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Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the history of education and considers the role of informal educational activity that takes place outside the classroom, including that of children's reading for pleasure. Stories in the interwar British, Canadian and Australian Girl's and Boy's annuals provide an example of how appropriate gender roles were presented to their young readers at a time of intense social and political change for Britain. With Brexit heralding a similar significant moment of change and the pandemic lockdowns resulting in children spending more time at home, it is concluded that the significance of 'informal' education, both historically and today, requires our attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to this special issue arising from the 2017 50th anniversary conference of the UK History of Education Society entitled "Celebration, commemoration and collaboration: milestones in the history of education," sponsored by the Centre for the History of Women's Education at the University of Winchester in Winchester, England.

The remit for this short piece was to identify themes emerging from the articles in this edition by Julie McLeod, Duncan Waite and Eugenie Samier, to consider how these themes reflect on the current field, and to identify their ongoing relevance. Additionally, I was asked to consider the current challenges that the field is facing and what this means for research and journals such as this one. My short response is that our research has to matter. It has to matter to us as individuals so that what we do is worthwhile; it has to matter that we can provide rigorous research that is reliable so that it can inform policy makers and administrators; and it has to provide teachers and students with a greater understanding of why they are doing what they are being asked to do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article highlights the significance of sociability in the activities of the British and International Federations of University Women in the long 1950s. Much of the activity centred on Crosby Hall, the ‘International Clubhouse’ in London for overseas and British graduate women. Ideas of cosmopolitanism and sociability can be traced back to the Enlightenment. The article draws on Glick Schiller et al.'s discussion of cosmopolitan sociability in a transnational age, and suggests that a gendered and historical perspective highlights the significance of events which might appear somewhat marginal compared with more formal political activities. Both Noah Sobe and Thomas Popkewitz have recently highlighted the exclusionary, as well as the inclusive, possibilities of cosmopolitanism. The nature, preparation and importance placed on social events in local, national and international networks demonstrates the centrality of the social in promoting the successful outcome of the more formal activities of the Federations on the public stage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Fink and Tinkler on sexual vulnerability of teenage girls on film, oneby Edwards on rural femininity and one by McCarthy on women employees.

This article focuses on the series of 11 books about a young female pilot, Worrals of the WAAF, by W.E. Johns, creator of Biggles. The Worrals books were published from 1941 when recruitment for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was falling. Johns chose to ignore that the WAAF supported pilots through their work on the ground and did not themselves fly. The article discusses how historians of education can draw on fiction in order to identify aspects of informal education, especially during wartime, when so many children’s formal schooling was disrupted or non-existent. Drawing on Erica Jong’s 1970s metaphor of “flying” as representative of female freedom, it is possible to read Worrals’ character as a role model for teenage girls. The conundrum of why Johns chose to put Worrals in the WAAF, rather than in Air Transport with the likes of Amy Johnson, is further explored in the light of evidence that a number of WAAF were seconded to the SOE. It concludes that fiction read alongside a range of other evidence offers a rich source for the historian engaged in a search for the gendered nature of education beyond the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the guest editors of the journal discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the transnational, religious, and gendered perspectives in the history of education.

This article explores the fictional world of the schoolgirl annual in the interwar period and the significance of the imagined girls'-only spaces for their intended readership. The article takes the year 1929, the year of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and focuses on two annuals designed for the 12–15 market: School Friend and Schoolgirls' Own. The annual compendium of stories, a very British invention, drew on characters whose adventures were followed in the weekly schoolgirl comics and was published at Christmas, a time when there was little personal space available as families gathered together. The imaginary world of boarding schools such as Cliff House or Morcove offered readers an escape from the hierarchy of family life and expectations of girls' participation in the home. Using the background of Woolf's feminist polemic and a framework informed by the theoretical framing of space by feminist geographer Linda McDowell, the article teases out the meaning of the multilayered nature of stories created by men with no experience of single-sex girls' school, writing as women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1927 the British Federation of University Women (BFUW) established Crosby Hall in London as a hall of residence for women graduates from overseas. The Federation aimed to foster international understanding and peace at a time of social and political turmoil. Accessions to the library at the Hall were on a somewhat ad hoc basis and provide an intriguing historical source. Crosby Hall was sold, but the much loved library travelled first to Bloomsbury and ultimately to the Special Collections of a university. This article discusses the sensory power of a book collection for the historian drawing on recent reflections on the affective turn in history of education. Is it more than the sum of its parts? Does the collection hold more meaning if held separately rather than integrated onto the general shelves? What are the possibilities inherent in research on rather than in a collection such as this? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 25 years ago Joan Scott reviewed the progress of historical analysis that foregrounded gender as an analytical category. Her article in The American Historical Review has become one of the landmark expressions of the state of the field. While historical approaches utilising gender frameworks have become quite commonplace, this issue of Journal of Educational Administration and History demonstrates that the gender debate is by no means over. Indeed in specialised areas of historical research the precise challenge that Scott laid down for historians to identify the power structures embedded within narratives of the past becomes all the more pressing. The papers in this issue highlight the vibrant nature of an approach which allows us to cross disciplinary boundaries as we enhance our appreciation of the impact of education in its broadest sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in governmental financial support are causing many would-be students to question the value of higher education or to consider attending a local university. Oral history testimonies provide a source for understanding the role that living, as well as working, within an academic community plays in the learning lives of its alumni. An understanding of the cultural and social space provided by an institution offers an insight into how time spent in higher education remains integral to long-term learning lives, often articulated as marking a 'watershed' or inspiration. Interviews for the University of Winchester Alumni Voices project invited alumni and retired staff to reflect on the process of learning generated by their time at Winchester (previously King Alfred's College). At the article's core is the significance of oral history narratives to the social history of learners and learning. We discuss how we have developed voice relational analysis in order to interrogate the transformative impact of learning on individuals' sense of self. The richness of the data from a small scale research project and the increasing sophistication of oral history methodology demonstrate the relatively untapped potential that histories of higher education hold for understanding individual learning lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by John Tosh on the relationship between history and social theory, one by Nicola Sheldon on the music education of boys in British care institutions, and one by Georgina Brewis on the way middle-class girls were introduced to philanthropic work between 1890 and 1914.

Britain in the 1950s offered increased opportunities for secondary education leading to better career prospects at a time of full employment. A government report into early leaving in 1954 noted that it was girls of all social classes who were most 'at risk' of not staying the course. The following article discusses first the nature of risk and suggests that for girls perhaps, staying at school and delaying marriage, at a time when unequal pay and opportunities were the norm, was perceived as more of a risk than the safety of marriage and dependent domesticity. It then considers the concerns of the Early Leaving Report in more detail. Despite the attempts by policy makers to encourage girls into education, there were rival discourses which persuaded girls into domesticity and the article concludes by indicating the varied and pervasive nature of some of this rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the possibility for expanding our understanding of the visual to include the ‘spoken visual’ within oral history analysis. It suggests that adding a further reading, that of the visualized body, to the voice-centred relational method we can consider the meaning of the uniformed body for the individual. It uses as a case-study reflections on a photograph taken of a group of girls on a school outing and their adult interpretation of the meaning of the modifications to their school uniform. Extracts from oral history interviews with girls who left school in South London in the late 1950s are also used to demonstrate the frequency with which respondents refer to how they looked in order to express in more detail how they felt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on education and employment of women.

Discusses girls' experience of secondary education in England in the late 1950's. Memories of small self-selected sample of women who left school in London, England between 1956 and 1960; Role of oral history in a methodology suited to the research of the history of education; Consideration of possible struggle between home and school values in terms of class and gender roles.

Queen's College in London, England's Harley Street was founded in 1848 by Frederick Denison Maurice. Together with other professors from King's College, London he began the venture for the education of middle-class girls, which was greeted with prejudice and ridicule. Originally planned as an institution for training governesses, it was decided at the first meeting of the committee to admit other girls and young women to its lectures. However, although the college was designed for women it was administered by men. The Lady Visitors make only brief appearances in histories of the school, located on the margins by their non-teaching, non-governing roles.

This article explores the way in which the "city" Throughout this article "city" functions both as place and representation. was represented in popular imaginations as the site where the metamorphosis from girl to woman could be achieved in late 1950s England. It uses a socio-semiotic theoretical framework in order to tease out the relationship between the city as an imagined space and the actual experience of living or working in the city. The article draws on material from both interviews and career storybooks for girls. The discourse of the city as representative of sophistication and freedom, at a time when the rules of society were still fairly rigid, is one which occurs in both areas. The city provided a site where girls could grow up away from the surveillance of parents and school. It was an educative space in which boundaries could be challenged and crossed without upsetting the established conventions of gender roles. The notion of the career girl was in its infancy and women were still expected to prioritise their domestic role. After a brief flurry of (relatively) independent living or working in the city, girls could emerge as young women who, having met Mr Right, returned to the suburbs or provinces and conformed to the gender expectations of the time. There was never any suggestion in the novels, or in the interviews, that the period spent working or training in the city was anything other than a transitional phase. The perceived sophistication of city life acted as an informal educative site where girls could learn to be women. They learned to dress properly, work through relationships and grow in worldly wisdom away from the safety of their home environment, to which inevitably they would return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the analytic framework of career novel author Penny Summerfield regarding the relationship between women and paid work in the 1950s. Discourses on women and work since the First World War; Background on the creation of girls' career novels; Portrayal of women in the novels.

The article examines the photographs of North Wales which was taken by Francis Bedford. Bedford was one of the most respected photographers of the British landscape in mid-nineteenth century England. His favorite region to photograph is in North Wales, which best represents his work as a whole. It has been pointed out that an analysis of this group of photographs contributes to the understanding of how and why Bedford selected specific sites, how he interpreted them technically and aesthetically, and what they may have meant to a contemporary audience. When viewed in a larger context, this analysis also clears up Bedford's links with traditional landscape painting in theory and practice.

The article examines the photographic work of photographer Oscar Gustav Rejlander, the promoter of photography as a fine art in Great Britain. His interest in photography led him to took up lessons on the calotype, waxed paper and wet collodion processes. The most important aspect of Rejlander's career is that he never abandoned painting and drawing. It is inferred that Rejlander did not view photography as superior, but simply tried to demonstrate the usefulness of photography in the study of fine arts and in establishing a higher standard of truth to nature. In addition, he believed that photography was itself an art form, if given the same degree of imagination and creativity, as artists did.