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WEA
How Oxford pioneered working-class education
The Department for Continuing Education
is well known locally for the many
extramural classes it runs in Oxford and
the surrounding area, but what is perhaps
less well known is that the University, in
the early years of the 20th century, led the
movement to establish adult and workingclass
education.
The University’s early partnership with
the Workers’ Educational Association
(WEA) was celebrated recently at a
conference marking the centenary of the
first ‘tutorial classes’ launched by Oxford
and the WEA together in the autumn of
1908. These classes were designed to
take worker-students through a high-level
academic curriculum – comparable with
studies at a university – in the towns and
cities where they lived and worked. The
first classes were held in Rochdale in
Lancashire and in Longton in the Potteries
of North Staffordshire. They were taught by
RH Tawney, an Oxford alumnus who was to
become one of the most notable historians
and political thinkers of the 20th century.
Today, the WEA is the UK’s largest
voluntary provider of adult education and is
a charity supported by government funding.
It runs over 10,000 courses each year,
providing education for more than 110,000
adults from all walks of life. The organisation
was founded in 1903 to support the
educational needs of working men and
women, the year that Tawney graduated
from Balliol College.
After leaving Oxford, Tawney went to live
at Toynbee Hall in the East End of London,
the Oxford University settlement founded in
Top: The Rochdale industrial and
economic history class, pictured in
1908 with tutor RH Tawney seated in
the centre of the front row. A painting
of Tawney, dated 1951–2 (below), hangs
in the WEA’s London headquarters
WEA
In a place where no university
exists…
1885 where Oxford students and graduates
provided social and cultural leadership
among the urban poor. Some WEA
classes were held there and in 1908
Tawney was engaged jointly by Oxford
and the WEA as a peripatetic tutor for six
years, the result of a joint determination by
the two organisations to bring a university
education within reach of working people.
A meeting of representatives from the
University and more than 200 workingclass
organisations (including delegations
from trade unions, cooperative societies
and local educational groups) had been
held in Oxford in August 2007 to begin
planning for a ‘democratic education’.
After the event, a joint committee
representing Oxford and the WEA was
established and its resulting report, Oxford
and Working-Class Education, published
in 1909, set down a model for adult
education classes on which Tawney and
others drew in subsequent years.
Tawney’s first classes covered the
‘Industrial and economic history of
England in the 18th and 19th centuries’.
Dr Lawrence Goldman of St Peter’s College
and the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, who is also a former president
of the Thames and Solent District of the
WEA, gave a paper at the recent centenary
conference in Stoke-on-Trent. ‘The class
in Longton, which met on Friday evenings,
included potters, miners and mechanics as
well as shop workers and school teachers,’
he says. ‘Fees, subsidised by the University,
were 2s 6d for the year and students were
expected to write a fortnightly paper to be
set by the tutor. The youngest member
of Tawney’s Rochdale class, Alfred
Wadsworth, went on to become editor of
the Manchester Guardian.’
Tawney went on to teach tutorial
classes in several more locations including
Chesterfield, Glossop, Littleborough and
Wrexham. By 1914 Oxford was responsible
for 18 classes and a total of 367 students.
The model thus established spread to
other places and also to other institutions
so that within a few years many universities
were in partnership with the WEA and
thousands of mature students were in
contact with higher education. In addition,
the syllabuses developed for tutorial classes
were influential at a formative stage in the
development of the modern university in
Britain: the teaching of subjects as diverse
as English, Geography and Economic
History to adult students at this time
helped to form and shape these and other
academic disciplines.
Tawney himself continued to serve the
WEA, as a member of its executive for over
40 years and then as vice-president and
president, alongside an academic career as
a lecturer and then professor of economic
history at the London School of Economics.
A hundred years on, Oxford’s
Department for Continuing Education
continues to dispatch tutors to extramural
classes and to collaborate with the WEA in
providing what Tawney called ‘the nucleus
of a university in a place where no university
exists’.
10
Blueprint January 2009