The Education System

During the latter part of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries pious people, anxious to improve the lot of the poorer sections of the Community, established “Free” or “Charity” Schools in many towns. The founding of the S.P.C.K. in 1698 was partly the result of this movement, and did much to encourage and further it. “They offered one means of attacking the problem of pauperism that was eating like a canker into the life of the nation.” While some advocate “Schools of Industry” (Workhouses) “others look to the three R’s and religious teaching to give moral uplift and touch the heart of conscience.” It is difficult for us to-day to envisage the conditions of children in towns at the end of the 17th century. Needham writing in “Schools and Schoolmasters,” in 1663 says, “It must needs pity any Christian heart to see the little dirty infantry which swarms up and down the alleys and lanes with curses and ribaldry in their mouths, and other rude behaviour, as if they were intended to put off their humanity and to degenerate into brutes.” “Charity” Schools were appointed, and it was estimated that by 1750 30,000 children in England and Wales attended these schools.

At the beginning of the 19th Century, Dr Andrew Bell (a minister of the Church of England) and Joseph Lancaster (a Quaker) independently hit upon similar ideas of instructing large numbers of children with only one master. The master taught the older scholars and monitors a lesson, and they in turn took groups of children and taught them. For “rote” learning the idea was successful. Bell, whilst head of an Orphan Asylum in Madras, introduced the system which is known as the “Madras” or “Monitorial” System, to combat a staff strike; and poverty forced the idea on Lancaster. The work of these two men led to the establishment of the National School Society (1811) and the British and Foreign School Society (1810).

The Church of England and other churches often operated primary schools in addition to Sunday Schools , where students paid a small fee to study the Bible, catechism, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools run by the Church of England were generally known as National Schools, the British and Foreign Schools catered for the non-conformists. In 1833 the British Parliament passed a law that gave some government funds to these schools. In 1862 the United Kingdom established a school grant system, called payment by results, in which schools received funds based on their students’ performance on reading, writing, and arithmetic tests. The Education Act of 1870, called the Forster Act, authorised local government boards to establish public board schools. The United Kingdom then had two schools systems: board schools operated by the government and voluntary schools conducted by the churches and other private organizations.

The 1870 Act gave local authorities the right, for the first time, to provide elementary schools from the rates wherever there were not enough schools provided by the voluntary bodies, such as churches and charities. Her Majesty’s Inspectors were required to visit every town to find out what was needed and make a report.

In Windsor the inspection took place in 1871 and the report concluded that there was a deficiency of 384 school places. This excluded school places that were considered inefficient.

A great deal of effort then went into upgrading the schools of Windsor both in teaching standards and the premises, which is why so many school buildings were built in the 1870’s. By improving standards the Church and Charity schools provided enough places and the ‘Godless Board Schools’ were kept out of the town. If there were not enough places for the children of the town a School Board would have been formed to provide them. Schools that failed to meet the new standards would not have received any government grants.

In 1878 the United Kingdom passed laws that limited child labour in factories and made it possible for more children to attend school. To make schooling available to working-class children, many schools with limited public and private funds used monitorial methods of instruction. Monitorial education, developed by British educators Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, used student monitors to conduct lessons. It offered the fledgling public education system the advantage of allowing schools to hire fewer teachers to instruct the large number of new students. Schools featuring monitorial education used older boys, called monitors, who were more advanced in their studies, to teach younger children. Monitorial education concentrated on basic skills—reading, writing, and arithmetic—that were broken down into small parts or units. After a monitor had learned a unit—such as spelling words of two or three letters that began with the letter A—he would, under the master teacher’s supervision, teach this unit to a group of students. By the end of the 19th century, the monitorial system was abandoned in British schools because it provided a very limited education.