High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  London and some other large towns did have school boards. They had caused an increase in attendance of 53 per cent on average: but in Birmingham the increase had been 94 per cent, in Hull 99 per cent and in Sheffield 120 per cent.49 Dixon wished boards to compel children not in work to go to school, just as those who wished to work were made to do as a condition of being allowed to work. Also, he could not understand why the recognition by towns that education should be more widespread was not shared by the countryside. He conceded that in certain villages a combination of the squire and the parson ensured that an excellent standard of education was provided: but he feared that many MPs, knowing that in their own areas there were such public-spirited men, imagined they were everywhere. Dixon asserted that ‘thousands’ of villages were ‘very backward indeed’, and it was on behalf of these ‘backward districts’ that he urged the Commons to pass the bill.50 The backward districts were the ones that contained the highest proportion of agricultural labourers; and he argued that only a system of school boards would ensure that parents in those districts sent their children to school. The other advantage that boards, provided they had a modicum of State funding, would have is that they could take over voluntary – mainly Church – schools where those schools were underfunded and failing. The Church itself admitted that in some areas this was so.

  Dixon’s opponents argued that compulsion should come from government action, not after a private member’s bill. It was also felt that ratepayers in areas that did not need school boards would be punished financially. Also, education seemed – if numbers were any guide – to be doing well without compulsion. In the last year before the passing of the 1870 Education Act there had been 7,845 schools, accommodating 1,765,000 pupils, and an average attendance of 1,062,000. In 1874, once the 1870 Act had had time to allow the building of schools in areas short of them, the number had grown to 12,167 and the accommodation provided to 2,871,000, with an average attendance of 1,678,000. However, of this increased number of schools just 838 were run by school boards, offering 245,000 places. Of these only 131,000 on average were taken each day, despite the boards having the power to pass by-laws to enforce compulsion. Hence, it was argued the system did not work.51

  One opponent, John Scourfield, the MP for Pembrokeshire, described compulsion as ‘un-English’, and as inflicting a ‘heavy cost’ upon the public – inspectors were paid between £80 and £100 a year, and there would need to be more. However, the facts continued to suggest that education was failing. It was estimated that 3 million children were of an age when they ought to be in schools, against the 1,678,000 who actually turned up. Switzerland had one-eleventh of the population of England, but twice as many pupils passed the sixth standard examination. Another speaker accused Dixon of ‘fanaticism’, saying he should be content with the ‘experiment’ of 1870, which was delivering ‘progress’ without compulsion.52 It was also not clear how compulsion would work: though the example of a separate law passed for Scotland in 1872, under which parents had been summonsed for not sending their children to school, had proved successful once parents began to be convicted.

  However Viscount Sandon, who as vice-president of the Council was the minister responsible, refused to commit the government, saying the law in Scotland had not been in operation long enough for any sound conclusions to be drawn from it. Nor was he sure the higher attendances in urban areas could be attributed to the boards in those areas, but rather to ‘enormous’ additional expenditure by the voluntary sector.53 He also felt denominational schools had an interest in compulsion less connected with the expansion of knowledge but more with raising extra money, since compulsory attendance would result in more parents paying fees. He said that of the 515 boards formed between May 1874 and May 1875, only ten had passed a by-law to enforce compulsion: so the link between boards and compulsion did not seem essential.54 Compulsion, he said, would also mean those school boards able to regulate education without compulsion would be made to enforce it. He was criticised by Forster, who reiterated Dixon’s point that urban children were being directed towards an elementary education, while rural ones were not.

  The government itself sought, in part, to address this problem in 1876. Attendances at schools, whether in urban or rural areas, had increased since 1870 but were still poor: of the 614,670 children estimated to live in London, only 288,497 had attended during the previous half-year. Sandon introduced a bill on 18 May 1876 to assist attendance, and suggested – not entirely successfully – that something so important to the working classes and the employers of Britain as improving education should not be a party political matter. Two separate commissions had investigated the work done by children in factories and on the land – the principal causes of non-attendance at school. The government proposed to legislate on the basis of their findings. Sandon asserted that it was ‘the determined and final and settled wish of the whole country’ that ‘no child in the country should hereafter enter on the struggle of life without having those simple tools needed by our present civilization to enable him to work his way hereafter’.55 He argued that society would no longer tolerate ‘gross ignorance’ – even the landowners and farmers who benefited so much from the child labour that helped provide their incomes.

  The government was now giving £1 million a year for education. A similar amount was raised annually in fees; and £660,000 came from the voluntary sector. As a result, places were provided for 3,150,000 children in elementary schools, and 100,000 in what Sandon called ‘private adventure schools’, which were of an appallingly low standard and outside State inspection. This meant that 1,450,000 children who ought to be at school still were not attending. If ‘all talent and merit should have an opportunity of rising’, which Sandon said had been a doctrine of the country since after the Reformation, more had to be done.56 But even children of no talent required a basic schooling. This, he reminded the House, had been the stated desire of Liberals such as Lowe and Radicals such as Bright.

  The half-time system, which applied to factory children between ten and twelve, already enforced an element of compulsion, and Scotland had its legal powers. Children could only work on the land if they could produce a certificate of attendance at school. There was a mass of different regulations depending on the trade in which a child worked, and they neither protected the interests of children nor ensured a decent basic education. Some school boards had enforced compulsion, but this was only in areas with no voluntary schools. Sandon feared universal compulsion enforced by the State would bring an end to the voluntary sector. He proposed instead a certificate of education without which no child could work: and since it was usually in the parents’ interest that the child did work, they would be motivated to ensure attendance. There would be certain well-defined exemptions at harvest time.

  One reason why the government would still not contemplate direct compulsion was that it feared confrontation with employers, landowners and, perhaps worst of all, Nonconformists. The age at which children could work, and when they would need the certificate, would be ten; and local authorities would enforce this power. Parents who refused to comply would be punished by law: as would those who allowed their ‘wastrel’ children, over the age of ten, to idle about, neither in school nor in work, robbing orchards and poaching. Such children might be ordered to an industrial school – a forerunner of the approved school, with arduous work and severe discipline. Lyon Playfair attacked that last proposal, saying such action would punish the child when the State ought to be punishing the parent. ‘The industrial school’, he said, ‘was really a prison where children on the verge of crime were detained; and would the interests of education, which people should be led to regard as a good and worthy thing, be served by associating these children with others on the verge of crime?’57

  Forster congratulated the government on preventing children younger than ten working: but he could not see why children whose parents neglected their education should, for want of the requisite certificate, be forbidden
from working between the ages of ten and thirteen, and left in a destructive idleness through no fault of their own. Sandon said that the local authority, whose responsibility it was to detect when children were not attending school, would provide for such victims of neglect: so such cases should not arise. Poor districts would be given extra resources. In the desire to raise school attendance, the State would have to requisition, in some cases, the role of parent.

  Liberals welcomed this: but could not see why there could not be clear, centralised, universal compulsion. In a sign of how far the civilising process was moving on, there were requests for better provision for blind, deaf and dumb children. There were still representatives of the landed interest who argued against restricting child labour in the fields, given the concentration of effort required at harvest time. One, Clare Read, the Conservative MP for South Norfolk, said the notion of half-time in factories was one thing: but in agriculture it was, he said, ‘simply preposterous and ridiculous’.58

  At the bill’s second reading on 15 June Mundella, who would have Sandon’s job when the Liberals returned to power in 1880, launched a demand for universal school boards. He threw back at Sandon his admission that there were ‘millions of children in the country who did not attend school at all.’59 Those children were in areas without school boards – areas where the voluntary sector had, before 1870, supplied enough places for all the local children. School boards, with their powers of compulsion, ensured most children in their districts went to school. The various Labour Acts regulating factory and agricultural work had achieved nothing but confusion: a system of boards would be far preferable. The regulations under the Acts for attendance at school were inadequate, and the standards achieved by children subject to them derisory. The commission that had inspected the factories, and the education of children there, had said there should be education between the ages of five and thirteen, and at least five hours a day, with half-time attendance only allowed to children in permanent employment over the age of ten. The government appeared to be diluting this.

  ‘Why’, Mundella asked, ‘should the cities and towns of England have a good system of education while the rural districts had a bad one? The opposition to compulsion did not proceed from the artisans or the agricultural labourers.’60 Education had become ‘a great public necessity’. The damage caused by ignorance was everywhere apparent. British workers, through lack of education, were increasingly unable to compete with those from other advanced nations. The country’s moral character left much to be desired. The franchise had been extended, and ‘in time the agricultural labourer would be in possession of it, and that being so, it became the duty of the State to see that he was so far educated as to understand the value of the right which he possessed.’ Liberals such as Mundella were not prepared to quibble about expense. The richest nation in the world contributed relatively little to education compared with other powers, notably America, and much of what was spent came from the Church rather than the taxpayer. The government was happy to spend money on ironclads and new rifles for the Army: it was less enthusiastic about educating, to a basic level, all its children. Mundella might have added that, at the same time, a bill was speeding through Parliament to punish severe cruelty to animals: which seemed to have a higher priority, and provoke more unanimity, than of that to children.

  The religious question came back, as always. While the argument for boards had been forcefully made, some Liberals promised they would insist, on their party being returned to office, on the establishment of at least one non-sectarian school under every board. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics would risk, otherwise, having their children driven into Anglican schools. Towns required compulsion, which was possible under school board by-laws: in the country things were very different. As so often before, religious bigotries were going to impede all children, urban or rural, getting the education they needed.

  The problem with the type of bill Sandon had introduced, with its attempts not to aggrieve religious groups or to upset more than necessary the agricultural interest to which his party was so wedded, was that the means of achieving all these things was excessively bureaucratic. There were grave concerns about who would award the certificates to permit children to work legitimately: if it were left up to schoolmasters, there was scope for abuse. If it were entrusted to local authorities, it would simply add to the burdens on them: a burden that could be avoided by straightforward compulsion. The Workshop Act, the Mines Act and the Factory Acts all set out how many hours children should go to school: would this bill override them, or simply conflict with them? That problem, too, could be solved by straightforward compulsion. James Kay-Shuttleworth, to whom opinion in the House deferred on educational questions, lamented the ‘weak, half-hearted and inefficient Bill’ before them, rendered so by the attempt not to upset the Nonconformists and the agricultural landlords.61

  Despite Sandon’s entreaties, the discussion became nakedly partisan. The Conservatives admitted its defects: but they argued that it was trying to extend the scope of the 1870 Act, which the Liberals were in no position to criticise because of its own shortcomings. There were concerns that children who did not qualify for an attendance certificate because of feckless parents would suffer because they could not work, and contribute to the family income, and therefore would be half-starved as a result. Also, as one Irish MP put it, ‘compulsory education would in many instances amount to religious persecution’.62 It would allow the Church to spread its doctrines in a way that was improper and unfair. However, the commissioners who had looked at the problem had recommended direct compulsion: why did Parliament not want to carry out the recommendation? Compulsion, where it was enforced, was expensive: the court procedures entailed meant it cost 7 guineas to get a child to school, and in areas where there was mass non-attendance, the bureaucracy was unequal to the problem.

  Forster himself, who had had to handle the Nonconformists with care in 1870, now from the luxury of opposition said that direct compulsion was essential. Sandon could not agree with him: ‘No doubt a great evil was to be met, but to say to every poor man that his children were, under all circumstances, to attend school every day would be a bad and undesirable thing.’63 This marked out the division between the state of Conservative and the state of Liberal opinion on the question of whether children should be forced to go to school. The Liberals were now, six years after Forster’s Act, unequivocal in support of the notion of the State intervening in this way: the Conservatives could only see their way to a form of compulsion by the back door, and by providing an indirect pecuniary incentive to the lower classes to send their children to school, in the alleged interest of encouraging parental responsibility for their children.

  A main obstacle to compulsion was the primitive, labour intensiveness of agriculture, hop-picking, fruit-picking and so on. However, there was to the end deep opposition on religious grounds. Henry Richard, the Nonconformist MP for Merthyr Tydfil, described it as ‘the worst Bill, the most unjust, the most reactionary, the most tyrannical in spirit, that has been brought before Parliament since Lord Bolingbroke proposed his Schism Bill in the reign of Queen Anne.’64 He protested that ‘the attempt to make national education sectarian is an absurdity and a contradiction in terms, and that it is impossible to have a denominational system imposed upon the people with adequate securities for the rights of conscience.’ The offending clause in the 1870 Act – which allowed school boards to pay the fees of poor children, using ratepayers’ money – would be repealed, and the payment of fees for the poor handed over to the local boards of guardians. Religious views would not be considered; which was a large part of the problem. Yet again, a bill had failed to separate secular instruction for all from religious instruction to be given elsewhere. Nothing had changed since 1870. The government had, however, succeeded in making it more attractive for parents to send their children to school where they were not already compelled to do so.

  VI

  Because compulsory attendan
ce at school had still not been agreed, it remained possible for employers to deploy child labour in a fashion that offended the increasingly progressive values of Parliament and the general public. The Factory Act of 1878 sought to address this, by compulsion rather than by permissive legislation, consolidating earlier laws, and acting on recommendations of a Royal Commission of 1876. The programme of regulating industry since 1833 had been piecemeal, with fifteen Acts of Parliament in force by 1878 to deal with various trades – such as agriculture, coal mines, ore mines, textile mills, bleach and dye works, ironworks, paper works and so on. Small manufacturers with fewer than fifty hands came under the Workshops Regulation Act of 1870. The mass of regulation created not just inequalities in the workplace, but a bureaucratic nightmare of enforcement. There were special problems with children, and numerous loopholes that allowed them to be exploited still: the hours a child could work, or should spend at school, would depend on which trade it worked in. A child in the mines could work full-time at twelve; in textiles it was fourteen; in agriculture there was no limit of age. The provisions of the 1876 Education Act addressed some, but not all, anomalies.

  There was another, more fundamental problem. Many children could not meet the prescribed educational standard at the age of thirteen; they stopped going to school but could not work full-time, and so were idling. At one of the largest woollen mills in the West Riding 62 per cent of the children were unable to reach the standard that would allow them to work under age: their enforced idleness cost their families an estimated £11 or £12 per child per year. The country was in an economic depression; such loss of earnings was hard for many families. The factory laws were absurd: educational privileges were allowed to people in some trades that were barred in others. Sanitary rules varied from factory to factory. Safety rules were far more stringent in one dangerous trade than in another equally dangerous. The Factory Inspectors knew the arrangements were ridiculous, and urged the government to standardise the regulations across industry. However, the Royal Commission dismissed the need for uniformity, since industry itself did not demand it.