Nineteenth Century England: Education of Women

 In 1811 the first meeting of the National Society for the Promotion of the Education of the Poor in the principles of the established Church took place. This body went onto ensure that education in England had Christian input for the rest of the century and still exists today.

The first schools that had been set up for the poor were the Ragged schools. These originated in the Sunday School founded in 1780 by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, who taught children to read so that they could read the Bible. Then a Portsmouth cobbler, John Pounds, gathered groups of children to play with his disabled nephew, and by 1818 had a class of thirty or forty children who he was teaching to read from the Bible because it was the only book easily available. The idea spread to London. In 1844, 19 Ragged Schools joined to form a Ragged School Union, headed by Lord Shaftesbury. By 1861 they were teaching over forty thousand children in London, including the children of convicts, drunks and abusive step‐parents, and deserted orphans – and even ‘the children of poor Roman Catholics who do not object to their children reading the Bible’. By 1870 there were two hundred and fifty Ragged Schools in London and over one hundred in the provinces. Meanwhile Quintin Hogg, the ex‐Etonian son of a prosperous London merchant, had set up a Ragged School, just off the Strand in London, in 1863, when he was just eighteen years old. His pupils were the wildest and most destitute of the street children. Hogg persevered, and even set up a ‘doss house’ for homeless boys. One of his sisters was enlisted to run classes for girls, who were just as wild. The London Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster, can trace its origin to Quintin Hogg.

In 1833 the Government instigated sums of money to construct schools for poor children. Education was largely the preserve of the wealthy who could afford to employ women as governesses for their children. Boys were most frequently those children who received that education. In some cases poor women would set up what were known as “Dame Schools” for the education of children, often girls but these were rarely more than childcare and babysitting provision. The upper classes assumed that girls did not need education because they were expected to marry but in 1848 the Queens college was founded in Harley Street, London for the education of single women who gained a qualification that allowed them to become governesses. The Jews had been early in setting up education for children in England. The Jewish Free School opened in 1817 for the education of Jewish boys and went on to provide education for six hundred boys and half as many girls.

Boys’ schools were often funded by endowments. The Endowed Schools Act of 1869 provided that girls could also be included in the schools if it was considered “convenient”. Sometimes this route had enabled the funding of girls’ grammar schools, but in 1874 the Act was dismissed and did not become law. Many Boys’ Grammar Schools had never found it “convenient” to split their endowments and as a result the fruits of these were not shared to allow girls to participate.

The Compulsory Education Act of 1870 established boards to set up schools in places that did not have adequate provision and marked the start of state education. Many schools at this time were funded by the Church, due to the work of the National Society. This 1870 Act was called the Forster Act after its founder. In 1880 schooling became compulsory up to the age of ten years.

Does this feel like a country where in 2021 education is compulsory up until the age of eighteen and open to both boys and girls?

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