It is easy to forget that it was once ‘customary to genuflect whenever the Butler [Education] Act was mentioned’. Contemporaries harboured few doubts about its long-term importance. Speaking to the Conservative Party conference, on 15 March 1945, Winston Churchill claimed for his government ‘the greatest Education Act in the history of the country’. He also passed over his own, early and continued opposition to the proposed legislation. Even those then less inclined either to selective memory or unsubstantiated hyperbole tended to agree. James Chuter Ede, a genuinely tireless proponent of progress, testily countered that so admirable an outcome was actually ‘more the result of the coalition’, that is of Labour's enthusiasm for Butler's plans, than of the Prime Minister's belated enlightenment. He still happily acknowledged that the Act had gone ‘a long way to unify the educational system of the country’ and in so doing had given the ‘whole service…a fresh start on improved lines’. For a generation after, the majority of informed commentators and critics concurred; some with Churchill's fine words, more with Ede's measured assent. The majority of early chroniclers also acclaimed its eponymous author. The occasional champion can still be found.

But the prevailing orthodoxy is hostile. Variously berated for its failure to deal with the ‘real problem[s]’ of social justice, economic modernisation or even administrative efficiency, the Butler Act is now widely condemned as, at best, a missed opportunity, or worse, as the egregious product of political myopia and social inertia, each disingenuously harnessed by Butler's sly conservatism to effect little in much.