Adult migration 1600-1980

Migration was an integral part of the political process through which British identity, the British state and the British Empire were constructed. Although the notion of imperial Britain may not have been well received in Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was greater common ground in the idea of imperial Britain existing overseas. British settlement in the American colonies became the basis for Britain’s notion of empire and emigration, at least until the late eighteenth century, was an expression of the movement of British energies from east to west in Ireland and then further west to the American colonies. Attitudes to emigration were, however, ambivalent and Parliament banned the emigration of groups such as artisans who were seen as central to Britain’s economic expansion. Adam Smith suggested that colonial wealth could impoverish countries rather than enrich them and implied that emigration reduced the energies of the country when population was needed for the transformation of Britain itself. Colonies could be populated by slaves and by Protestants from northern Europe rather than British emigrants and Britain could still expand its empire.

During the nineteenth century, retaining Britain’s population was increasingly viewed not as the basis for economic and commercial growth but as a cancer that threatened the basis of British society. Emigration provided a solution that allowed the poor to escape from the impoverished rural and urban slums to the expanding colonies, themselves a source of wealth for Britain’s continuing prosperity and greatness. Emigration to the British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was openly encouraged by the government and charities and by individuals and parishes. Whether this was the British state ‘shovelling out the poor’ as some colonial commentators believed, its aim was to populate the empire with British citizens as well as alleviating social distress in Britain and Ireland. [1] Rising levels of literacy meant that pamphlets calling for emigration proved popular among working- and middle-class audiences. For instance, John A. Etzler published Emigration to the tropical world for the melioration of all classes of the people of all nations in 1844, while J. Boyd wrote State directed emigration in 1883 and P. J. Andrews The coming race?: some reflections on the inherent dangers of mass civilisation in Britain and the opportunities for balanced spiritual development by peopling the dominions in 1929. The Empire Parliamentary Association issued pamphlets on emigration to Canada and Australia and the Salvation Army Organised Empire migration and settlement in 1930. There were also publications from other organisations such as the Imperial Immigration League, the Landholders and Commercial Association of British India, the London Compositors’ Emigration Aid Society, the Fund for Promoting Female Emancipation and the Clerkenwell Emigration Society. Books, children’s literature, souvenirs, paintings, public monuments and lectures all transmitted narratives of martial heroism from the mid-nineteenth century reinforcing the notion that emigration was not only practical but also, in some ways, heroic. [2] Foreign missionary representatives canvassed working-class Sunday schools and chapels and middle-class philanthropists for subscriptions but the missionary presence at local level extended far beyond this. [3] The effectiveness of missionary organisations was such that contemporaries could justifiably claim that ‘many a small tradesman or rustic knows more of African or Polynesian life than London journalists’. [4] Popular culture was saturated by imperial images from films and plays to sauce bottles and biscuit tins. This was populist propaganda on an industrial scale. [5]

Scottish and especially Irish emigration were far greater than that of the English in proportion to the size of their respective populations. Emigration from proved particularly successful. [6] Sir Charles Dilke, writing in 1869, remarked:

In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. [7]

The Scots grasped the opportunities afforded by union in 1707 and there were large outflows of men and women looking for a new life and a new beginning, initially in North America. Between 1763 and 1777, 50,000 Scots largely from the west of Scotland settled in North America. [8] They quickly dominated the tobacco trade and other areas of economic life, such as fur-trapping in Canada. Education and religion were other areas of cultural life where the Scottish influence was dominant. Such was the strength of the Scottish presence in America that 19 of the 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence came from Scotland or Ulster. The Scottish presence was also strongly present in India. Henry Dundas became President of the Board of Control in 1784 and with his support Scots came to dominate the activities of the East India Company. By 1792, they made up one in nine Company officials, one in eleven common soldiers and one in three officers. The first three Governor-Generals of India were Scots. Scottish scholars and scientists made important contributions to Indian culture and society: for instance, Colin Campbell completed the first geographical survey of India; Alexander Kydd created the Botanic gardens in Calcutta while others developed the infrastructure of India. Even after the dissolution of the East India Company in 1857 and the introduction of competitive entry into the British administration, they still played an important part in the running of India. Scots were important to the development of the Empire in diverse ways: as businessmen, as educators, as missionaries, as imperial administrators and soldiers. Whether this made the empire a ‘Scottish empire’, as some historians have argued is debatable. [9] Whatever the importance of Scots as emigrants or administrators of empire, decisions about the direction of empire and the policies through which it was ruled were made in London. It was the British state that dominated the empire.

As concerns over ‘surplus population’ grew, there was an increase in landless peasants from the Highlands and unemployed craftsmen, labourers and small farmers from the Lowlands willing to emigrate. Most were aged between 16 and 29 and men rather than women. Whatever the cause, Scotland lost between 10 and 47% of its natural population increase every decade between 1830 and 1940; a rate exceeded only in Ireland and Norway. However, even these countries were dwarfed by emigration from Scotland in the years 1904-1913 and again in 1921-1930, when over half a million people emigrated exceeding the entire natural increase and constituted one-fifth of the total working population. [10]

Until about 1855, a number of the emigrants from the Highlands were actually forced to leave the land because of mass evictions. The Emigration Act in 1851 made emigration more freely available to the poorest with the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society established to manage the process of resettlement. Under the scheme a landlord could secure a passage to Australia for a nominee at the cost of £1 and between 1846 and 1857, over 16,000 people, largely poor young men, were assisted to emigrate. Many settled in Canada in places such as Ontario and Nova Scotia, where they could continue to farm and maintain their style of life and ethnic identity. In Nova Scotia in the first half of the nineteenth century, 59% of settlers from Britain were Scots-born. In the Lowlands, the decision to move abroad was nearly always the outcome of the desire to improve living standards because they experienced low wages, poor housing conditions and unemployment and, unlike in the Highlands, was voluntary. Emigration was seen by trades unions and other voluntary groups as a practical solution to unemployment and economic depression. The high points in emigration corresponded with years of severe economic depression in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the mid-1880s and between 1906 and 1913. Emigration was so heavy in the period 1871-1931 but it more than offset the increase in the population due to new births. This trend was brought to a halt in the 1930s as the global depression saw emigrants returning home and the numbers leaving Scotland were at their lowest for a century. [11]

Canada was the most important destination of emigrants during the first half of the nineteenth century and between 1825 and 1835, over 70% of emigrants from Scotland settled there. [12] However, this changed substantially after 1860 and especially 1900 as skilled urban workers became the most important emigrants. In 1912 and 1913, 47% of adult male emigrants from Scotland described themselves as skilled, compared with 36% of those from England and Wales. Only 29% classed themselves as labourers. It seems also that in the late-nineteenth century wore on and emigration, individuals’ social standing determining the country where they settled. Unskilled labourers tended to opt for Canada and Australia, while skilled workers preferred South Africa and the USA. [13] The middle-classes strongly preferred South Africa. Emigration acted as a safety valve for modern Scotland and although the British Empire was the main beneficiary of this process, Scotland also benefited in terms of wealth and profit. The great commercial mansions of Edinburgh and Glasgow were built from the profits of the colonial trade. In addition, substantial areas of employment were dependent on Empire providing the economic mortar that held the Union together. The collapse of the Empire after 1945 forced Scotland to make a painful transition from an economy based on heavy industry to one dependent on services and electronics. It also led to a redrawing of the political map as the Unionist vote evaporated. In 1955, Scottish Conservative Party took 50.1% of the popular vote and held half of Scotland’s 72 parliamentary seats. This high-point was followed by a gradual decline from 1964 until in 1997, with 17.5% of the popular vote, it took no seats at all and only one seat in the 2001, 2005 and 2010 general elections [14]

The adult experience of emigration in England and Wales paralleled that in Scotland. The bulk of the migrant population went to the United States in the eighteenth century, although Canada and Australia were popular destinations after 1815. After 1900, America fell behind Canada and Australia in attracting large groups of emigrants and South Africa was beginning to attract emigrant in significant numbers. In 1911, of the more than 450,000 Britons who left the United Kingdom, almost half settled in Canada, nearly a quarter in Australia and approximately one tenth in South Africa. Subsided emigration made it possible for certain sections of the population to be sent abroad, most to North America and Australia. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 secured the passage of more than 25, 000 ‘paupers’ by 1860 and the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners helped 370,000 people move to Australia between 1840 and 1869. Young men tended to make up the vast majority of migrants, although couples and family units were also prominent. Migrants came from many different types of occupations. For instance, most Welsh emigrants were miners or worked in the iron, steel, copper and tin industries. However, general labourers and worker of the building trades and textile workers, engineers, farmers, clerical and commercial workers were also represented. In the 1880s, when emigration had reached massive proportions, the most important group among the immigrants was urban unskilled workers. This suggests that, by the 1880s, the occupations of British emigrants reflected closely those of the population as a whole. [15]

Adult emigration, whatever its motivation in Britain, was determined by the economic needs of the colonies that were different at different times. The majority of New Zealand’s English, at least until 1920, were largely from the rural, working-class. Unlike the United States, which attracted unskilled labourers and industrial workers, NZ recruited agricultural labourers and pre-industrial craftsmen among the men and domestic servants among the women. NZ needed labourers and tradesmen for its farms, ports, mines and towns and artisans to meet the needs of its growing population. Builders were in especial demand and emigrated in large numbers helped by the introduction of assisted migration in 1871. Migration from England tailed off in the late-1880s and 1890s because of depression in the NZ economy. [16] This also corresponded with a change the regional origins and occupations of the English arrivals. The numbers engaged in agricultural work declined, while those working in industry and mining increased. These trends continued in the twentieth century and became even more marked after 1945. The post-1900 development of coal mining in New Zealand was aided by the arrival of miners from northern England. Industry expanded with the influx of skilled industrial workers from Yorkshire and Lancashire. The rapid growth of trade unions after 1890 was associated with the migration of English workers in the textile, clothing, footwear, mining and marine transport industries. Over 80,000 assisted British migrants arrived in NZ between 1947 and 1975, selected for the contribution that they could make to industry, education and health. [17] As NZ became less focused on England and ended all forms of assisted migration, and as England turned its attention to Europe rather than to the Commonwealth, so the appeal of migrating to New Zealand began to fade.[18]

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[1] See, for example, Moran, Gerard. ‘‘Shovelling out the poor’: assisted emigration from Ireland from the great famine to the fall of Parnell’, in ibid, Duffy, Patrick J., and Moran, Gerard, (eds.), To and from Ireland: planned migration schemes c.1600-2000, (Geography Publications), 2004, pp. 137-154.

[2] MacKenzie, J. M., ‘Heroic myths of empire,’ in MacKenzie, J. M., (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, (Manchester University Press), 1992, pp. 10-38, considers the heroic reputation of Henry Haverlock, David Livingstone, Charles Gordon and T. E. Lawrence.

[3] Thorne, Susan, ‘‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain’, in Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Laura Ann, (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (University of California Press), 1997, pp. 238-262.

[4] London Quarterly Review, Vol. 7, (1856), p. 238.

[5] Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2004, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, insists that popular culture promoting the imperial ideal had no effect on the general public.

[6] Gray, M., ‘The Course of Scottish Emigration 1750-1914: Enduring Influences and Changing Circumstances’, in Devine, T. M., (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, (John Donald), 1992), pp. 16-36, provides a good summary.

[7] Dilke, Charles W., Greater Britain: A record of travel in English-speaking countries during 1866 and 1867, (Harper & Brothers), 1969, p. 511.

[8] Dobson, D., Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785, (University of Georgia Press), 2004, and Landsman, Ned C., ‘Nation, Migration and the Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas 1600-1800’, American Historical Review, Vol. 104, (1999), pp. 463-475.

[9] On this issue see, Devine, T M, Scotland's Empire, (Penguin), 2003, and Fry, M, The Scottish Empire, (Tuckwell Press), 2001.

[10] Richards, E., ‘Varieties of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 21, (1985), pp. 473-494.

[11] Harper, M, Emigration from Scotland between the wars: opportunity or exile?, (Manchester University Press), 1998.

[12] Hornsby, Stephen J., ‘Patterns of Scottish emigration to Canada, 1750-1870’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 18, (1992), pp. 397-416. See also, Campey, Lucille H., The Scottish Pioneers of Upper Canada, 1784-1855: Glengarry and beyond, (Dundurn Press), 2005, and An Unstoppable Force: The Scottish Exodus to Canada, (Dundurn Press), 2008. On Canadian immigration policy, see Kelley, Ninette, and Trebilcock, M. J., The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy, (University of Toronto Press), 1999.

[13] Macmillan, D. S., Scotland and Australia, 1788-1850: emigration, commerce and investment, (Oxford University Press), 1967, ‘The Scots’, in Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 644-665, and Prentice, Malcolm D., The Scots in Australia: A Study of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland 1788-1900, (University of Sydney Press), 1983, provide the context.

[14] Devine, T. M., ‘The Break-up of Britain?: Scotland and the end of Empire: The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, Vol. 16, (2006), pp. 163-180.

[15] Erickson, Charlotte, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century, (Cornell University Press), 1994.

[16] Simpson, Tony, The immigrants: the great migration from Britain to New Zealand, 1830-1890, (Godwit), 1997.

[17] Hutching, Megan, Long Journey for Sevenpence: Assisted Immigration to New Zealand from the United Kingdom, 1947-1975, (Victoria University Press), 1999..

[18] Phillips, Jock, & Hearn, Terry, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland & Scotland 1800-1945, (Auckland University Press), 2008: see http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/home-away-from-home/sources

The state intervenes 1833-1862

Everyone was agreed that any education worth the name had a moral and therefore a religious core. But if religious, which denomination? Anglicans, as members of the established church, argued that any school named in law and supported by government funds should be theirs. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hotly disputed this. It was for this reason that the two voluntary day school societies were joined by the Catholic Poor School Committee, in 1849. This was the sectarian divide that dominated developments in elementary education up to 1870 and arguably 1902.

Public provision for elementary education began with a grant of £20,000 in 1833 in aid of school buildings. This was channelled inevitably through the two religious societies because these alone could show any degree of efficiency. This was the beginning of a system of ‘giving to them that hath’. Government initiatives and funding were most needed in areas of ‘educational destitution’ where there were no middle-class enthusiasts to start schools. In 1839, therefore, the Whigs attempted to grasp the nettle of the ‘religious problem’ with a scheme that included grants to districts according to need and government training schools for teachers organised on a non-denominational basis.[1] The Tories mobilised against it in both Commons and Lords and the opposition of almost the entire bench of bishops brought most of the scheme down to defeat.

In 1843, the Tories attempted to take the initiative in the education clauses of Graham’s Factory Bill creating Anglican-run factory schools. They faced a comparable storm from Nonconformists and Catholics and likewise retreated.[2] Thereafter there was a stalemate with neither side strong enough to break through to a new system. The amount of grant continued to rise but still the money went only to localities already making an effort. Middle-class enthusiasts broadly agreed that working-class children should be in school, not at work. The problem was which school they should attend and whether government aid could be deployed to ensure that there were schools within the reach of all working-class children.This was finally broken by the Education Act of 1870.[3]

The debacle of 1839, where non-sectarian developments were effectively vetoed by the churches, did result in the creation of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. Opposition continued from the Church of England resulting in the ‘Concordat’ of 1840 under which the church authorities secured control of the appointment of the inspectors of state-aided schools and the right to frame the instructions for religious education, though not over non-Anglican schools. The most positive result of the Concordat was the appointment as secretary to the new Committee of Education of James Kay-Shuttleworth.[4] Resistance to state elementary education and the sectarian conflict made it impossible to start a national system using the established technique of a Royal Commission followed by a governing statute. A step-by-step approach was adopted: from the small grant of 1833 to the Privy Council Minutes of 1846 that governed the mid-century expansion. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, there were two other roots from which a national system of primary education might have grown: the new Poor Law and the Factory Acts.[5]

Chadwick saw education as a depauperising influence sharing the assumption that universal education would in some unexplained way cure unemployment and render poor relief largely unnecessary. His enthusiasm was shared by several of the Poor Law Assistant Commissioners, who believed that pauperism as well as crime could be eradicated by early training. The architect of poor law education was James Phillips Kay (Kay-Shuttleworth as he called himself after his marriage). Son of a Rochdale cotton manufacturer, trained as a physician in Edinburgh, founder-member of the Manchester Statistical Society and a writer on social questions, he was recruited as Assistant Commissioner for Norfolk and Suffolk in 1835. He found little or no education for pauper children: some were sent to local schools, but always the cheapest and worst and there was no industrial training. Kay began by persuading more enlightened guardians to employ young trainee teachers.[6] He claimed in his autobiography, that this improved the workhouse schools up to a point where the Guardians would be persuaded to take more interest in pauper education and perhaps consent to the creation of school districts.[7] When Kay was appointed Secretary to the new Committee of Council on Education in 1839, he selected an establishment in Norwood for his experiment in pauper education. In three years, he turned it into a model for the district school movement and a nursery of pupil teachers for elementary schools. After 1842, however, Peel‘s government slowed down the plans for district schools as it was not prepared to coerce the Unions and the movement never achieved more than three Metropolitan School Districts and six small rural ones. [8] The failure of the district-school movement was partly compensated by the growth of separate schools in the more enlightened Unions. By 1857, 57 of these were listed. Some smaller workhouses had detached schools on the workhouse site. School standards greatly improved after 1846 with the beginnings of poor law school inspection and the decline in the use of untrained pauper teachers. Poor Law education never aspired to becoming a basis or a model for state elementary education.[9] It was intended for workhouse children but there were, in 1855, some 277,000 children in families on outdoor relief not provided with any education except in refuges or mission or ‘ragged’ schools. It was on too small a scale even to fulfil its own task, a criticism evident once the Local Government Board took responsibility for their operation in 1872.[10] Workhouse schools provided national coverage but the stigma attached to the workhouse meant that they could never provide the nationwide system of elementary education that by the 1860s many regarded as essential.

The factory school was not new in 1833.[11] Voluntary provision can be traced back to the 1780s and was pioneered by enlightened manufacturers such as Henry Ashton at Turton Mill, the Peel family and Robert Owen. The factory master was traditionally responsible for the education of his apprentices. Many progressive millowners were alienated by the education clauses: W.R. Greg, an enthusiastic organiser of factory schools, became a leading opponent of the Act.[12] After 1833, much of the enthusiasm for the voluntary provision of factory schooling was lost.[13] The Factory Act 1833 made millowners responsible for the education of children workers who were not their apprentices but lived with their own parents. 80% of all pupils attending factory schools were concentrated in Lancashire, Cheshire, the West Riding and Monmouthshire, where literacy levels were low and there is little to suggest any marked improvement in factory districts in the aftermath of the legislation. Inspectors were authorised to enforce attendance but the Act did not require employers to provide education themselves, only to obtain a certificate of school attendance for the previous week. Millowners unable or unwilling to provide their own schools tried to obey the law by sending their children to the local day schools. These arrangements were often unsuccessful. Factory education became embroiled in the sectarian debate over Graham’s Factory Bill of 1843 and the act eventually passed in 1844 was shorn of its education clauses.[14] The Newcastle Commission was damning in its indictment of the inadequacies of factory education. Factory education might have improved, at least in small mills, if the millowners had co-operated in setting up shared schools. The failures of factory education, especially its involvement in sectarian disputes, certainly delayed the spread of elementary education. Disgusted Nonconformists turned to the voluntarist movement and Anglicans seemed to prefer the perpetuation of ignorance to giving up their own control of education. Faced with such attitudes, the government contribution to the development of education in the mid-century had to be made largely be stealth.

Government intervention in education was made more difficult as a result of sectarian conflict. Grants provided the first form of intervention but during the 1840s and 1850s other forms of central control over education were instituted largely through the work of Kay-Shuttleworth whose period as secretary of the Committee of Council for Education lasted between 1839 and 1849. He believed that the key to better standards was better-paid and trained teachers. He set out to change the monitorial system into a sound preliminary to a professional training and to attract teachers of the right class and calibre by raising salaries. [15] By the Minutes of 1846 selected pupils would be apprenticed at the age of 13 to their teachers and would receive a grant of £10 increased annually to £20 when they were 18. [16] They were taught by the master for 90 minutes a day and had to pass the annual Inspector’s examination.[17] They were to assist the master in teaching and he would train them in class management and routine duties and would be paid according to their level of success in the examinations. This system was not new. Kay-Shuttleworth had used it at Norwood. Although the first pupil-teachers came from pauper schools, he intended that the bulk of them should form a social link between the children of labourers in elementary schools and the school managers, who were clergy or gentry. They would therefore be mostly from the upper-working and lower-middle-classes. The top section of this ladder of recruitment and training was formed by the teacher training colleges. In 1839, there were four training colleges with model schools in the United Kingdom that took students through very inadequate courses of six weeks to three or four months. Beginning with the Battersea Training College in 1840[18], by 1858 there were thirty-four colleges partly financed by the Education Department through Queen’s Scholarships.[19]

The Minutes of 1846 may have led to the trained elementary teacher but did it really improve the standard of teaching?[20] To some degree any response to this question is subjective. Much school teaching was mechanical, overloaded with ‘facts’ for memorisation. The Teacher Training Colleges did provide a little teaching material, method and possible much-needed self-confidence. They were, however, severely criticised by the Newcastle Commission for their long hours, vast syllabuses, and addiction to textbooks and the superficial nature of many of their courses. The main cause of poor teaching in elementary schools was generally considered to be the low wages of teachers. The Minutes attempted to solve the problem by state grants but the basic variations and inequities were left untouched. Salaries varied from area to area and school to school depending on endowments, contributions and school fees. By 1855, the average annual pay of a certificated schoolteacher was assessed at £90. Higher pay would have removed elementary teachers too far from the class of their pupils and weakened the sympathy and understanding supposed to be felt between them. The reality was often different. Elementary teachers were educated above their station and in the 1850s began to demand promotion of the Inspectorate, to leave the schools for better jobs or to go into the church

The growth of grants to elementary schools increased dramatically from the original £20,000 of 1833 to £724,000 by 1860. From 1856, the Committee of Council on Education had a Vice-President to represent it in parliament. Yet the 1850s were considered a period of comparative educational stagnation. This was partly because all reformers (except the voluntarists) were not convinced that a national school system could not be completed without support from the rates. In addition, continuing sectarian bitterness defeated all attempts to secure rate support: bills in 1850, 1852, 1853 and 1862 all failed as did the recommendation of the Newcastle Commission in 1861. The continuation of central grants ensured the survival and increase of the Inspectorate; from 2 in 1840, they had become 23 with 2 Assistant Inspectors in 1852, 36 with 25 Assistants in 1861 and 62 with 14 Assistants in 1864. Grants and inspectors came together with the introduction of the payment by results principle in the reconstruction of the government grant in the Revised Code of 1862-1863.[21] The bulk of a school’s grant, roughly half its income, was to be dependent upon satisfactory performance by each child over seven in examinations conducted by HMIs. It was unwelcome to those who thought that government should be doing more but was praised by those who though expenditure was mushrooming out of control and who doubted that the grants were giving value for money. Grant aid to education fell almost by a quarter and the levels of 1861 were not reached again until 1869. In effect, payment by results was a piece-rate system, putting teachers in the position of factory operatives.

Kay-Shuttleworth had, through the central government department, established an inspectorate and a system of training teachers. Under his successor Ralph Lingen (1849-1869) the work of the Education Department, as it became in 1856, steadily expanded but on more formal and bureaucratised lines.[22] The age of creative innovation was over and the department’s primary goal was to manage the system as efficiently and economically as possible. Lingen saw his job as being to

...stem the growth of a system of subsidies and to control the expansionist tendencies of inspectorate and educational public.[23]

A Royal Commission on Elementary Education, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle was appointed in 1858 and reported in 1861. [24] In general, it considered that the system of state aid had worked well, but argued that the objectives had been set too high for the majority of children who attended the schools. It was desirable that results should be tested to ensure that schools were providing value for money, a recommendation used by Robert Lowe, the minister who spoke for the education department in the House of Commons, to establish the Revised Code in 1862 linking annual grants to pupil results.[25] It also recommended involving local as well as central government in the provision of schools, allowing local government agencies to offer rate support to supplement government grants and suggested that this rate support should be dependent on the school’s results, in effect a series of incentive payments.

Until the late 1850s, much of the schooling of the working-classes was still informal or semi-formal. Efforts to bring government resources to bear had so far been hampered by the ‘religious problem’ and it took another twenty years to cut through this knot. Elementary education in the 1860s entered a period of some regression. The Newcastle Commission set low intellectual targets for the education of the poor and this can be compared with the hardening of Poor Law attitudes in the 1870s.[26] A national system of elementary education had to await the legislation of 1870 and 1880.

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[1] On this issue see, Newbould, I.D.C., ‘The Whigs, the Church, and Education, 1839’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 26, (1987), pp. 332-346.

[2] Ibid, Ward, J.T. and Treble, James H., ‘Religion and education in 1843: reaction to the ‘Factory Education Bill’’.

[3] Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, (Manchester University Press), 1980 is the best analysis of state intervention.

[4] Ibid, Selleck, R.J.W., James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider, is now the standard biography of this seminal figure.

[5] Ibid, Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, pp. 44-69.

[6] On the early development of workhouse schools see, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, (Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts), 1862, pp. 287-292.

[7] Bloomfield, B.C., (ed.), The autobiography of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, (Institute of Education, University of London), 1964.

[8] Hill, Florence Davenport, Children of the state: the training of juvenile paupers, (Macmillan and Co.), 1868, pp. 63-78 considers critically the development of District Schools.

[9] Richson, Charles, Pauper education: its provisions and defects; with certain objections to its extension, considered in a letter to the Right Hon. Sir Geo. Grey, Bart., M.P., (Rivington), 1850 and Browne, Walter, ‘Facts and Fallacies of Pauper Education’, Fraser’s magazine for town and country, Vol, 18, (Longmans, Green), 1878, pp. 197-207 considers the problems posed by pauper education while Chance, William, Children under the poor law: their education, training and after-care, together with a criticism of the report of the departmental committee on metropolitan poor law schools, 2 Vols, (S. Sonnenschein & Co.), 1897 provides later, more positive analysis.

[10] See, for example, Local Government Board, Annual Report, Vol. 1, (HMS0), 1872, pp. 224-235.

[11] See, for example, Sanderson, Michael, ‘Education and the Factory in Industrial Lancashire, 1780-1840’, Economic History Review, new sereies, Vol. 20, (2), (1967), pp. 266-279. Robson, A.H., The Education of Children Engaged in Industry, 1833-1876, (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner), 1931.

[12] See Rose, Mary B., The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 1986, pp. 56-58.

[13] Robson, A.H., The Education of Children Engaged in Industry, 1833-1876, (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner), 1931.

[14] Ibid, Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, pp. 114-125 considers the 1843 Bill.

[15] Ross, A.M., ‘Kay-Shuttleworth and the training of teachers for pauper schools’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 15, (1967), pp. 275-283.

[16] These were the minutes of the Committee of Council on Education minutes of August and December 1846. See, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Public Education: as affected by the Minutes of the Committee of Privy Council from 1846 to 1852; with suggestions as to future policy, (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans), 1853, pp. 54-112.

[17] Dunford, J.E., Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools in England and Wales, 1860-1870, Leeds, 1980.

[18] For Kay-Shuttleworth’s take on the Battersea Training College, see, ibid, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, pp. 294-431.

[19] Dent, H.C., The training of teachers in England and Wales, 1800-1975, (Routledge), 1977.

[20] Ibid, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, pp. 437-551 provides an explanation of the Minutes of 1846.

[21] Mason, Donald, ‘Peelite opinion and the genesis of payment by results: the true story of the Newcastle Commission’, History of Education, Vol. 17, (1988), 269-281 and Marcham, A.J., ‘The revised Code of Education, 1862: reinterpretations and misinterpretations’, History of Education, Vol. 10, (1981), pp. 81-99.

[22] Bishop, A. S., ‘Ralph Lingen, Secretary to the Education Department, 1849-76’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 16, (1968), pp. 138-163.

[23] Cit, Johnson, Richard, ‘Administrators in education before 1870: patronage, social position and role’, in Sutherland, Gillian, (ed.), Studies in the growth of Nineteenth-century Government, (Routledge), 1972, p. 135.

[24] Anon. Report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the state of popular education in England; Reports of assistant commissioners etc.; Correspondence etc. Parliamentary papers, [2794-I] H.C. (1861), Vol. XXI, pt. 1, 1; Parliamentary papers, [2794-II-VI] H.C. (1861), Vol. XXI, pt. I-VI; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 231 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 295; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 354 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 307; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 410 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 341; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 325 (1861) and Vol. XLVIII, 305.

[25] ‘Payment by results’ proved highly divisive issue; see for example, ‘Popular Education—The New Code’, London Quaterly Review, Vol. CCXXI, (1862), pp. 38-59, Menet, John, The Revised Code: A Letter to a Friend, suggested by the pamphlets of the Rev. C.J. Vaughan, D.D., Vicar of Doncaster, and the Rev. J. Fraser, Rector of Upton, (Rivingtons), 1862 and Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Memorandum on Popular Education, (Ridgway), 1868. See also, Rapple, Brendan A., ‘A Victorian experiment in economic efficiency in education’, Economics of Education Review, Vol. 11, (4), (1992), pp. 301-316 and Fletcher, Ladden, ‘A Further Comment on Recent Interpretations of the Revised Code, 1862’, History of Education, Vol. 10, (1), pp. 21-31.

[26] Several areas of social administration went through periods of administrative regression in the third quarter of the nineteenth century: education in the 1860s and the poor law and public health in the 1870s.