Parliamentary grants for school buildings

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Student’s File

Boarding Schools

I. Lead-in

· Education in England: a brief history

II. Obligatory Material

· Reading 1: The history of British education and the role of independent boarding schools.

· Reading 2: A Brief History of Boarding Schools

III. 5-minute statements (materials in the Reader)

IV. Debate

V. Term Presentations

VI. Summary (class)

LEAD-IN

PRE-READING QUESTIONS

1. How can you define “education”?

Education in England: a brief history
Derek Gillard

© copyright Derek Gillard 2011
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Chapter 2: 1800-1860

Towards a state system of education

Industrialisation: the need for mass education

The industrial revolution

In 1751 the population of the British mainland stood at seven million. By 1821 - after seventy years of industrial revolution - it had reached fourteen million, and by 1871 it would reach twenty-six million. The rapid expansion in the overall population was matched by increases in the proportion of people who lived in towns and cities and in the proportion of the population who were children.

England's industrial revolution began in the second half of the 18th century. At first, new agricultural techniques freed workers from the land and made it possible to feed a large non-agricultural population.

In the 19th century, relative world peace, the availability of money, coal and iron ore, and the invention of the steam engine, all combined to facilitate the construction of factories for the mass production of goods. The factory system increased the division and specialisation of labour and resulted in large numbers of people moving to the new industrial cities, especially in the midlands and the north. It also resulted in low wages, slum housing and the use of child labour.

Thus the industrial revolution exacerbated the problems of a society 'divided into those with land or capital or profession and those with no wealth, no possessions and no privileges' (Benn and Chitty 1996:2).

Perhaps the first sign that the state was beginning to acknowledge some responsibility for the conditions in which the poor - and particularly poor children - lived, was Peel's Factory Act of 1802: 'An Act for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others employed in cotton and other mills and cotton and other factories'. The Act required an employer to provide instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic during at least the first four years of the seven years of apprenticeship. Such secular instruction was to be part of the twelve hours of daily occupation beginning not earlier than 6am and ending not later than 9pm. Many of the apprentices were young pauper children who were frequently brought from distant workhouses to labour in the cotton mills.

Alongside the upheaval of industrialisation, the process of democratisation got under way with the Representation of the People Act 1832 (commonly known as the Reform Act), which gave a million people the right to vote.

This dramatic social, political and economic transformation served to reveal the utter inadequacy of England's educational provision. A number of reports highlighted the deficiencies and called for more and better schools. One such report looked at 12,000 parishes in 1816, and found that 3,500 had no school, 3,000 had endowed schools of varying quality, and 5,500 had unendowed schools of even more variable quality.

The first government department with specific responsibility for education was established during this period. An Order in Councildated 10 April 1839 created the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. Dr (later Sir) James Kay-Shuttleworth was appointed as its first Permanent Secretary. A second Order in Council of 3 June approved the Committee of Council on Education's report on the distribution of funds for public education.

The following are Minutes of the Committee of Council on Educationdated 1839-59:

24 September 1839: regulations governing the appropriation of grants.
25 August and 21 December 1846: appointment of inspectors; teachers' qualifications and pensions; education of pupil teachers and stipendiary monitors; support for Normal Schools.
6 August 1851: grants to certificated teachers in training schools.
23 July 1852: grants to assistant teachers in elementary schools.
2 April 1853: grants for the support of schools.
20 August 1853: Queen's Scholars, apprentices and certificated teachers.
2 June 1856: admission of Queen's Scholars and annual examination of students in training colleges.
4 May 1859: cancelled Section 9 in the Minute of 20 August 1853.

New types of school

To fill the gaps, and to provide for England's newly-industrialised and (partly) enfranchised society, various types of school began to be established to offer some basic education to the masses.

Sunday schools

The Sunday schools taught the poor - both children and adults - to read the Bible, but not to do writing or arithmetic or any of the 'more dangerous subjects' which were 'less necessary or even harmful' (Williams 1961:136).

Schools of industry

'Schools of industry' were set up to provide the poor with manual training and elementary instruction. Such a school opened at Kendal in the Lake District in 1799. According to the Records of the Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor (III. 300-312):

the children were taught reading and writing, geography and religion. Thirty of the older girls were employed in knitting, sewing, spinning and housework, and 36 younger girls were employed in knitting only. The older boys were taught shoemaking, and the younger boys prepared machinery for carding wool. The older girls assisted in preparing breakfast, which was provided in the school at a small weekly charge. They were also taught laundry work. The staff consisted of one schoolmaster, two teachers of spinning and knitting, and one teacher for shoemaking. (Hadow 1926:3-4)

In 1846 the Committee of Council on Education began making grants to day schools of industry towards the provision of gardens, trade workshops, kitchens and wash-houses, and for gratuities to the masters who taught boys gardening and crafts and to the mistresses who gave 'satisfactory instruction in domestic economy' (Hadow 1926:9).

Monitorial schools

In the rival systems of Lancaster and Bell, as in the Sunday schools, the teaching was based on the Bible, but using a new method which Bell called 'the steam engine of the moral world' (quoted in Williams 1961:136). (Incidentally, Young and Hancock (1956:830) ascribe this quotation to Brougham, of whom more below).

Bell's method involved the use of monitors and standard repetitive exercises so that one master could teach hundreds of children at the same time in one room. It was the industrialisation of the teaching process.

The curriculum in these monitorial schools was at first largely similar to that of the schools of industry - the 'three Rs' (reading, writing and arithmetic) plus practical activities such as cobbling, tailoring, gardening, simple agricultural operations for boys, and spinning, sewing, knitting, lace-making and baking for girls.

A small group of thinkers led by Bentham and Place, impressed by developments in Scotland, Prussia, France and Holland, sought to establish higher grade elementary schools and monitorial secondary schools to meet the needs of the class immediately above the very poor. Unfortunately, Bentham's 'Chrestomathic Scheme' for the education of 7 to 14 year olds, devised around 1816, proved too encyclopedic a course of studies, and the proposal met with little support.

Kay-Shuttleworth recognised the shortcomings of the monitorial schools and made an important contribution to the general development of primary education by introducing a modified form of the pupil teacher system, so preparing the way for a large supply of adult teachers (see Hadow 1931:7).

Infant schools

The first infant school was established by Robert Owen (1771-1858) in New Lanark, Scotland, in 1816. Children were admitted at the age of two and cared for while their parents were at work in the local cotton mills. The instruction of children under six was to consist of 'whatever might be supposed useful that they could understand, and much attention was devoted to singing, dancing, and playing' (Hadow 1931:3).

Infant schools were thus at first partly 'minding schools' for young children in industrial areas; but they also sought to promote the children's physical well-being and to offer opportunities for their moral and social training and to provide some elementary instruction in the 3Rs, so that the children could make more rapid progress when they entered the monitorial school.

In 1818 a group led by the radical Whig politician Henry Brougham and the historian and philosopher James Mill (both Scots) established an infant school on Owen's lines in London, and imported a teacher from New Lanark.

Owen's ideas were developed by Samuel Wilderspin (1792-1866), who worked out a system of infant education which left its mark for many years on the curriculum and buildings of elementary schools. He had 'a mistaken zeal for the initiation of children at too early an age to formal instruction' (Hadow 1931:3).

The Home and Colonial Institution (later known as the Home and Colonial Society) was founded in 1836 to establish infant schools and to train teachers for them. The principal promoter of the Society, Revd Charles Mayo (1792-1846), was much influenced by the work of Pestalozzi, the Swiss educational reformer.

Elementary schools

The question of how to organise children above the age of six in elementary schools was first addressed in Great Britain by David Stow (1793-1864), who began his work in Glasgow around 1824. He founded the Glasgow Normal School and became a significant figure in the development of educational theory and practice. He believed that in primary education the living voice was more important than the printed page, so he laid great stress on oral class teaching.

He also conceived a graded system of elementary education, with an initiatory department for children of two or three to six years of age, and a juvenile department for children between the ages of six and 14, itself divided into junior and senior divisions. He described this scheme in his 1836 book Training System of Education for the Moral and Intellectual Elevation of Youth, especially in large Towns and Manufacturing Villages.

There were several practical objections to his system in the first half of the 19th century: it was costly; the school life of most children was short; and teachers could not be obtained in sufficient numbers. As a result, few schools were established using Stow's system, and the usual arrangement was an infant department for children up to the age of six, and a senior department for 6-12 year olds.

The small 'all-age' school for children between 6 and 12 often developed into a school with three or more classes, in which one teacher took a section for an oral lesson, while assistant teachers took other sections for written work in arithmetic and for exercises in reading, dictation and composition. This system became common after about 1856 (see Hadow 1931:7).

Impressed by the practical work he had seen in Swiss schools, Kay-Shuttleworth attempted to introduce more practical instruction into England's elementary schools. In the Regulations for the education of pupil teachers and stipendiary monitors, which he submitted to the Privy Council in December 1846, it was provided that pupil teachers at the end of their fourth year should be examined by the Inspector 'in the first steps in mensuration with practical illustrations, and in the elements of land surveying and levelling'. The women pupil-teachers in every year of their course were expected 'to show increased skill as seamstresses, and teachers of sewing, knitting, etc' (see Hadow 1926:8-9).

However, Kay-Shuttleworth's efforts had little effect on the great mass of elementary schools, most of which were set up and run by university graduates with literary and scientific interests. They wanted more culture in the schools, and there was a noticeable tendency to emphasise the superiority of a general non-manual education over any sort of vocational training such as that given in the schools of industry.

There was another reason why vocational training took second place to academic studies: it was soon discovered that any effective form of practical instruction cost much more than the teaching of the three Rs. Moreover, it was almost impossible to arrange for such instruction in large classes taught by monitors. Owing to the growth of commerce and sea-borne trade in the mid-19th century there was a great demand for clerks, and in schools where advanced work for older pupils was attempted it was found that it was much easier to train them for clerical work than for manual occupations. Matthew Arnold, writing about 1858, considered that the humane studies in the upper classes of the best elementary schools were by far the most interesting part of the curriculum.

Technical education

Because the industrial revolution had given Britain a head start in world trade, the government saw no reason why the state should be involved in the training of industrial recruits. So modernisation of the old apprenticeship system was left to voluntary agencies. Several Mechanics' Institutes opened in the mid-1820s and by 1850 there were 610 such Institutes in England and 12 in Wales, with a total membership of over 600,000.

The state did establish a 'Normal School of Design' in London in 1837 and made some annual grants for the maintenance of some provincial schools of design from 1841 onwards, but otherwise it did nothing until the Great Exhibition of 1851 drew public attention to the lack of facilities for technical education in England compared with those provided in various continental countries.

So in 1852 a Department of Practical Art was created under the Board of Trade. In 1856 this was moved into the Education Department as the Department of Science and Art, and in 1859 it began setting examinations - for both teachers and students - in branches of science related to industrial occupations (see Spens 1938:51).

Hostility to mass education

All the schools described above were established by individuals and groups who believed in - and campaigned for - mass education. But they found themselves up against vicious hostility to the very idea of educating the poor. One Justice of the Peace, for example, opined in 1807 that:

It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be generally instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes - that they may read the Scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a disrelish for the laborious occupations of life. (quoted in Williams 1961:135)

And when the Parochial Schools Bill of 1807 was debated in the Commons, Tory MP Davies Giddy warned the House that:

However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as is evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and, in a few years, the result would be that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them and to furnish the executive magistrates with more vigorous powers than are now in force. Besides, if this Bill were to pass into law, it would go to burthen the country with a most enormous and incalculable expense, and to load the industrious orders with still heavier imposts. (Hansard, House of Commons, Vol. 9, Col. 798, 13 June 1807, quoted in Chitty 2007:15-16)

In some respects things were even worse than in previous centuries. Although the poor had never been educated en masse, there had been parishes where exceptional provision was made, and a few able boys from poor homes had even been offered university places. But by the start of the 19th century, education was organised, like English society as a whole, on a more rigid class basis. The result was

a new kind of class-determined education. Higher education became a virtual monopoly, excluding the new working class, and the idea of universal education, except within the narrow limits of 'moral rescue', was widely opposed as a matter of principle. (Williams 1961:136)

But the calls for more and better education were increasing in number and volume. They were endorsed by school inspectors. In reports for 1847 (quoted in Hadow 1926:8), for example, two inspectors commented:

I adhere, however, to the opinion which I formerly expressed, and which I now repeat, having had the advantage of conversing with many of the most experienced supporters of education upon the subject, that in most country districts it would be advisable to have a preparatory school in each village, and a completely organised school, under the charge of able teachers, in a central locality. (Rev FC Cook)

and

I think it very desirable that district schools should be formed for three, four, or five parishes, wherein, under an efficient master with apprentices, a superior education may be provided not only for the elder children of labourers, but also for such of the farmers, small tradesmen, and mechanics, as may choose to avail themselves of it. (Rev HW Bellairs)

Parliamentary grants for school buildings

Some financial assistance to schools from the local rates had been permitted in a few places in the 18th century. In the 1830s, the government began making grants for school buildings. The Treasury Minute of 29 August 1833 set out rules regarding the distribution of the first £20,000 grant.

Five School Sites Acts were passed between 1841 and 1852, designed to facilitate the purchase of land for school buildings and to make 'Parliamentary Grants for the Education of the Poor'.

School Sites Act 1841
School Sites Act 1844
School Sites Act 1849
School Sites Act 1851
School Sites Act 1852

These were followed by the 1855 School Grants Act (14 August 1855) which sought 'to render more secure the Conditions upon which Money is advanced out of the Parliamentary Grant for the Purposes of Education'. It stated that, where Parliament had made grants for land, or for the construction, enlargement or repair of school buildings, they were not to be sold, exchanged or mortgaged without the written consent of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.

Thus, despite the hostility to universal education, new schools were being built and school attendance was rising. In 1816, 875,000 of the country's 1.5m children 'attended a school of some kind for some period' (Williams 1961:136). By 1835 the figure was 1.45m out of 1.75m. If this sounds fairly impressive, it should be noted that by 1835 the average duration of school attendance was just one year.

By 1851 the average length of school attendance had risen to two years, and in 1861 an estimated 2.5m children out of 2.75m received some form of schooling, 'though still of very mixed quality and with the majority leaving before they were eleven' (Williams 1961:137).

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