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A trip down memory lane - Here Hugh Davies recalls some memories from his time on the course
'' I was a student at Huddersfield Technical Training College in the first course held in 1948-49, with a scot, Mr MacLennan, as Principal. There was an expansion of technical education at the end of the war, and consequently far more teaching staff were required.'' More …
Education was thought to be so important in the post-war reconstruction of Britain that considerable educational planning occurred before hostilities ceased. The 1944 (Butler) Education Act provided ''secondary education for all" by creating the tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, admission to which was to be determined by examination at eleven plus. The Act also established the notion of further education for those beyond the statutory school age that wished to continue their education.
To be effective such profound changes needed to be supported with an adequate supply of well-trained teachers, and the McNair Report (1944) discussed how the teaching force might be developed. One of the Report's seventeen chapters was devoted to the newly created sector of further education, and recorded that the only training available for such teachers was occasional short courses provided by industrialists for staff involved in apprentice training, and part-time courses at some colleges for teachers of technical subjects.
These were validated by the City and Guilds of London Institute. McNair changed the position drastically. It not only studied the needs of further education teachers, but also recommended the process by which their training became part of the general system of teacher training based on the Area Training Organisations (ATO) set up in 1947, so that since the war all major reports on teacher training have made reference to Further Education.
Training was established in Huddersfield in 1947, and for sixty years, Huddersfield has played a leading part nationally and internationally. The institution has had four names, each characterised by a particular phase of development. Firstly the Technical Teacher Training College , founded in 1947, was principally concerned with establishing full-time programmes of basic training. In 1963 the name was changed to College of Education (Technical) following the national remit that "Training" should be transformed into the wider concept of "Education". This phase was associated with considerable expansion of in-service basic training in collaboration with a network of partner colleges.
In 1974 the separate institution merged with Huddersfield Polytechnic and a Faculty of Education was formed which greatly facilitated the development of degree programmes. By the time the Polytechnic became the University of Huddersfield and in 1992, the School of Education had a well established research expertise and reputation which attracted many MPhil and PhD students seeking supervision, so that by 1997 over 2,100 students were recruited annually to a comprehensive range of courses.
