School buildings are closed. Months of learning are being missed. Teachers and children are fearful of the future. The country is grieving. Our world is in crisis.

Sound familiar? Naturally, you’ll think of 2020 and the huge impact that the pandemic had on both your personal and professional life. But the description also fits another time in history, when education came to a standstill and life changed forever: the Second World War.

Could looking back to the upheaval caused by those wartime school closures and the subsequent recovery efforts provide us with a clue as to whether our current catch-up priorities are on the right track?

Daniel Todman, a lecturer in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London, thinks it could. He explains that, between 1939 and 1941, some school buildings in cities were closed and repurposed as air-raid shelters, or were destroyed in the Blitz. City children were evacuated to the countryside, where many received their education in small village schools (see box, opposite).

Indeed, in a podcast for HistoryExtra, Jonathan Boff, a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Birmingham, said that as many as two-thirds of schools in London and about 60 per cent of those in Manchester were closed down during the Blitz.

By January 1940, only a quarter of children in London were receiving full-time education; another quarter were having part-time education, and a quarter were being homeschooled. The remaining quarter (around 430,000 children), Boff says, were getting no education at all.

And even in 1941, when the education system had adapted and schools were open more often, education was still patchy: absence rates were high and there was plenty of low-level disruption.

Today’s teachers know the effects of school closures and subsequent absences all too well, but how far behind were the children of the 1940s when they returned to school after their time away?

While testing wasn’t as easy to organise back then, in 1943 some 3,000 13-year-olds were tested in arithmetic, history, geography and English. They were found to be about a year behind on average, with many having considerably low levels of literacy. Something needed to be done but resources were scarce, says Todman.

“Even during the war, there were fights about how many resources should be devoted to education because it was a time of resource constraint,” he explains. “There was a fairly effective president of the board of education [equivalent to the education secretary today], Richard [“Rab” ] Butler, and with his great Labour deputy, James Chuter Ede, they scraped to get resources for education.”

This was a challenge, not only because funds were scarce but also because the teaching workforce had been decimated by the war: some teachers joined the army and never returned; others lost their lives during the Blitz. And while a proportion of returning soldiers retrained as teachers, the process of recruiting and training them took years.

Facilities were also a concern. With many of their buildings destroyed or repurposed, schools had to erect temporary classrooms, which often weren’t up to scratch.

A radical rethink

With children behind on their education, teacher numbers low and education happening in temporary buildings, a radical rethink was needed. So, what did the government do?

It brought forward the 1944 Education Act, and enforced legislation that raised the school leaving age to 15. This was, technically, already the law, having first been introduced in the 1936 Education Act, says Todman - but it had never been properly enforced.

“The 1944 Education Act was actually the only piece of legislation passed during the war,” he explains. “There was a consensus between reforming Conservatives and big Labour figures that education was going to be a really fundamental part of recovery.”

The war, he says, highlighted the pre-war gaps in the system, and there was a “national moment of reckoning” around skills. Education, Butler thought, would be the key to producing the skilled tradespeople the country really needed.

Back then, it was the labour gap that was the driving force behind the reforms, not concerns about children catching up.

“It wasn’t about making up the difference from the war; it was about recasting education to make the country succeed post-war,” Todman explains. “The gaps in education heightened the debate.”

So, how successful were the reforms? At the time, they met the needs of the country, explains Todman.

“If you look at how relatively bad the British education system was between the wars, the 1944 act represented a significant advance. It meant more children going to school for longer and, in the political context of the time, it was successful. Was it transformational? I think people who lived through it would say so,” Todman says.

But while the act created “a skilled workforce to meet the demands of the 1940s and 1950s”, it was not a silver bullet. Todman says that “by the 1960s we didn’t have the right sort of skilled workers” because society had changed.

Modern parallels

Are there lessons to learn here? Well, clearly those in power in the 1940s were less concerned about catch-up than our current government. But we have a similar focus on technical and vocational education today, as we try to plug the skills shortages that have emerged since Brexit and Covid.

There are parallels we can draw, then. And Todman says there are several key takeaways. The first, he suggests, is about strong leadership. “You need a competent education secretary, with the backing of a Civil Service able to plan for the future, to campaign effectively in Whitehall for the resources education needs,” he explains.

Political consensus about the need for improvement is also critical, he adds. During the Second World War, there was consensus across all political parties; today, consensus needs to be at least within the Conservative Party.

Todman’s final takeaway is perhaps more directly applicable to schools: the need to have a big-picture vision to tackle the challenges of the future - not just those in front of you.

“We can see these huge challenges coming up: climate change, automation, for example. And during the war, Butler could see those skills challenges on the horizon. You may not predict things exactly right, but you need to have a vision to try and implement change that meets the scale of the challenge,” he says.

Schools should therefore approach Covid catch-up with their eyes fixed firmly on the future. It might not be enough to simply make up for lost time, Todman suggests. Instead, the sector needs to cultivate a “forward-thinking vision”.

Kate Parker is schools and colleges content producer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 26 November 2021 issue under the headline “The Blitz spirit can help us with Covid catch-up”