Victorian Elementary Education

Background

Prior to 1870, elementary education in England and Wales was provided almost entirely by voluntary bodies — chiefly the National Society (Church of England) and the British and Foreign School Society (Nonconformist) — supplemented by dame schools, ragged schools, and factory schools operating under the Factory Acts. Attendance was neither compulsory nor free, and coverage was profoundly uneven. Parliamentary reports compiled by the Newcastle Commission in 1861 found that only one in seven children in manufacturing towns received any schooling beyond the age of nine. The Commission's findings led directly to the Revised Code of 1862, which tied government grants to individual pupil performance in reading, writing, and arithmetic — a system that became known as *Payment by Results* and which critics, including the school inspector Matthew Arnold, condemned in his annual reports as mechanising instruction at the expense of genuine learning.

William Edward Forster, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education in Gladstone's first administration, introduced the legislation that would become the [Education Act 1870](/wiki/education-act-1870). Forster's bill navigated the sustained conflict between Anglican and Nonconformist interests over the religious character of state schools, ultimately adopting the Cowper-Temple clause, which prohibited denominational catechism or formulary in board school religious instruction. The Act received Royal Assent on 9 August 1870 and is widely regarded as the foundational statute of English public education.

The Education Act 1870

The [Education Act 1870](/wiki/education-act-1870) established a system of directly elected School Boards empowered to survey local educational provision, identify deficiencies, and fill them by building and maintaining board schools funded through local rates. Where voluntary schools were judged sufficient, boards were not required to act; where gaps existed, boards were obliged to remedy them within a statutory timetable. The [London School Board](/wiki/london-school-board), elected in November 1870, became the largest and most consequential of these bodies, overseeing the construction of hundreds of schools across the capital under architects including Edward Robert Robson, whose *School Architecture* (1874) codified the distinctive three-storey Queen Anne brick style that remains a feature of inner London streetscapes.

School Boards were granted permissive authority to make attendance compulsory within their districts; this permissive structure was consolidated by the Education Act 1876, which placed the duty to ensure attendance on parents, and by the Mundella Act of 1880, which made attendance compulsory for all children between five and ten throughout England and Wales. The [Free Education Act 1891](/wiki/free-education-act-1891) abolished school fees in most elementary schools, removing the last significant financial barrier to universal attendance. By 1895, average attendance at public elementary schools in England and Wales exceeded 4.8 million pupils, a figure recorded in the Report of the Committee of Council on Education for that year.

Immediate Reaction

The passage of the 1870 Act was received with vigorous opposition from two directions simultaneously. Anglican clergy and the National Society objected that board schools would draw children and ratepayer funds away from church schools, threatening the institutional dominance of the established Church in popular education. Nonconformist groups, organised principally through the Birmingham-based National Education League under Joseph Chamberlain and George Dixon, condemned the Act for its continued state subsidy of denominational schools under Clause 25, which permitted School Boards to pay the fees of poor children at voluntary schools from the rates. The League campaigned energetically, though unsuccessfully, for the abolition of Clause 25 throughout the early 1870s.

Teachers' organisations responded to the period with more qualified support. The National Union of Elementary Teachers, founded in 1870 and renamed the National Union of Teachers in 1888, welcomed compulsion and free education as measures that stabilised enrolment and reduced the dependency of teachers' incomes on fee collection, while objecting consistently to the Payment by Results system as demeaning and counterproductive. HM Inspectors of Schools, whose written reports to the Committee of Council constitute one of the primary sources for the period, documented both the rapid physical expansion of provision and the persistent unevenness of instruction. [William Edward Forster](/wiki/forster-william-edward) received a formal address of thanks from the National Union of Elementary Teachers in March 1881, though he had by then left office.

Legacy

The administrative machinery established between 1870 and 1891 was rationalised and extended by the [Education Act 1902](/wiki/education-act-1902), introduced by Arthur Balfour's Conservative government. The 1902 Act abolished the 2,568 School Boards then in existence, transferring their functions to newly created Local Education Authorities (LEAs) constituted as committees of county and county borough councils. The voluntary schools that had survived the board school era were incorporated into the new system as "non-provided" schools, receiving full funding in exchange for LEA oversight of secular instruction — a settlement that remains, in its broad outlines, the basis of Church of England and Roman Catholic maintained schools in England to the present day.

The period produced a measurable and sustained increase in functional literacy. The Registrar General's reports on marriage registers, which recorded the proportion of men and women signing with a mark rather than a signature, show a decline in the mark rate from approximately 33 percent of men and 49 percent of women in 1870 to under 3 percent for both sexes by 1900. Historians of education, including Gillian Sutherland in *Policy-Making in Elementary Education 1870–1895* (Oxford, 1973), have credited the board school system with this shift while noting that voluntary schools, ragged schools, and Sunday schools had already reduced illiteracy substantially in the two preceding decades.

In Popular Culture

The board school building type — recognisable by its red brick, tall sash windows, and separate entrances labelled *Boys*, *Girls*, and *Infants* — has acquired a persistent presence in the visual culture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The buildings appear as background settings in numerous works of fiction set in the period, including several of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; in "The Naval Treaty" (1893), Holmes observes a board school from a train and describes it as a "light-house" and a "capsule with hundreds of bright little seeds in each." The remark is one of the few instances in the Holmes canon of unambiguous social optimism.

The [London School Board](/wiki/london-school-board) was the subject of sustained historiographical attention during the centenary of the 1870 Act, and several of Robson's surviving board school buildings are now listed structures. The National Union of Teachers marked the centenary with a commemorative publication in 1970, and the Board of Education's original administrative files for the period 1870 to 1902 are held at the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives) and at The National Archives, Kew, under reference ED 14.

See also

• Education Act 1870
• Education Act 1902
• London School Board
• Free Education Act 1891
• Forster William Edward

References