Doctoral thesis written by Robert James Sutton in History of Art for the award of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of York, September 2014.

Robert Sutton writes about the period between 1938 and 1950, focusing on four public commissions that Moore completed at four different educational establishments. Each of these commissions represented a different strand of educational provision either side of the Second World War. The first two commissions that Sutton writes about did not come to fruition: a series of reliefs to cover the side of Senate House, commissioned by Charles Holden, and a sculpture to be situated in front of the new 'Village College' in Cambridgeshire, devised by Henry Morris and designed by the architects Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry. The thesis then focuses on Family Group, 1948-49 (LH 269) and how it was commissioned at sited at the Barclay School, Stevenage, one of the first secondary modern schools built in England after the war and the implementation of the 1944 Education Act. The final commission written about in this thesis is Memorial Figure, 1945-46 (LH 262) for the ground of the Dartington School in Devon, set up by the philanthropic educationalists, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst.