This ground-breaking book uncovers a hidden history of the professional development of serving teachers. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archive material, Wendy Robinson reveals an optimistic and liberal age of high class conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, in London hotels and Oxford colleges, free from government control, where teachers from across the country and abroad, gathered for professional, intellectual and cultural 'refreshment'.

The status attached to these occasions was signified by the celebrities who graced them, including royalty, public intellectuals, educational practitioners and politicians. Professor Robinson then shows how post-war training became more instrumental, taken over by the Ministry of Education with its centrally-prescribed advanced courses, and, from 1970, by Local Education Authorities' invention of apparently democratic Teachers' Centres.