Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860-1918

J. S. Hurt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315442266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This study, first published in 1979, analyses the attitude of various income and occupational groups to elementary schools both before and after the introduction of compulsory school attendance. It also discusses the efforts made by voluntary organisations to provide school meals, as well as examining the quality of the meals themselves, before the enactment of remedial legislation in the early twentieth century. This title will be of interest to students of history and education.

Part One
The Working Classes and the 1870 Act

I
Our Future Masters

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 created school boards for those parts of England and Wales in which there were insufficient school places for those children whose station in life was held to destine them for the elementary school. These boards possessed power to enforce the attendance of their pupils. Ten years later this power became a duty that devolved also on the school attendance committee, a body created under an act of 1876 in the non-school-board areas. As certain groups of children had been forced to attend school before 1870, the idea of compulsory education was not new. The number previously affected by a miscellany of legislation that included the Factory Acts, the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Acts and the Poor Law Acts, had been comparatively small. What was new about the legislation of the 1870s was the extent of its operation. For the first time in history the nation's children had to attend school on a full-time basis for a minimum of five years, a period that extended to nine for many by 1914.

The new laws had an important effect on the working-class way of life. No longer could parents take for granted the services of their children in the home and their contributions to the family budget. Traditional working-class patterns of behaviour, when continued, did so in defiance of the law. The state had interfered with the pattern of family life by coming between parent and child, reducing family income, and imposing new patterns of behaviour on both parent and child.

Any analysis of the impact of compulsory education between 1870 and 1914 on working-class culture has to recognize the great diversity of practice and belief that this term conceals. In reality there were several working classes and many cultural differences in the period under examination. Mid-Victorians were well aware of the complexity of this cultural mosaic as their frequent preference for the term 'working classes', in contrast to 'working class', demonstrates. As well as giving recognition to gradations within the working classes based on differences of income, occupation, and the degree of reliability of earnings, they were also aware of regional diversity.

The modus operandi of the commissioners appointed under the chairmanship of the Duke of Newcastle in 1858 to inquire into the state of popular education in England—a brief that was extended without protest in those pre-devolutionary days to includes Wales—illustrates this point. In tackling the problem of producing a balanced account of the existing state of affairs without the advantage of today's knowledge of statistically reliable sampling techniques, they chose two contrasting agricultural regions, two manufacturing, two mining, two maritime, and two areas in London for detailed examination. Yet, as will be argued, their omission of many of the largest cities and some of the poorest parts of London obscured the major failing of the elementary schools of the day. The children of the poorest classes—the 'residuum', the 'street arabs', the 'dangerous and perishing classes', to quote a few contemporary terms—were virtually untouched by the existing state-aided voluntary schools managed by the religious societies. The most important of these were the Anglican National Society and the nonconformist British and Foreign School Society which between them provided over 90 per cent of the voluntary-school places.

If, broadly speaking, the children of the poorest received no education apart from that offered in those unflatteringly designated institutions, the Ragged Schools that flourished mainly in Bristol and London, it follows that the new laws bore the most heavily on the least articulate. Hence any evaluation of the impact of compulsory education in the period under examination is heavily dependent on the writings of their social superiors, be they middle-class observers or the leaders of the trade-union and labour movement. To stipulate a further caveat, the term compulsory education is used as a synonym for compulsory schooling. Although this is not entirely accurate it accords with contemporary and popular usage. It must not be forgotten, though, that for the greater part of historical time children have received their education outside the classroom. Schooling has been the experience of the minority of mankind before the present century. Such phrases as 'got his book-learning' or 'got his schooling' vividly demonstrate the way in which the distinction between formal and informal education lives on in the minds of the elderly.

Our discussion must start with an examination of the position in the 1860s just before the new laws reached the statute book. There are two interrelated problems. The first is that of defining the social groups for whom the elementary schools were intended. As the parental consumer had a free choice of sending his child to an elementary school, a private school, or to no school at all, the second problem is that of establishing whether the social composition of the classroom reflected the will of the bureaucrat.

As an answer to the first question the Education Department used a simple social and demographic equation. One-seventh of the population belonged to the upper and middle classes who were expected to make their own arrangements for the education of their children. As a corollary it was argued that these parents would not have wanted their children to attend a school in the company of those of the remaining six-sevenths. The latter, the labouring classes, came within the orbit of the state system. Although the methods by which these proportions were determined do not stand up to a close scrutiny, they provided a working basis for the implementation of the 1870 Act. When it became law, officials used this rule-of-thumb formula to determine whether a particular district possessed sufficient school accommodation. Since this was the first great nineteenth-century exercise in social planning the Departmental guide-lines merit closer scrutiny.

The ratios of one- and six-sevenths were derived from calculations made by Dr W. Farr, of the Registrar-General's Office, and others for the Taunton Commissioners' investigation of the middle-class endowed schools in the 1860s. Farr used the returns of the Department of Inland Revenue. These showed that 519,991 of the 3,739,505 houses in England and Wales were assessed for inhabited house duty at an annual value of £20 or more in the financial year, 1861—2. He calculated that the corresponding figures for 1864 were .575,779 and 3,893,233 respectively. He also found that the number of marriages by licence, at a fee of £3 4s, in 1864 was 26,579. On the other hand 153,808 couples had chosen the more economical and leisurely method of marriage by banns at a cost of about 12s. The proportions in the two cases, 14,789 and 14,730 to 100,000 were close enough to convince him that there was a causal connection and that they provided a satisfactory means for determining the number of children in the middle and upper classes. 'Taking the country generally', he pronounced, 'it is considered right and becoming for the higher and middle classes to marry by licence, and for the rest of the population to marry after the publication of banns.' He concluded that despite the difficulties involved in drawing the line between¹

what are called the working classes and the middle classes, requiring such an education as the Commission is inquiring into .... We have broad lines drawn by the people themselves, and recognized for practical purposes by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. From the one class he collects the house tax, and he does not now venture to go lower.

Other investigators, who followed different routes, reached similar conclusions. Although D. C. Richardson, Assistant Commissioner and Registrar to the Commission, quite legitimately attacked Farr's assumption, he broadly agreed with his result. Richardson showed that the relationship Farr had attempted to establish between social class, the occupation of houses assessed at £20 a year or more, and marriage by licence, did not stand up to close scrutiny. For instance, 44̇2 per cent of the houses in London and 6̇2 per cent in Westmorland were assessed at £20 a year or more. Yet the percentages of marriages by special licence in the two areas were 14 and 39 respectively. Richardson accordingly carried out a survey based on information derived from the Court Directories. He chose for investigation the towns of Woodbridge and Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, and the large villages of Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire, and Stradbroke, Suffolk, a sample biased heavily in favour of a rural and pre-industrial England of a century earlier. From an analysis of this material he decided that 155 in every 1,000 belonged to the upper and middle classes. A third person to tackle the problem was J. G. Fitch, another assistant commissioner to the Taunton Commission. After examining the parental background of children in the schools of York, Sheffield, Halifax, and Selby, he calculated that 17̇8 per cent of the boys and 19̇7 per cent of the girls belonged to the class that paid for the education of its children. His slightly higher proportions, he argued, were consistent with Farr's figures because they were inflated by the longer stay at school made by children in 'the middle and upper ranks'.²

A contemporary study, R. D. Baxter's National Income (1868), provides little further guidance on the matter. Baxter calculated that 4,870,000 of the estimated population of England and Wales belonged to the upper and middle classes. The balance, 16,130,000, were members of the manual labouring classes. However, Baxter's classification was based on an amalgamate of social esteem imputed to a particular occupation and status ascribed by income. He had used the Occupational Returns of the 1861 census to make his allocation of individuals to his broad social categories. Similarly, his general conclusion that there were 2,053,000 people with independent incomes in the upper and middle classes and 7,785,000 in the manual labouring class gives little further guidance in answering the question what proportion of the population could afford to pay school fees of over ninepence a week, the upper limit of the charge made in public elementary schools. Since Baxter was concerned with establishing the total number of independent incomes, his aggregate figures include estimates of the earnings of both married and single women, and children. More-over, his estimates of upper- and middle-class income are made from the dubious evidence of income tax returns. Somewhat naively he assumed that only the working classes would have been so unscrupulous as to practise tax evasion.³ Thus Baxter's enquiry does no more than broadly confirm the accuracy of the one-seventh and six-sevenths formula of the Education Department, it by no means proves its reliability. His estimates, in common with those already cited, are open to other objections. Any calculation of the number of children whose education had to be subsidized needed to take into account, not so much individual income, as total family income. It also had to allow for such quantifiable variables as the size and age structure of the family as well as the non-quantifiable one of parental interest in education.

In any discussion of social class and school attendance it must be remembered that mid-Victorian observers had some, but only a limited, justification for equating willingness with ability to pay school fees. In today's society parental value-judgements on the worth of higher education for children vary not only between various income levels but within them as well. In the nineteenth century this was equally true of elementary education. Apart from other factors, readiness to pay school fees was determined both by income and occupation. One perceptive inspector, the Rev. D. J. Stewart, whose district included the university city of Cambridge, showed his awareness of this in his Report for 1856.⁴

In thirty-one schools . . . I saw 3,505 children. Of this number, only 1,629 were children of the labouring class; the others were the children of farmers; small shopkeepers, farm bailiffs, household servants, college servants, petty tailors, shoemakers, and etc., many of whom are, no doubt worse off than labourers in full work.

Although Stewart's main concern was to demonstrate that children other than those of the labouring class used the schools receiving a government grant, his comments show that there was no simple correlation between income levels and attitudes towards education.

Granted that some of the farmers and small businessmen may have been worse off than the labourer in full employment, others were not. Hence the social structure of England and Wales by the 1860s was too complex to make a cut-off point of one-seventh valid. The Taunton Commissioners gave considerable attention to this social borderline where the lower middle classes and the more prosperous members of the working classes overlapped. They found that 'the education of what is sometimes called the lower section of the middle class is at present often conducted in the National and British schools', the very schools that had been surveyed by the Newcastle Commissioners during their enquiry into the education of the independent poor. Not surprisingly they commented, 'our inquiry into this most important part of our subject has been attended with unusual difficulties.'⁵

In their Report they had envisaged that the sons of 'the lower section of the middle class'—the sons of 'the smaller tenant farmers, the small tradesmen, the superior Artisans'—would attend a 'third-grade school' where they would receive a thorough grounding in the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This level of attainment broadly corresponded with that expected of the top class of a voluntary school. Under Standard VI of the Revised Code, introduced by Robert Lowe in the early 1860s to monitor the scholastic performance of the schools and to determine the amount of their annual grants, a child was expected to 'read a short ordinary paragraph in a newspaper', write a similar passage of prose from dictation, and calculate 'a sum in practice or bills of parcels'. The mastery of such accomplishments would have qualified a boy for a clerkship in a mercantile office or some comparable career, the level of parental ambition of many from the top end of the working classes or the lower end of the middle. The duplication of the syllabuses paralleled that of the institutions. 'The lower divisions of the third-grade schools do not differ from good national schools except in as far as a higher fee may secure schoolmasters either of a higher social rank or of a greater professional skill.'⁶

The demands made by this socially amorphous group gave school managers an easy and acceptable market to satisfy. The children were seen as easier to handle and more highly motivated than those of the poorer sections of the working classes. Their regular attendance together with the opportunity of charging higher fees made the voluntary schools financially secure. When a school manager decided to go upmarket he frequently did so at the expense of the very children for whom the school had been founded in the first place. Poor children were either excluded because the fees were too high or, if admitted to the bottom classes at a low fee, were accorded the lowest priority in the allocation of teaching resources. In 1895 H.M.I. DuPort described his experiences as a young curate at Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone, in the early 1860s.⁷

I was behind the scenes as a curate-manager of large and highly esteemed schools in London, teaching in them daily; and very pleasant hours did I spend with those 40 first-class boys over their Euclid, their history, and their arithmetic. My occasional visits to the second class, too, were, though, in a less degree, interesting and encouraging; but . . . the lower two-thirds fraction of the school was little better than an unorganized mass of children of all ages; of teaching properly so called they had none;. . . educational training began at the second class.

In this school the children of the skilled artisan travelled first class, those of the poor were in the steerage, the captain seldom came below deck.

School managers who provided a more advanced form of teaching had little reason to fear for the future prosperity of their schools. In making their schools the precursors of the higher elementary schools run by the school boards in the last decades of the century, they were remedying one of the major deficiencies of the English educational system. 'The schools that are wanting everywhere', the Taunton Commissioners declared, 'are good schools of the third grade.' T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE THE WORKING CLASSES AND THE 1870 ACT
• PART TWO THE SCHOOLS AND THE SOCIAL SERVICES
• PART THREE IN AND OUT OF THE SCHOOL
• Notes
• Index