In 1938, only about 14 percent of English and Welsh young people entered state secondary schools, and fewer than 1 percent of the state-educated went on to university; but today, all those under 18 attend secondary school and 50 percent go on to university. In The Crisis of the Meritocracy, Peter Mandler considers how and why this mass expansion of education took place in Britain after the Second World War. This is not primarily a story, Mandler argues, of successive governments’ expanding education because they foresaw the need for a skilled workforce, but of increasing demand for “more and more education” (206) among parents and pupils themselves. The bipartite system of grammar schools and secondary moderns established after the 1944 Education Act encountered parental opposition from the start, as “parity of esteem” between the different school types was never accepted. As Mandler puts it, “no-one was suggesting that there should be good hospitals for some and average hospitals for others” (48); counterarguments from figures such as Labour education minister Ellen Wilkinson suggesting that there should be different types of school for different types of child did not ring true to the general public.

Local educational authorities responded to these pressures, and many began “going comprehensive” long before the Department of Education and Science required them to do so in Circular 10/65. Meanwhile, the Robbins Report of 1963 established the principle that higher education should be made “available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment” and who wanted to pursue it; but a 1962 survey had already shown that 80 percent of working-class and middle-class parents wanted their children to go to university if they were “so qualified and so inclined” (79). And despite temporary lulls in “staying-on” rates in the early 1970s and late 1980s, participation among 18–19 year olds continued to rise throughout this period, augmented by the number of mature students flooding into higher education, aided by Access courses, part-time degrees, and the Open University.

Why did student demand for higher education continue to increase across most of this period? Economists have portrayed students as rational actors investing in their futures, or, during more straitened economic circumstances, “parking” in education until the job market improved. However, redefinitions of the route to adulthood may have been more important. From the 1960s, Mandler argues, a new idea of “student life” was emerging that entailed physical mobility away from parents and would eventually, in the twenty-first century, provide “the transition between childhood and adulthood” for a large number of young people (142). While the majority of young people did not go to university at the age of 18 before 2017, establishing a separate home away from one's parents was increasingly viewed as a marker of adulthood by the 1980s, even if you did not access higher education (Susan Hutson and Richard Jenkins, Taking the Strain: Families, Unemployment and the Transition to Adulthood [1989]). Mandler also emphasizes the importance of new qualifications like the General Certification of Secondary Education (GCSEs), examined in 1988, in smoothing young people's route toward A Levels and hence to university.

Much official discourse about British education, especially from the 1970s onward, adopted a “declinist” framework and assumed both that educational opportunities were inferior in Britain when compared to those of mainland Europe and other key competitor countries such as the United States, and that the shift “away from science” (156) after the 1950s meant that Britain was lagging in scientific and technical expertise. Mandler points out that Britain's Age Participation Rate (APR)—the proportion of 18–19 year olds who progress to higher education—did not lag behind that of most other European countries in the 1960s, although it was far behind the United States and Canada. However, widening participation was actually in tension with the wish to see young people qualify in scientific and technical subjects—at least until 2012, the new intake of students preferred humanities and (especially) social scientific subjects. Mandler suggests that cumulative subjects like the sciences were harder for students to pick up if they decided to stay on later in their academic career, but also that the social sciences were especially attractive to young people as “self-discovery” became fashionable, especially among girls, who linked it to a desire to “help the community directly through social action” (163).

The final chapter of The Crisis of the Meritocracy addresses the question of “social mobility,” often the first phrase on people's lips when the history of education is mentioned today, although it did not enter public discourse until the 1990s. Mandler clearly explains traditional claims about absolute versus relative social mobility, showing that as the number of “white-collar” jobs increased during the age of affluence, more working-class young people were able to rise through the I–VII class structure defined by sociologists. However, he also points out that this was caused by social, rather than educational change; furthermore, “effectively maintained inequality” meant that people from higher class backgrounds made better use of the opportunities created through educational expansion (185).

The Crisis of the Meritocracy is an impressive synthesis of sociology, economics, and history. Much of the ground Mandler covers is familiar, but that does not make the contribution of this monograph any less important. Indeed, his achievement is to bring these debates about education together, explain them in terms that a non-specialist can understand, and link them to the wider history of the British state. Mandler, deliberately, does not have much to say about how young people experienced the education they received, and whether, for example, they were driven to stay on because they had been fulfilled by what they had seen so far or because they believed the next stage would be different. However, as Mandler notes in his introduction, this “worm's-eye view” (viii) is the job of his Secondary Education and Social Change Project, jointly conducted with Laura Carter and Chris Jeppesen at the University of Cambridge. Alongside this existing monograph, the publications from this project promise to explore “what difference education has made to [British] people's lives over the last three generations” (viii).