, secondary education, further and higher education, governance, teachers, pupils, special educational needs, curriculum and examinations.

They follow a common format. Each begins with an overview of the situation at the turn of the 20th century, followed by a summary of what was happening in 1900. Then each contains a longer central section on “change and continuities”, a brief conclusion and a guide to further reading. The focus is on England and Wales. There is an excellent table of key events and an invaluable glossary of acronyms.

The format poses some editorial problems. Each contributor is left to decide the balance between information and interpretation. Peter Cunningham, writing on primary education, leans one way; Gary McCulloch, on secondary education (“widely perceived by 2000 to be in a state of chaos”), leans the other. Philip Gardner offers a perceptive essay on the culture of teaching and the “isolation” and “disappointment” that have been, he says, its defining characteristics, but finds no room for teacher training, teacher unions or the new culture of accountability and compliance.

Ruth Watts’s chapter on pupils and students ignores the changing commonalities of the classroom experience for the discriminations born of class and gender. Only Ian Copeland, Peter Gordon and Alison Wolf, tackling the more manageable areas of special needs, the curriculum and assessment, cover the ground and review the journey.

A second difficulty is repetition. There is inevitable overlap across chapters: the same landmarks (major statutes and reports, seminal or symbolic interventions such as those of Robert Morant at the first Board of Education, or James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin speech) reappear and are frequently re-described. Cross-references and a fuller index would have been helpful.

More problematic are the omissions. That is partly a matter of perspective. There is no mention, for example, in the chapter that deals with LEAs and government, of inspirational giants such as the West Riding’s Alec Clegg or Birmingham’s Tim Brighouse - but space is found for the Ridings school and Hackney Downs. Is this a question of balance, or a tacit acknowledgement that media perceptions are now as powerful as politics in shaping educational policy?

Other gaps stem from the format. There is nothing, except by implication, on the way that the independent sector has been able to shape, for much of the century, perceptions and policies. In education, letting the best become the enemy of the good has been a very English disease. The 40-year struggle to broaden A-levels (not mentioned here) reflects abiding tensions in this area.

So does the story of the comprehensive movement - another issue that has to be traced through chapters. The consensus here is that the comprehensive school was an experiment that failed. Future historians, looking at the explosion in higher education that the comprehensives fuelled, may take a different view.

The great value of this book is that it sets into context a century of ever-accelerating changes. A new generation of teachers needs to study these and see them for what they were. “The only uniformity of practice that (we) desire to seeI is that each teacher should think for himself.” Not Estelle Morris but Robert Morant, circa 1905. It’s time the pendulum swung back a little. If enough young teachers read this and reflect upon it, that could well begin to happen.

MICHAEL DUFFY