In 1843 the Committee of Council decided to make grants in aid of the erection of normal schools or training colleges Training-college grants. in connexion with the National Society and the British and Foreign School societies, thus marking the definite abandonment of the provision of training colleges to voluntary effort.
In 1846 an important step forwards was taken in the foundation of the pupil-teacher system. The regulations of this year inaugurated annual maintenance grants in the form of stipends for apprenticed pupil teachers receiving a Pupil-teacher system. prescribed course of instruction under the head teacher, and a lower grade of stipendiary monitors in schools where such instruction could not be provided. These regulations inaugurated the system of Queen’s Scholarships to assist pupil teachers to proceed to a training college; they also established capitation grants for the support of such colleges, and annual grants to elementary schools under government inspection of from £15 to £30 in aid of the salary of every trained teacher employed. Provision was at the same time made for retiring pensions to elementary teachers.
Down to 1847 state aid was confined to two religious categories of schools: those giving specifically Church of England teaching, and those in connexion with the British and Foreign School Society giving simple Bible teaching. To Extension of state aid to Wesleyans, Roman Catholics and Jews. facilitate the recognition of other denominational schools the Committee of Council in 1847 issued a minute dispensing schools not connected with the Established Church from inquiries concerning their religious condition, and in the same year state aid was extended to Wesleyan and Roman Catholic schools. The settlement of model trust deeds gave occasion for each of these two great religious bodies to negotiate a kind of concordat with respect to school management, and the Roman Catholic deed was only settled after a controversy, similar to that which had arisen with the National Society, as to the rights of ecclesiastical authority. Jewish schools received recognition in 1851 upon condition that the Scriptures of the Old Testament should be daily read in them.
During the middle years of the century various unsuccessful legislative attempts were made to establish a national system of elementary schools upon the basis of rate-aid. These attempts began with the education clauses of Sir Robert Bills of 1842-57. Peel’s Factory Bill of 1842, and were renewed in a series of bills from 1853 to 1857, of which one set was introduced by Lord John Russell on behalf of the Whig government, whilst a second was promoted by an organization called the Manchester and Salford Committee on Education, in the denominational interest, and a third set by an organization called the Lancashire (afterwards the National) Public Schools Association, in the secular interest. The only one of these attempts which calls for notice here is the bill introduced by Lord John Russell (called the Borough Bill, on account of its being restricted to municipal boroughs) in 1853, and forming part of a comprehensive scheme of legislative and administrative reform of which a portion was actually carried into effect. The bill as a measure for elementary education was supplemented by an administrative system of capitation grants for rural areas. The government scheme also comprised a measure dealing with the administration of charitable trusts (which took shape as the Charitable Trusts Act 1853), the constitution of the Department of Science and Art, and university reform upon the lines recommended by the Oxford and Cambridge commissions. The Borough Bill left it optional with municipalities to adopt the act. It provided for the appointment of a school committee, one half of whose members might be non-members of the council. The school committee was merely given power to assist existing voluntary schools out of the rates. No provision was made for public control beyond the requirement of audit; the sole condition as to religious instruction was the acceptance of a conscience clause.
The failure of the Borough Bill did not affect the new system of capitation grants which was introduced by minute of the Committee of Council dated April 2, 1853. These grants were fixed at a scale varying from 3s. to 6s. per head, Capitation grants. payable upon certain conditions, of which the most important were that the school must be under a certificated teacher, and that three-fourths of the children must pass a prescribed examination. In consequence of the failure of the several fresh bills introduced in 1855 by the government, the church party and the secular party respectively amplifying the proposals previously brought forward, the capitation grant was, by minute of January 26, 1856, extended to urban areas. As in the case of all the early grants, the regulations governing the distribution of the capitation grants were framed upon the principle that subventions of public money must be met by local funds derived from voluntary contributions, endowments and school fees; thus the basis of the denominational system as fostered by the state at this stage was one of financial partnership.
In 1856 a purely administrative bill was passed, establishing the office of vice-president of the Committee of Council Education minister, 1856. on Education as a minister responsible to parliament. At the same time, the Science and Art Department was transferred from the Board of Trade to the Committee of Council.
The progress of state-aided education during this period may be measured by the increase of the annual parliamentary grant, which rose from £30,000 in 1839 to £100,000 in 1846, £150,000 in 1851, £396,000 in 1855, and £663,400 in 1858. This expansion was viewed with misgiving Newcastle Commission. by the friends of the denominational system, and by the strong individualist school of that day, who upon wider grounds clung to the old ideal of voluntary initiative. These sections combined with the advocates of further state intervention to press for a commission of inquiry, and at the instance of Sir John Pakington (the eminent Conservative educationist who was responsible for the denominational bills of the ’fifties) a royal commission was appointed in 1858, under the chairmanship of the duke of Newcastle, to inquire into the state of popular education in England, and to consider and report what measures, if any, were required for the extension of sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of the people. The Report of the Newcastle Commission, issued in 1861, contains an exhaustive account of the existing condition of elementary education, and, with due allowance for the grave defects revealed, and in particular the glaring inefficiency of the numerous little private-venture schools kept by “dames” and others, the graphic picture drawn by the commissioners constitutes a striking tribute to the sterling qualities of self-help and religious earnestness which were so characteristic of the early Victorian period. It was found that in round numbers about 2,500,000 children were attending day schools, the proportion to population being 1 in 7, as compared with 1 in 9 in France, 1 in 8 in Holland, and 1 in 6 in Prussia, where education was compulsory. On the other hand, of this number only 1,675,000 were in public schools of all kinds, only 1,100,000 in schools liable to inspection, and 917,000 in schools receiving annual grant. The result was that only one child in every twenty was attending a school whose efficiency could be in any way guaranteed by the state. In the constructive portion of their work the comments and recommendations of the commissioners reflected the prevailing perplexity of the public mind. A consistent individualistic minority considered that the annual grant should be withdrawn altogether, and that any further state aid should be confined to building grants, which they would concede not as desirable in themselves but as necessitated out of considerations of fairness to the parishes that had not yet received such aid. The commissioners as a body rejected free and compulsory education in view of the religious difficulty and upon general grounds of individualistic principle. Of the religious difficulty itself the commissioners had some wise words to say which hold good in substance at the present time. In their judgment the considerable evidence they had amassed conclusively proved that the religious difficulty originated with the managers, promoters and organizers of the schools, and not with the parents themselves; yet the indifferent or comparatively passive attitude of the people nowise materially diminished the practical difficulty of introducing a comprehensive system, since it was not with the body of the people but with the founders and supporters of schools that legislators would always have to deal. In view of the solution adopted in 1902 it is of interest to note that the Newcastle Commissioners deliberately rejected the parish as unfit to be taken as the unit of elementary education upon the ground that management by parochial ratepayers must tend to be illiberal and niggardly, bent upon economy of the rates to the detriment of educational interests; accordingly they recommended the constitution of county boards (which in the absence of elective councils must needs originate with quarter sessions) clothed with power to levy a rate for the aid of existing voluntary schools.
The one definite achievement of the Newcastle Commission was the famous system of payment by results, which may be said to have excited a keener and more prolonged controversy than any other measure of a purely Payment by results. educational character. Impressed by the defects of the existing teaching, the commissioners reported that there was only one way of securing efficiency, and that was to institute a searching examination by competent authority of every child in every school to which grants were to be paid, with the view of ascertaining whether the indispensable elements of knowledge were thoroughly acquired, and to make the prospects and position of the teacher dependent to a considerable extent upon the results of this examination. Thus the commissioners hoped to counteract what appeared to them to be the crying defect of the existing training college system, viz. that it tended mainly to adapt the young schoolmaster to advance his higher, rather than to thoroughly ground his junior, pupils. They recognized that to raise the character of the children, both morally and intellectually, was and must always be the highest aim of education, and they were far from desiring to supersede this by any plan of a mere examination into the more mechanical work of elementary education, the reading, writing and arithmetic of young children; but they thought that the importance of this training, which must be the foundation of all other teaching, had been lost sight of, and that there was justice in the common complaint that while a fourth of the scholars were really taught, three-fourths after leaving school forgot everything they had learnt there.
Mr Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) as vice-president of the Committee of Council (1859-1864) adopted the system of payment by results in what became famous in history as the Revised Code, issued in 1862 and so called because it was a revision Revised Code. of the minutes and regulations of the Committee of Council, which were first collected and issued in the form of a code in 1860. The Revised Code provided for the payment of a grant of 4s. upon the old principle and a further grant of not more than 8s. upon the result of examination. Mr Lowe declared of the system in the House of Commons that “if it was costly it should at least be efficient; and if it was inefficient it should at least be cheap.” In fact, it proved to be cheap; the giant fell from £813,400 in 1861 to £636,800 in 1865. The upholders of the existing system denounced the Revised Code as an undeserved slight upon the voluntary managers, and even as a breach of faith with the great religious denominations. On purely educational grounds, which need not be here re-capitulated, it was at once viewed with misgiving by many authorities, including Matthew Arnold. To meet objections, some modifications were introduced in the code under the Conservative government in 1867. The system of paying grant upon the result of individual examination of the scholars was not finally abolished till 1904.
The years immediately preceding 1870 were occupied with discussion and preparation for the great legislative measure for which the time was now felt to have arrived. Good work was done in this direction by the Select Committee Proceedings preliminary to the act of 1870. of the House of Commons in 1866, over which Sir John Pakington presided. For reasons connected with the political situation of the moment this committee never reported, but the minutes of evidence and the draft report prepared by Sir John Pakington contained much valuable material in the way of criticism of the existing system and suggestion for the coming settlement; in particular the draft report insisted upon the inevitableness of an education rate. In 1868 the Conservative government brought in, but did not proceed with, an education bill deliberately discarding the principle of rate-aid on the ground that it would destroy voluntary contributions and gradually starve out the denominational schools. In 1867 and again in 1868 Mr Bruce (afterwards Lord Aberdare), Mr W.E. Forster and Mr Algernon Egerton introduced a bill which formed the basis of the measure of 1870. As redrafted in 1868 the bill of Mr Bruce and his coadjutors proposed a universal system of municipal and parochial rating with liberty for voluntary schools to unite themselves to the rate-aided system under their existing management, subject to the acceptance of a conscience clause. The bill also proposed to empower town councils to co-opt outsiders upon their education committees. Thus both in the principle of co-optation and in the extension of rate aid to schools not under public control the bill of these Liberal statesmen in 1868 anticipated certain controverted features of Mr Balfour’s Education Act of 1902. In the meantime, in the country the Education League, originated at Birmingham, was carrying on a propaganda in favour of free secular schools, whilst the Education Union, formed to counteract the influence of the league, urged a settlement upon the old lines. As a concession to the popular feeling against secularism, the league proposed to allow Bible reading without doctrinal exposition. Thus opinion was sufficiently focussed to enable Mr Gladstone’s administration in 1870 to undertake the comprehensive measure of educational reform for which the country had had to wait so long.