The English School

Its Architecture and Organization, Volume II 1870-1970

Malcolm Seaborne, Roy Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Britain has a rich heritage of school buildings dating from the later Middle Ages to the present day. While some of these schools have attracted the attention of architectural historians, they have not previously been considered from the educational viewpoint. Even schools of little or no architectural interest are important sociologically, since the changing architecture of schools reflects changing ideas about how children should be educated and organized for teaching purposes.

In this second volume, originally published in 1977, Malcolm Seaborne and Roy Lowe carry the historical record into our own time. Like its predecessor, the volume studies the development of school architecture and its influence on the organization of the school, and relates architectural questions to the educational and social forces which influence the design of schools. The authors have chosen representative examples which illustrate the main trends in the development of school design and construction.

Part One

The board school era 1870—1902

One

The schools in transition

The schools’ inspector for Devon and Cornwall, H. F. Codd, making his annual report for 1876, was at great pains to emphasize the relative cheapness of elementary schools in the South-West, some of which were being built for as little as £5 per place, roughly half the cost of those in many other areas. He explained the economies which resulted in these ‘very substantial, useful buildings’, and recommended particularly the saving which was made when a school was built without the services of a professional architect, as was often the case in Devon.¹ Although this practice was not widely copied during the following years, it does offer an extreme but powerful example of the relative crudity of thinking on school design at the beginning of our period. During the century following 1870, when a vast number of new schools was built, an increasing sophistication was brought to bear on their design: by 1902, many of the major steps in this process had been taken, and the pragmatic approach which Codd advocated was a thing of the past. Design was already in the hands of professional school architects, employed by the school boards; there was a growing department at Whitehall, which exercised increasing control over school design; a host of publications on school architecture, together with detailed reporting of new school buildings in the architectural press, meant that new departures were widely publicized and frequently copied. The thirty years after 1870 saw the emergence of an effective educational system in England, with the creation of local administrative bodies, the coming of universal elementary education, a major reform of secondary schools, and some expansion of the provision of higher education. In this process the widespread adoption of a more professional approach to school design was an important formative element.

Within a generation school architects, who were thus increasingly sensitive to a variety of influences, accomplished what was little short of a revolution. There was a widespread shift away from quasi-religious architectural styles towards a more secular school building, as the State, rather than the Church, came to play the major part in the provision of education. By 1902, where Gothic styles were used by school architects, it was usual to resort to mock-Tudor, with large rectangular windows, reminiscent of domestic architecture, rather than the lancet windows (and occasionally even stained glass) which had been popular as recently as the 1870s and 1880s. Second, there was a development in scale of the educational provision. Although Bell and Lancaster had foreseen that their monitorial system would allow schools of up to 1,000 children, in fact most nineteenth-century schools, particularly in rural areas and small townships, were relatively small. Within a few years of 1870 it was quite usual for the larger school boards to build for up to 1,500 children in one school, arranged in three departments. This development, in turn, had several consequences. There was, during these thirty years, as never before or since, a growing contrast between large urban schools responding to the pressure of numbers, and small rural schools, built either by voluntary societies or less well endowed school boards which could not afford such lavish provision. Predictably, the larger boards were frequently criticized for their extravagance in school buildings. But it was these large boards (and the well-endowed secondary schools) which pioneered class teaching, and hastened the demise of the schoolroom, thus allowing the provision of specialist facilities and the augmentation of the school curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century. This period saw, too, a growing contrast in style between the elementary and the secondary school, a distinction which was to be reinforced during the twentieth century. While the elementary schools represented an attempt to universalize education and were built where they could be available to most children (often on cramped urban sites, resulting in two- and three-storey buildings, and in some instances with roof playgrounds), the better off endowed secondary schools were often able to move to spacious suburban and rural sites with relatively large playing fields, and buildings designed to emphasize the prestige of the institution.

Of scarcely less significance was the fact that during this period the school building itself came to be seen as important in its own right. There was an increasingly powerful lobby for the school to set decent standards of hygiene, with no less a person than Edwin Chadwick firing one of the early shots in a paper to the Social Science Association in October 1871.² After the introduction of compulsory schooling in 1880, an increasing number of doctors, alarmed by the medical implications of having the whole population in school, emphasized the need for proper ventilation, heating and lighting, as well as acceptable sanitation.

Further, the view was widely held, although less often articulated, that the school building should contribute to the aesthetic sensibility of the child by showing him standards beyond those of his own home. As early as 1851 one group of provincial architects emphasized ‘the influence of happy architectural associations connected with the scenes of our education…. [We] should be the last to withhold from our poorer brethren, so much the more impressionable than ourselves, an advantage which not only influences childhood, but carries its abiding associations to the end of life.’³ A similar argument was advanced by the President of the R.I.B.A. at the end of the century, in a speech claiming that the aesthetic crudity of many of England’s industrial products could be attributed to the influence of ugly schoolrooms.⁴

It is clear that in 1870, although there was already a growing interest in elementary-school architecture, there had in practice been little development beyond the stage when it could be suggested that ‘a barn furnishes no bad model’.⁵ Joseph Clarke was architect to three Diocesan Boards of Education. In 1852 he wrote Schools and schoolhouses to publicize his designs. All of the buildings he illustrated, from the plain building at Monks Horton in Kent, ‘built to supply the wants of a poor and small population’, to that at Leigh in Essex, ‘hardly belonging to the ordinary class of village schools’, had only a schoolroom for teaching. This was confirmed by the Newcastle Commissioners, who found the single schoolroom ‘the only arrangement sufficiently general to require distinct notice’.⁶ Patrick Cumin, who inspected schools in Bristol and Plymouth for the Commission, reflected the limited horizons of the assistant commissioners when he found that ‘the tripartite division, which allows one portion of the scholars to stand, another to sit at desks, and a third to receive a gallery lesson, is, I think, universally approved’.⁷

The two other major commissions of the 1860s confirmed that the public and grammar schools were not exempt from similar criticisms. The Clarendon Commissioners found in the major public schools that ‘the school buildings … are by no means all that could be desired … there is not unfrequently a want of suitable classrooms … though this is being gradually supplied’.⁸ The Schools Enquiry Commission estimated that only a quarter of the grammar schools reached minimum acceptable standards, which were defined as a good and well-ventilated schoolroom, with at least one classroom, decent offices, a good master’s house, a grass playground and a healthy and accessible site. This report went on to compile a daunting list of the shortcomings of some of the better- known grammar schools. At Portsmouth those in the master’s room could hear conversation from the adjoining public house; at Dudley one ill-ventilated schoolroom was approached from a disreputable street in the worst quarter of the town; Westmorland schools had usually no master’s house and only ‘one schoolroom of the rudest description’. Most of the Lancashire grammar schools were ‘old, ugly, ill-ventilated, in every way offensive’, and the assistant commissioner thought them the only class of building which had not been influenced by the architectural revival sweeping through the towns of northern England. One grammar school was described simply as ‘a hut by the roadside in very disgraceful condition’.⁹

Where class-teaching did appear it often took place in the main schoolroom. In the elementary school, several pupil-teachers gave ‘simultaneous’ lessons, as they were called, within earshot of the master, who conducted his own class, usually in the gallery. The public schools were increasingly using ‘divisions’ for teaching, but in 1864 it was reported that:

At Eton in Dr. Keates’s time, nearly 200 boys, and those the highest in the school, were heard as a single class, and the average number in each division of the upper school was eighty. It is now forty.¹⁰

In fact, the returns showed Eton to be lagging behind some of the other schools; at Charterhouse ‘divisions’ varied in size from nine to twenty. Equally, it has been argued in the first volume of this work that the Clarendon Commissioners were far from convinced of the need to add classrooms for separate teaching, believing that divisions could work effectively in a single schoolroom.¹¹ So it is clear that a class system of teaching, devised originally to enable masters to hear scholars read prepared sections of classical texts, was well established in the larger public schools, even though there was not yet a consensus of opinion that it should lead to the general adoption of classrooms. Among the middle-class schools only a few, most notably Rugby and the Woodard schools, had wholeheartedly adopted teaching in separate classrooms.¹² E. R. Robson, who as architect to the London School Board was to pioneer many important developments in school design, commented in 1874 that the existing grammar schools offered few ideas on how they might in future be organized:

Their sole provision was usually a single lofty and noble hall of oblong form, in which the whole of the boys might be seen engaged in their various lessons — learning by heart or carefully plodding with grammar and dictionary — within sight of the master who was placed on a raised platform. No classroom ever, until during recent years, spoiled the simple dignity of these architecturally excellent school houses.¹³

If there was in practice little during the years immediately before 1870 to suggest the great changes which were to come over school buildings, there were certainly very few signs of a body of opinion ready to support new initiatives. Among the three major educational enquiries which reported during the 1860s, it was, predictably, the Taunton Commission which placed by far the greatest emphasis upon the importance of the school building, reflecting the sorry plight of many of the schools investigated and perhaps the fact that it was this group of schools which had most to gain in terms of prestige from their appearance:

Next to a good master there is nothing more important for a school than a good site and buildings. Health, order, dignity, good teaching and good learning are all intimately concerned with the aspect and accommodation of the school itself … a grammar school should occupy a worthy position among the buildings of the town.¹⁴

Almost prophetically, the report foresaw that many schools would need to remove to new sites to achieve this: ‘to get a good playground in a new site is quite a sufficient reason to justify removal’.¹⁵

But in general, what little public debate there was, reflected a cautious ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One The board school era 1870—1902
• Part Two Medical influence on school design 1902—1914
• Part Three Schools and the economy 1914—1939
• Part Four A new architecture for education 1944—1970
• Bibliography
• The plates
• Index