Grammar and public schools and universities after 1870

In the twenty-five years between the Endowed Schools Act 1869 and the appointment of the Bryce Commission to look at secondary education four main developments had taken place:

• The endowments and management of the grammar schools had been widely reformed.
• The curriculum of grammar schools had become subject to greater scrutiny and change.
• The middle class character of the schools had been further reinforced though a narrow ladder had begun to be erected for the recruitment of a small number of working class children to the secondary system.
• Secondary education for middle class girls had made considerable advances.

In spite of the reforms, however, many schools remained insecure. The Bryce Commission found in the 1890s many of them, mainly smaller schools, were prone to fluctuating numbers and decline. It was the question of access to secondary schools that was on the point of becoming a major issue. The Education Act 1902 was central to the process of change for grammar schools.

The Endowed Schools Commissioners had power to make provision for girls and was widely used by them. By the time of their demise in 1874 they had made schemes creating 27 schools for girls; schemes for another twenty were in the pipeline. The Charity Commissioners proceeded at a much slower pace but as further 45 girls’ schools had been added by 1903. Parallel to these developments went the creation of proprietary schools for girls. In 1892 a Girls’ Public Day School Company was formed and by 1880 it had opened eleven schools in London and eleven elsewhere. A handful of new girls’ schools, such as Cheltenham, Wycombe Abbey and Roedean, were boarding, modelling themselves more or less on boys’ public schools; but the vast majority were day schools.

The elementary and endowed and private school systems remained broadly defined by the criteria of social class. It is not surprising that the public schools managed to maintain their social identity though criticisms continued to be levelled against their traditions and preoccupation with games and athleticism. The public schools perpetuated an aristocratic element in English education and the proprietary and endowed schools continued to uphold it as an educational ideal. The sons of the expanding commercial and industrial middle classes were trained in the older traditions and codes of gentlemen, an education that left them ill prepared for their role in an increasingly competitive world. Modern subjects were often left optional and between 1860 and 1880 games became compulsory, organised and eulogised at all the leading public schools. There was no overall change in their structure, objectives or curriculum until after 1918.

Higher education after 1870

The vast growth in and attempt to systematise secondary education was paralleled by a significant, though relatively small, growth and innovation in the university sector. Higher education was still only accessible to a tiny minority. There were changes in the composition of the university population, in the structure of university government and in the curriculum.

1. The 1870s saw the arrival at Oxford and Cambridge both of Nonconformists and of women. The 1871 legislation abolishing university tests untied both undergraduate places and fellowships and in the process allowed fellows to marry. The growing regiment of dons’ wives was augmented by a small file of women students. Girton and Newnham at Cambridge in the early 1870s were joined by Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s at Oxford in 1879 followed by St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s in 1886 and 1892 respectively. But numbers were small: in 1900-1 296 women students at Cambridge and 239 at Oxford compared to 2,880 and 2,537 male students respectively. Women did not become full members of the university in Oxford until 1919 and in Cambridge until 1948 whereas they were admitted to all the University of London degrees in 1878.
2. The Royal and Statutory Commissions of the 1850s had begun the process of overhauling college statutes and strengthening the central organs of university government. This was continued in the 1870s but the more ambitious plans were spoiled by the fall in colleges’ income brought about by the agricultural depression. At the same time, a reassertion of control over teaching and pastoral responsibilities by many colleges counter-balanced such trends towards centralisation very powerfully.
3. The breaches in the dominance of Classics and Mathematics towards the end of the 1840s continued and in the early 1870s separate courses in History and Law emerged and the 1890s saw the arrival of courses in English and Modern Languages. Parallel to this was the emergence of research as a systematic postgraduate activity.

Changes in Oxbridge, however, were only a pale reflection of the changes outside it. By 1900 there were more students, women as well as men, in higher education in Great Britain outside than within Oxford and Cambridge. The sequence of foundations was as follows: Newcastle 1871; University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 1872; Leeds 1874; Mason College, Birmingham 1874; Bristol 1876; Firth College, Sheffield 1879; Liverpool 1881; Nottingham 1881; Cardiff 1883; Bangor 1883; Reading 1892; Southampton 1902.  Many of these institutions began by taking external London degree examinations before seeking Royal Charters to enable them to grant their own degrees.

Other institutions, often also exploiting the external London examining umbrella, grew in London itself: medical schools attached to the teaching hospitals; in South Kensington the Royal School of Mines, the Royal College of Science and the Central Technical College formed the great Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1907; the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895; and the women’s colleges, Bedford [1849], Westfield [1882] and Royal Holloway [1886]. But the University of London only acquired a teaching as well as an examining role in 1899, following the University of London Act 1898 that brought all these and other institutions together in a complex and uneasy federation. By 1900-1 full-time students outside Oxford and Cambridge totalled almost 8,000 in England and a further 1,250 in Wales.

Funding the civil university movement proved problematic and most universities were operating on a shoe-string compared to the endowments of Oxbridge. In individual cases, university colleges benefited from the generosity of local business: in Birmingham, for example, the Chamberlains played a central role. But this was not enough. From 1839 the University of London had a small recurrent grants in recognition of the imperial and colonial as well as the domestic function of its examining role. In 1883-4 the Welsh parliamentary lobby succeeded in securing short-term grant aid for the three Welsh colleges; and in 1880 the Treasury finally conceded the principle of grant aid to the English institutions outside Oxbridge. By 1906 direct Treasury grants to universities amounted to £100,000.

The full-time student population in all English and Welsh universities in 1914 only accounted for one per cent of the age group. Universities still catered for an elite. The advance of the new professional middle classes gradually reduced the dominance of the landed gentry and clergy. And outside Oxbridge, by 1914, the children of the lower middle classes and skilled artisans were beginning to appear.

Some conclusions

The development of education between 1830 and 1914 was largely a reflection of the class basis of English society. The working classes, if they were schooled at all before 1870, went to elementary schools. The middle classes filled the grammar schools while the public schools remained the preserve of the upper classes. There were links between these three stages, a situation made more obvious after 1902 and the ‘free-place’ system, but movement from elementary school to grammar school was the exception rather than the rule. Children of all classes and of both sexes were better educated in 1914 than in 1830 but this did not have any real impact on the class bias of that education. Education mirrored the pyramidal nature of society rising to the one per cent who received a university education by 1914.

The growing intervention by the state, first with grants to voluntary schools and then with its school boards and local education authorities, marked a recognition that education for all was increasingly seen as a social service not something that ought to be provided by religious and voluntary organisations. The policy-making initiative moved from localities to central government. Acceptable standards were imposed from the centre and administered locally. Education was finally perceived as being too important to be left to chance.

Education and the state 1870-1914

Forster’s Education Act did not provide universal, free or compulsory education, but it did allow for the glaring deficiencies in English education to be removed[1]. Before 1870 the system was characterised as one of state subsidy of voluntary education, the period after by state supplementation of voluntary education. Board schools and voluntary schools existed side by side, in theory complementary, in practice in competition. The 1870 Act was a compromise that tried to make use of and not destroy existing educational resources. It did not solve the problem of elementary schooling overnight and it took a further thirty years to make a national system of elementary schools fully a reality.

Extending Forster

Religious squabbling continued in the elections for School Boards and in the attempts, particularly by Anglicans in county areas, to forestall the imposition of the School Boards. Initially the advantage lay with the existing voluntary schools and even by 1880 only one sixth of children were in board schools but the potential for growth lay with School Boards and by 1900 54 per cent of the elementary school population were in their schools.

1. Many of the larger boroughs imposed bye-laws making education compulsory, that in turn increased revenue, since grants were still related to attendance, and it was partly as a means of helping the rural voluntary schools that Disraeli’s ministry turned its attention to compulsion. For these schools, Lord Sandon the Vice-President, told the Cabinet in 1875 it was a matter of ‘life or death’. The result, in 1876, was Sandon’s Education Act that set up School Attendance Committees and placed the responsibility for ensuring attendance firmly on parents. It also gave voluntary schools the right to make attendance compulsory.
2. Various loopholes were removed by the incoming Liberal ministry that by Mundella’s Education Act 1880 made attendance compulsory for children between five and ten.
3. This inevitably sharpened the debate about fees, that averaged about 3d per week per child and many School Boards waived the fee for needy children. The Fee Grant Act 1891 virtually established free elementary education and by 1895 only about one-sixth of the five million needy elementary children were paying fees.
4. The availability of free education through School Boards made it easier to integrate pauper children into the general education system. An Act of 1873 had made school attendance a condition of outdoor relief for children, an option that had been open to guardians since Denison’s Act of 1855 had empowered guardians to pay school fees. By 1900 the vast majority of Unions sent children to their local board school and so the distinctive badge of pauperism was gradually removed.
5. The pernicious effects of payment by results were removed. The system had been severely criticised by the Cross Commission that reported in 1888 and in the 1890 Code grants for examinable attainments in the 3Rs were abolished.

It is important to recognise the achievements that resulted from the 1870 Act:

• The figures for the final decades of the century show the almost complete elimination of illiteracy as measured from parish registers. The gains were greater for women than men. Had it not been for the 1870 Act progress in literacy would have slowed down simply because illiteracy was concentrated in those classes and regions that were hardest to provide for under the voluntary system. The 1870 Act was responsible for the mopping-up operation by providing more school places and improvements in attendance and length of school life.
• There were certainly improvements in attendance but by 1897 it was still only just over eighty per cent. Legislation helped but machinery of enforcement was necessary. The main pressure was that of the attendance officer [commonly called the ‘board man’] and ultimately a summons. This did not always prove effective and authorities were often unwilling to prosecute or convict parents especially in rural areas where cheap child labour was essential for farmers and parents. The Agricultural Children Act 1873 was intended to improve attendance, but fines were so low if imposed at all.
• The quality of literacy was governed by things other than directly educational ones. The factory legislation of the late 1860s and 1870s encompassed children in industries not covered before. From the 1870s future patterns of leisure and holidays began to take rudimentary form. New skilled and semi-skilled occupations were being created and white-collar occupations were expanding. Literacy was essential in all of these areas.

The 1870 Act itself made access to higher-than-elementary education inevitably a more prominent issue. Apart from evening and adult education, such access became available mainly in two ways: the evolution of a higher stage within the elementary system, and the scholarship ladder from the elementary school to the grammar school.

The Education Act 1902 and after

By 1900 important factors were altering attitudes towards the pattern of education as it had evolved since 1870:

• The elementary system had produced what seemed to many people to be pseudo-secondary features in its higher-grade schools and evening classes. The still insecure basis of very many grammar schools was in many cases being eroded by these developments.
• The board schools were outpacing the voluntary schools. Many were in serious financial difficulties in a period of declining church attendance. The voluntary agencies were divided on the desirability of further state aid and intervention.
• State intervention was in society generally being more actively advocated and tolerated. The 1895 Bryce Commission recommended the creation of a central authority for education and a Board of Education was created in 1899.
• Local councils also entered the education field mainly under the Technical Instruction Acts as competitors of the school boards.

Such changes threatened the uneasy 1870 settlement. School boards came under fire before the end of the century, particularly for their higher-grade schools and what the church party considered excessive expenditure of ratepayers’ money. Leading Conservatives, especially Sir John Gorst, attacked the boards and attempted to reduce their powers or transfer their powers to the county and county borough councils. The boards themselves, nonconformist and labour bodies expressed hostility to such moves and defended their record.

Sir Robert Morant, who became Gorst’s private secretary in 1899 and permanent secretary of the Board of Education from 1903, was able to engineer a test case in which London school board expenditure on high elementary classes was disallowed by the district auditor, Cockerton, in 1899. The Cockerton judgement allowed Morant and Gorst to achieve a dual objective: the prevention of further post-elementary developments in board schools and the possibility of using the councils as all embracing educational authorities. In drafting the new education bill Morant was able to bring elementary and secondary education under one authority and at the same time bring relief to the voluntary schools.

The debate on the education bill, steered by the Prime Minister A.J.Balfour through Parliament, saw a stalwart defence of the board schools. However, the separate administration of board schools, grammar schools, Science and Art Department grants, technical instruction committees and the independent management of voluntary elementary schools were chaotic. The creation of new council education authorities would overcome this. It was, however, the notion of ‘Church schools on the rates’ that provoked the most fierce and lasting resistance especially from Nonconformists[2].

The most far-reaching effect of the 1902 Act was its influence on the structure of elementary and secondary education. It did not make it mandatory for local authorities to provide secondary education but it did require them to perform the functions previously performed by the school boards and the technical instruction committees. The result of this was a massive expansion in the physical provision of secondary schooling in the years up to 1914. The government did not neglect the question of access for elementary school pupils to the new fee-charging secondary schools. The Free Place Regulations of 1907 made available enhanced government grants to all secondary schools prepared to offer a quarter of their places without fees to ex-elementary school pupils. Would-be ‘free placers’ were expected to sit a simple qualifying examination. Pressure of numbers soon made this as ferociously competitive as any of the existing scholarship tests. By 1912 49,120 children, 32 per cent of the total population of maintained secondary schools, were ‘free placers’.

The Boer War [1899-1902] revealed the extent of ‘physical deterioration’ when a government committee investigated the causes of the poor physical condition of potential recruits. The need for developments in child health, orchestrated by Morant and Margaret McMillan, was legislation in 1906 and 1907 and in setting up a medical department of the Board of Education. Free school meals and medical inspections were a further attack on the existing poor law system as well as a major advance in the role of the state in education.

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[1] B. Simon Education and the Labour Movement 1870-1920, Lawrence and Wishart, 1979 is perhaps the broadest account of developments after 1870. J.S. Hurt Schooling and the Working Class 1860-1918, Routledge, 1979 is excellent on the 1870 Education Act and after and Gillian Sutherland Policy-Making in Elementary Education 1870-1895, Oxford University Press, 1973 is fundamental on the changing nature of policy and priorities.

[2] This influenced the landslide return to power of the reforming Liberal government at the end of 1905.