Education

After the blunders of the Crimean War (1853-1856), the key words were efficiency and accountability.

The first public exams were set in 1853 and with the annual grant to voluntary church schools running at half a million pounds the Government asked the Duke of Newcastle to do some quality control. His commission recommended pegging school grants, including teachers’ salaries, to test results. Government approved; teachers did not.

Scotland was reeling from the acrimonious split between ecclesiastical radicals and moderates known as the Great Disruption. This hit Scotland’s successful parish schools, which were already having difficulty adjusting to life in industrial areas. The Scottish 1861 census asked about school attendance among 5-15 year-olds. Excluding schools closed so children could help on the farm, 457,000 were recorded as at school; at 15% of the population this was on a par with the 15.6% listed as “scholar” in England and Wales.

After the success of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) Lord Clarendon’s commission set out in 1861 to see if public schools were really roasting fags over the common room fire. Equally fiery was the debate about religion and science in schools stirred up by Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859).

The must-read, though, was Samuel Smiles’s self- improvement through hard work manual, Self-Help (1859). Get educated and earn the vote seemed to be the message for working men and in 1861 Gladstone repealed the duty on paper, that monstrous “tax on knowledge”, to help them do it. Women, however, still had a long wait for both equal schooling and the vote.

Sean Lang