In theory, the new, non-denominational state schools were to complement the church ones, which in return for their grant now had to allow parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction. This was an attempt to settle the religious issue. In practice, as Harry Judge put it, ‘in many places the parson and the school board glowered at one another, and fought for pupils and resources’.11 A dual educational system, which duelled, had been created.
Meanwhile the public schools were expanding rapidly, catering for a growing middle class at a time of rapid economic expansion. Their ethos was stamped on them by Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1827 to 1841. Correlli Barnett in The Audit of War, his assault on the causes of Britain’s post-war decline, writes that Arnold:
through the medium of disciples who went on from Rugby to become leading figures in other public schools … was more responsible than any other single person for the nature of later Victorian élite education and the character both of the revamped ancient public schools and all the numerous new ones that opened between 1840 and 1900 to cater for the swelling middle classes.12
That character was hierarchical, games-playing, privileged, classics-based, robust Christianity. The Clarendon Royal Commission on the public schools in 1864 complained that natural science was ‘practically excluded’ and that their education was thus ‘narrower than it was three centuries ago’; this exclusion was ‘a plain defect and great practical evil’.13 Barnett argues that these public school attitudes transferred into the ‘liberal’ education of Oxford and Cambridge, based on ‘Greats’: mathematics, classics and philosophy. Not for them science, technology, the creation of wealth. The universities, John Stuart Mill said in 1867, ‘are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.’14
Thus, Barnett argues, the combined impact in the mid-nineteenth century of the public schools and Oxbridge was that:
Henceforward the British governing élite was to be composed of essay-writers rather than problem-solvers – minds judicious, balanced and cautious rather than operational and engaged; the temperament of the academic rather than the man of action. Moreover this was to be an élite aloof from the ferocious struggle for survival going on in the world’s market place; more at home in a club or senior common room than a factory.15
Or, as Peter Hennessy has put it, the public schools’ ‘mid-nineteenth-century role has been depicted as doubly malign by continuing to misshape an old aristocracy based on blood and land while absorbing and equally deforming a new aristocracy sired by the sweat and money of the men who made Britain’s and the world’s first industrial revolution.’16
If that was what was happening to the elite, life was infinitely worse at the other end of the social scale. Another Royal Commission, this time on technical instruction, toured Europe to report in 1884 that schooling in Germany was ‘over-whelmingly superior … the dense ignorance so common among workmen in England is unknown.’ They added: ‘Your commissioners cannot repeat too often that they have been impressed with the general intelligence and technical knowledge of the masters and managers of industrial establishments on the Continent.’17
As education was being studied, local government was being reformed and to answer these concerns in 1889 the newly created counties and county boroughs were empowered to provide technical education. By coincidence in 1890 a new tax on spirits was introduced. In one of the rare examples of the Treasury agreeing to an earmarked tax, it was persuaded to hand the proceeds over to the county schools. ‘Whisky money’ started to help finance secondary education. Meanwhile, in part as a result of the great burst of Victorian philanthropy, colleges that would become the redbrick universities of the great cities were being founded in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds, and in 1889 they received their first government grant, totalling £15,000.18
By the 1890s, however, the voluntary church-based schools were once again in financial difficulties. Because the board schools had access both to the rates and to government grants, the quality as well as the quantity of the education they provided was outstripping that of the church schools. Approaching half of the under-elevens were now in board rather than church schools and the boards had started to invest in post-eleven-year-old education.
Robert Morant, a young civil servant of the type it is doubtful that the service could tolerate today, believed Britain faced ‘an educational emergency’ and determined to sort out the ragged patchwork of provision. He was another friend of the Webbs and another product of Toynbee Hall. A former tutor to the royal princes of Siam, he became known in Whitehall as a ‘magnificent hustler’. The difficulty was how to get his political masters to act. On Boxing Day 1898 he quietly slipped into his office for a clandestine meeting to persuade a London County Council official to bring a test case over whether school boards could legally fund secondary education under the 1870 Act.19 The auditor ruled they could not: it was unlawful for a school board to fund anything other than elementary education. Politically, however, the demand for secondary education was such that it could not be halted. So by this conspiratorial sleight of hand Morant, of whom it was said, ‘he was not unprincipled but he was unscrupulous’,20 got what he wanted – reform.
Arthur Balfour’s 1902 Education Act created a Board of Education to replace the sub-committee of the Privy Council through which since 1833 money had been channelled to education, and a government minister was appointed as its President. The 2500 elected school boards were amalgamated into local education authorities which in turn became a full part of local government. They were given powers to fund education ‘other than elementary’. Secondary and technical education could thus be provided, along with teacher training colleges. But the Act also ended central government grants to both the state and voluntary schools. The church schools would now receive their grants for current spending (they were to be entirely responsible for their own capital spending) from local government in return for one-third of the seats on their governing bodies.
The result was another explosion of sectarian religious feeling. There were bitter and opposing protests about ‘Rome’ and ‘Canterbury’ ‘on the Rates’, while some Nonconformists went wild. In Wales they threatened passive resistance and withheld their rates.21 The Liberals exploited these divisions with ‘splenetic fury’ as a means of uniting their own supporters and the issue contributed to the Liberal landslide victory over the Tories in 1906. It was the election that first made Winston Churchill a minister and was a lesson he would never forget. The Act, however, produced ‘a surge forward in secondary education comparable with that in elementary education after 1870’. External examinations were developed. County and county borough secondary schools grew apace along with the independent grammar schools, many of which became direct grant schools after 1907 when grants from the Board of Education were offered in return for a quota of 25 per cent free places.
In 1916, Lloyd George sent the European historian H. A. L. Fisher to Education and the 1918 Education Act finally abolished fees in elementary schools, raised the school leaving age to fourteen, and ensured that not less than half the cost of education was met from central government funds. Legislation allowing twelve- to fourteen-year-olds to work part-time in factories was repealed. Much of the education up to fourteen, however, was still in elementary schools, not in the secondaries or grammars. And Fisher’s grander vision – allowing, but not compelling, local authorities to develop nursery schools and ‘day-continuation schools’ in which fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds would spend eight hours a week for forty weeks of the year – largely fell to the Geddes axe of 1922 which cut educational spending by about one-third. The mid-1930s economic crisis saw free scholarships to the selective secondary schools replaced by means-tested ‘special places’, although popularly these remained known as scholarships. While provision over the two decades did indeed grow, and various brave attempts to alter the shape of education were made, the effect of the economic blizzards was ‘to freeze the educational