Crafting the English Welfare State: Interventions by Birmingham Local Education Authorities, 1948–1963

This article throws light on the space and range of education professionals and their interventions against deviants understood as the ‘problem child’ or the ‘ineducable child’. The article argues these interventions played a central role in successfully establishing schools as social administrators in England during the constitutive years of English welfare state formation. Using Birmingham local education administration as an empirical and historical case, the influential Children Acts of 1948 and 1963 serve to demarcate the period treated. The theoretical framework is drawn from Bourdieu and Wacquant’s concept of state, with the key concept being ‘state-crafting’. The article contributes knowledge about the imaginaries, and the manufacturing and managing of ‘the public good’ – understood as a referent for modern governing – of the English welfare state. The article concludes that the boundaries of unacceptable otherness seem to fluctuate with ideas about usefulness in relation to an industrialised society.