Houghton (1974)

Preliminary pages (pages i-ix)

Report (pages 1-204)

London: HMSO

Background notes

Arthur Houghton

Arthur Houghton (1898-1996) (pictured) was first elected to Parliament as Labour MP for the Yorkshire constituency of Sowerby in March 1949.

In October 1964 he became a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson's first government and was appointed a Privy Counsellor.

He retired from the Commons in February 1974 and was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Houghton of Sowerby.

The inquiry

At the end of June 1974, Reg Prentice and William Ross, Secretaries of State for Education and Science and for Scotland, appointed Houghton to lead an inquiry into the pay of teachers in schools and colleges. It was the first independent review of teachers' pay in Great Britain as a whole, and the first in England and Wales since the McNair Committee's report, The supply, recruitment and training of teachers and youth leaders, in 1944.

Houghton's terms of reference were: 'to examine the pay of non-university teachers in Great Britain; and to make recommendations' (page 1).

The ten members of his Committee included Maurice Kogan and Lady Plowden.

The Committee's report was published six months later in December 1974. It recommended extensive changes to the salary structure for teachers and substantial increases in their pay.

Despite the Wilson government's need to cut public spending, it accepted the Committee's recommendations and, in 1975, teachers received pay increases averaging 27 per cent.

The report online

The 1974 Houghton Report is presented here in two searchable pdf files, one containing the preliminary pages; the other the body of the report itself.

The pdf files of the 1974 Houghton Report and the above notes were prepared by Derek Gillard and uploaded on 18 September 2018.