The study of education as a university subject in Britain

The first chairs in education were established in Scotland in 1876. But it was only from the late 1890s that education departments were founded in English universities. The study of education in Britain can be periodised into four stages, but it is in the last of these, from the 1960s, that the subject really ‘took off˚s, based on a paradigm originally defined by the new philosophers who applied the techniques of linguistic analysis to the subject. The massive expansion of colleges of education and the establishment of new universities greatly increased the number of academic staff engaged on theoretical study at this time. As a result education has developed as a multi-disciplinary study and is now much more closely related to the mainstream of university studies than it ever was in the past.