Secondary Education and the Raising of the School-Leaving Age

Effect of Education on Myopia: Evidence from the United Kingdom ROSLA 1972 Reform

“…17 , 18 Raising of the School Leaving Age (ROSLA) was implemented in England and Wales in September 1972. 19 Children born in September 1957 were the first to be affected by the reform; those who would have left school aged 15 were required to remain at school for up to one additional academic year. 20 Because ROSLA 1972 generated a marked increase in the duration of education for those affected, it provided a scenario well-suited for regression discontinuity.…”

Compulsory Educational Provision

“…In Britain, the 1944 Education Act raised the age to 15, achieved in 1947 despite postwar economic problems and a lack of suitable school buildings and teachers (Cowan et al 2012). It also recommended a further increase to 16 once this became practicable, which proved somewhat longer to achieve than was anticipated (Woodin et al 2013). This extended process was the result of hesitations over the high economic costs and in some quarters a preference for other educational priorities such as smaller class sizes and university growth.…”

“…Although compulsory education may at first appear to be a basic and inevitable feature of modern schooling systems, extending slowly and gradually over the course of many decades on the basis of general consensus, on closer inspection, the conflicts over compulsion are particularly evident (Provasnik 2006). Tensions regarding the extension of the compulsory school age have continued into the twenty-first century, representing basic disagreements over the purposes of schooling and its role in modern societies (Woodin et al 2013).…”

Conservatism and educational crisis: the case of England

“…To do so, they had sometimes to over-ride opposition from their own supporters, who were opposed to 'excessive' state spending (Woodin et al 2013). Moreover, as Gamble (1974) has noted, the grassroots of the Conservative Party retained an Oakeshottian dislike for structural reform in education, an attitude which was chanelled into defence of the grammar school, the academic element in the tripartite secondary system established after 1944.…”