| Date | 9 August 1870 |
| Location | England and Wales, United Kingdom |
| Caused by | Inadequate voluntary elementary school provision; extension of the franchise under the Reform Act 1867 |
| Resulted in | Establishment of locally elected School Boards; creation of rate-funded board schools; foundation of universal compulsory elementary education |
| Parties | Her Majesty's Government · National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor · British and Foreign School Society · Birmingham Education League · National Education Union |
| Lead figures | William Edward Forster, William Ewart Gladstone, William Cowper-Temple, Joseph Chamberlain, George Dixon |
The Education Act 1870, also known as the Forster Act, was a landmark piece of legislation passed on 9 August 1870 in England and Wales. The Act established a system of publicly funded elementary schools — known as board schools — to fill the gaps left by existing voluntary and religious institutions, and is widely regarded as the foundation of the modern English state education system.
By the mid-nineteenth century, elementary education in England and Wales was provided almost entirely by voluntary organisations, principally the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church and the British and Foreign School Society. Attendance was inconsistent, fees were a barrier for many families, and large industrial towns — particularly in the Midlands and the north — contained vast populations of children who received no formal instruction at all. A Select Committee report tabled in February 1869 estimated that roughly 1.5 million children of school age in England and Wales had no access to any form of elementary schooling.
The political pressure to act was compounded by the Reform Act 1867, which had extended the franchise to a significant portion of the urban male working class. The phrase most often associated with this context — attributed to the Liberal statesman Robert Lowe, though the precise wording is disputed — was the call to "educate our masters." William Edward Forster, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education and Member of Parliament for Bradford, was charged by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone with drafting the legislation. Forster introduced the Bill to the House of Commons on 17 February 1870.
### February to April 1870
Forster's Bill proposed dividing England and Wales into school districts and requiring each district to ensure sufficient school provision for all children between the ages of five and twelve. Where existing voluntary schools were deemed adequate, they would continue to operate with their denominational character intact. Where they were not, locally elected School Boards would be established, empowered to levy a rate, build new schools, and — crucially — to compel attendance where bye-laws were passed to that effect.
### May to August 1870
The Bill generated significant parliamentary controversy over the question of religious instruction in the new board schools. The compromise introduced by William Cowper-Temple — later enshrined as the "Cowper-Temple clause" — stipulated that no religious catechism or formulary distinctive of any particular denomination could be taught in board schools. This clause was inserted during committee stage on 22 June 1870 and remained in force, with minor modifications, for the next six decades. The Act received Royal Assent on 9 August 1870.
The Act did not immediately make attendance free or compulsory nationwide. School Boards retained discretion over both questions until the Elementary Education Act 1880, which introduced universal compulsion, and the Free Education Act 1891, which abolished fees in most board and voluntary schools. However, the 1870 Act was the first to establish a mechanism by which the state could, through elected local bodies, build, fund, and oversee elementary schools directly — a structural departure with no domestic precedent.
Reaction to the Act was mixed across religious and political lines. The Roman Catholic hierarchy objected that the dual system — which continued state support for Anglican voluntary schools while creating rate-funded secular alternatives — placed Catholic schools at a disadvantage, as they received no direct grant toward building costs from the new local boards. Nonconformist groups, led in part by the Birmingham Education League under Joseph Chamberlain and George Dixon, argued that any continued funding of Church of England schools from public sources was constitutionally improper and campaigned for a wholly secular system. A conference of the National Education Union, held in Manchester in November 1870, concluded that the Act represented an acceptable transitional arrangement pending a fuller settlement.
Within Parliament, the Act's passage was hailed by Forster as completing "the great work" of elementary provision, though he privately acknowledged in a letter to Gladstone dated 11 October 1870 that the voluntary schools in the poorest urban districts were unlikely to survive beyond a single generation of board school competition.
The Education Act 1870 resulted in the establishment of approximately 2,500 School Boards across England and Wales over the following three decades, responsible at their peak for the education of some 2.6 million children. The London School Board, created under the Act and first elected in November 1870, became one of the largest educational authorities in the world, overseeing the construction of more than 400 schools between 1870 and its abolition under the Education Act 1902. The characteristic three-storey "board school" buildings designed by E. R. Robson, the London School Board's first architect, remain a recognisable feature of inner London streetscapes.
The Act is generally credited with laying the administrative and legislative groundwork for compulsory universal elementary education in England and Wales, though the full realisation of that goal required three further Acts passed over the following two decades. It is cited in educational policy literature as the first statutory acknowledgement that the state bore a direct responsibility for ensuring elementary schooling reached every child — a principle that the voluntary system, however well-intentioned, had demonstrably failed to deliver.
The Act and its passage have been dramatised in several BBC documentary series on Victorian Britain, most notably in a 1970 centenary programme produced to mark the hundredth anniversary of the legislation. Forster's original draft bill, held at the Public Record Office under reference ED 24/1, was displayed publicly for the first time in 1970 as part of a Department of Education and Science exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. A commemorative plaque marking the location of Forster's parliamentary offices in Westminster was installed by the London County Council in 1921, though the building itself was demolished during the Blitz in 1941.