The PM saw me after his afternoon nap and was audibly purring like a great tiger. He said, ‘You have been in the House [of Commons] for 15 years and it is time you were promoted.’ I said I had only been there for 12 years but he waved this aside. He said, ‘You have been in the Government for the best part of that time [Butler was currently in the Foreign Office] and I want you to go to the Board of Education. I think you can leave your mark there. You will be independent. Besides,’ he said with rising fervour, ‘you will be in the war. You will move poor children from here to here,’ and he lifted up and evacuated imaginary children from one side of his blotting pad to the other; ‘this will be very difficult.’ He went on: ‘I am too old now to think you can improve people’s natures.’ He looked at me pityingly and said: ‘Everyone has to learn to defend himself. I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.’ I said that I should like to influence what was taught in schools but that this was always frowned upon. Here he looked very earnest and commented, ‘Of course not by instruction or order but by suggestion.’ I then said that I had always looked forward to going to the Board of Education if I were given the chance. He appeared ever so slightly surprised at this, showing that he felt that in wartime a central job, such as the one I was leaving, is the most important. But he looked genuinely pleased that I had shown so much satisfaction and seemed to think the appointment entirely suitable. He concluded the interview by saying ‘Come and see me to discuss things – not details, but the broad lines.’1
Two days after taking over, Butler met the Archbishop of Canterbury. Three weeks later that was followed up by a session with a deputation of thirty-three Free Church and Anglican leaders with the Archbishop again at their head. They had come to discuss their ‘five points’, almost all of which related to religious education. Butler judged the meeting ‘successful’, finished it by asking a slightly startled Archbishop to close with a prayer,2 and promptly went on holiday.
Given that, for many of the years that followed, religion ceased to be a central issue in British schools, an explanation is needed for Butler’s holding his first substantive meetings with the churches. Until the 1830s schooling had been entirely voluntary with no state funding. A country that had produced Shakespeare, Milton, Newton and Smeaton and in the early nineteenth century had Faraday, Stephenson, Telford and Keats in its ranks had just four universities in Scotland and two in England – Oxford and Cambridge. Fewer than ten public (that is, private, fee-paying, boarding) schools were in existence, although there was a spread of endowed and often ancient grammar schools, private tuition, and small ‘dame’ schools taught by women in private houses. In addition, a little very rudimentary teaching for the young was provided in Sunday Schools or in elementary schools which were run by church-sponsored voluntary societies. In 1818 just 7 per cent of children attended day school. The beginnings of an educational movement were, however, under way, although there were still strong fears that ‘too much education might lead to disaffection’ in a society where the labour and service of the many supported the wealth and leisure of the few. Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister, famously told Queen Victoria in the late 1830s: ‘I do not know why there is all this fuss about education. None of the Pagets [the Marquis of Anglesey’s family] can read or write and they do very well.’
The industrial revolution, however, produced a demand for better educated workers to which the state was finally to respond. In 1833 a half-empty House of Commons approved a £20,000 grant for school building to help the two church-based school societies, one Anglican and one Free Church, which had been founded in 1811 and 1810 respectively.3 The Anglican society’s full title, The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, in a sense says all that needs to be said about education before 1830.
Parliament as a whole was barely interested. Although this was the moment when the state first became involved in any way in education, the government was still spending more in a year on the Queen’s stables than on educating its children.4 The church schools were helped because they were about the only people standing on the barren field; the Catholic schools were later also to receive funds. But by opting to subsidise church schools rather than create secular state ones, Parliament invested in a problem that Butler would still be grappling with more than a century later, for religious feeling ran high. Nonconformists bitterly opposed Anglican instruction in schools, as did Roman Catholics, and vice versa. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary in 1841, was to complain bitterly: ‘Religion, the Keystone of education, is in this country the bar to its progress.’5 For the various church societies – Church of England, Roman Catholic and the Nonconformists embracing various brands of Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and others – went to war.
What was taught and how it was taught was not yet remotely the business of the government. What was taught was heavily biased towards the Bible. How it was taught was in many schools the ‘monitorial’ system: one teacher taught the older pupils who in turn taught the younger ones. Andrew Bell, the driving force behind the National Society, a bitter rival to the Quaker Joseph Lancaster who was patron of the British and Foreign, said: ‘Give me twenty-four pupils today and I will give you twenty-four teachers tomorrow.’ In this way a hundred children could be ‘taught’ by one master.6
Slowly, amid passionate rows between the various churches about who should be aided, and between all of the churches and those few who favoured state education about whether the godless state even ‘had a right to educate’, government aid spread to books, equipment and teachers’ salaries. In 1839 the very first inspections carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools began. Scotland still had more universities than England (and proved better endowed in schooling also), but in 1825, in part because Nonconformists remained barred from Oxbridge (they were not admitted until the 1850s), London University was founded and 1833 saw the creation of the University of Durham.
Parliament’s interest grew and Royal Commissions on Oxbridge, the elementary schools, endowed schools and the nine public schools followed in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1867 working-class men in urban areas, where schooling was least good, gained the vote, and in 1870, W. E. Forster produced his Elementary Education Act – introducing the first state schooling at a time when an estimated 700,000 children aged between six and ten were in school but an estimated one million were not.7 Up to this point, as Derek Fraser nicely puts it, the only way to receive a state education was to be ‘a cadet, a felon or a pauper’ since the army, prison and workhouse did provide at least some schooling.8
Forster’s Act, landmark though it was, merely tried in his own words to ‘fill up the gaps’. ‘We must take care … not to destroy the existing system in introducing a new one.’9 It allowed school boards to be established in areas of clear need to provide elementary schools. The boards were financed by a mix of government grant and local rates and they were directly elected – the view having grown that a direct local interest in education was vital if progress was to be achieved. In this way, education became an interest of local government, although central government grants to the voluntary church schools continued. Schooling was still neither free (as it was already in the New England states of America) nor compulsory. The school boards could award free places, in Forster’s words, ‘to parents who they think really cannot afford to pay’ and with government approval could even establish free schools ‘under special circumstances’ – in effect, chiefly in the poorest areas of large towns. While hinting that he personally favoured free schooling, Forster argued the Treasury’s case that providing it for all would be ‘not only unnecessary but mischievous. Why should we relieve the parent from all payments for the education of his child … the enormous majority of them are able, and will continue to be able to pay these fees.’10 Parents were expected to find around a third of the cost of education. Subject in each case to parliamentary approval, the boards were also allowed to frame by-laws making