Days out of School: Secondary Education, Citizenship and Public Space in 1950s England

There is a moment, when rifling through archives, when a subject, a substantive line of interpretation, gradually emerges. Sometimes returning over time, one recognizes the significance of an image or document that has been ignored heretofore. This was the case when looking through boxes of photographs, freely linked to schools, searching for evidence about classroom artefacts, and hastily passing over old, cyclostyled sheets of instructions about a school trip. It is not always apparent how public photographic collections emerge, or in what order and content they are to be viewed; sometimes even the nature of their subject is unclear. In this case, these pages of text seemed out of place as well. Returning again and again to the images, and finding the school trip guide again, it was read more carefully. It became clear that it was the operational guide for a major expedition by an elementary school to London to look at the main sites of the capital. The guide had a degree of detail that seemed overly specific but the curious aspect, to the present authors, was the expeditionary quality of the venture. It was a big event. It was also an unusual event. It described an early 1950s elementary/secondary modern school in a modest part of Birmingham and its determination to mount significant events for its children, which would have overwhelmed schools today. It had a heroic and pioneering quality. In this essay, we shall try to place the visit in the context of its time, pedagogy and ambition. It is a story from below, a novel act, an enactment of the new civics and yet also, carrying with it the older structures and cultures of work in schools as well.