The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The trade unions played their patriotic part. No one should have been surprised. A year before the war began, the TUC had been offered a real opportunity to contribute to a syndicalist victory. In Dublin, members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, under the leadership of Jim Larkin, were in dispute with the Dublin Municipal Tramways. Strike followed lock-out. After almost eight months, Larkin asked the British TUC for help – specifying that his greatest need was ‘sympathy strikes’, the syndicalist prescription for overcoming the power of the capitalist classes. Larkin was not the sort of man with whom the TUC did business. He was a friend of James Connolly and Maud Gonne and he believed in his own sort of Irish Home Rule – a workers’ republic. The TUC donated £60,000, not to finance the strike, but to the fund which had been set up to alleviate hardship among the strikers’ families. Not least because of the wisdom of the Liberal government, the British trade unions and the Labour Party which they created had become implacably moderate.

  *After Balfour’s defeat in 1906, the Liberal government chose to publish Marshall’s essay as a White Paper.

  CHAPTER 12

  Useful Members of the Community

  The Education Act of 1870 – although extolled in history as the great achievement of Mr Gladstone’s first administration – had left the English schools system in general confusion and, in some areas, actual chaos. It certainly increased the number of children in primary education – though not to the extent that was suggested by W. E. Forster, the author of the Act, who both overestimated the size of the improvement which it brought about and the number of children who had received no education before it passed into law.1 The Forster Act was accepted as proposing a feasible change to the pattern of English education because, even before it was passed, a majority of children were already spending four or five years in the local state school. It failed in its aim to give every child the same start in life – with five or six years of primary education – because it spread the governance and management of schools too wide.

  Legislation based on the experience of another country should always take into account the difference in national circumstances. The 1870 Education Act was inspired by the success – both military and economic – of Prussia. The English Establishment retained the belief that Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. The needs of that sort of school had been met with the Public Schools’ Act of 1868 and the Endowed Schools Act of 1869. But the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had been won in Bismarck’s elementary schools, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 made it impossible for even the most myopic British observer not to recognise the strength which comes from a universally educated people.

  As a result, England followed Germany’s example in 1870 and Scotland did the same in 1872. But both nations had to overcome obstacles which Bismarck did not face: the churches – which ever since the Middle Ages had provided what education there was – were not prepared to abandon their ancient authority, and all the government dared to do was provide state ‘maintained’ schools where religious ‘voluntary’ schools did not exist.

  The churches had been less provident than they claimed. The distribution of schools – and their very existence in some parts of England – depended on the strength of Anglican, Nonconformist or Catholic presence in an area. Even then, the quality of the provision varied with the enthusiasm of the local rector, minister or priest. The government provided minimal aid. Grants depended on matching funds being raised locally, levels of attendance and attainment, and the number of qualified teachers on the staff. As a result, only half the parishes of England had government-aided schools2 and the provision in Scotland was even worse. In the Western Isles only 15 per cent of schools qualified for grants.3 The charitable organisations chose (and often had no choice but) to send the children of the poor to private schools. In 1851, 700 teachers in private schools could not fill in the census because they could not sign their names.

  The Act of 1870, intended to fill the gaps that the churches had left, certainly spawned dozens of new schools. It also provided further management in a form which appeared to have been designed to maximise complications and minimise efficiency. The 2,500 school boards which were created were wildly different in size. In remote rural areas the responsibility might be for no more than two schools. The London School Board managed 1,500 and employed 13,500 teachers. The voluntary schools in England and Wales often resented (and sometimes felt threatened by) the secular alternative. In Leeds, Manchester, Salford and Sheffield, representatives of the churches took over the boards, kept the maintained schools short of funds and used government grants ‘for the education of indigent children’ to subsidise their own voluntary alternative.4 In other parts of the country, secularists blocked attempts by the churches to do more and better. Although some boards were indisputably excellent, creating ‘special’, residential, ‘truant’ and ‘higher grade’ schools, the results of the 1870 Act were simultaneously a triumph and a disappointment.

  After 1870, whenever ‘efficiency managed’ voluntary schools did not meet the needs of a whole parish, locally elected school boards were empowered to set up ‘maintained’ schools in which religious instruction was required by law to be non-denominational. The boards could compel attendance and, by 1873, 40 per cent of the population lived in a school board area where it was compulsory. In some rural areas landowners, who dominated the boards, were not convinced that farm labourers needed even elementary education. In 1876, compulsion was extended but, as the years wore on, no serious educationalist thought that the 1870 Act provided a system which would meet the needs of the twentieth century.

  Ironically, dissatisfaction with the way in which the 1870 Act worked came to a head as a result of attempts to improve it. By 1889 the pressure for English and Welsh maintained schools to provide free education – intensified by the Scottish Local Government Act which enabled local authorities north of the border to make grants which replaced school fees – had become irresistible. The voluntary (church) schools immediately complained that their natural pool of pupils was being diverted into the secular, or at least the non-denominational, sector. Maintained schools, they complained, would be able to finance a better quality of education free of charge.

  In 1891 the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, addressing Tory MPs in the Carlton Club, persuaded his followers that government grants should be paid to all schools – even though that would inevitably involve some government influence on the quality of the teaching as well as the buildings. His argument was part political, part principle. If the Liberal Party ‘should obtain a majority in a future parliament they would deal with the issue [of free education] in such a manner that voluntary schools would be swept away’.5 The 1891 Act abolished fees in all elementary schools, but the voluntary schools remained at a disadvantage. Maintained schools could invest far more in their buildings and staff than the churches could afford to finance. The fear was that the standard of voluntary school teaching would become so obviously inferior that many of them would be forced to close.

  There were, in 1900, 14,359 voluntary schools in England and Wales, with 2,486,597 pupils on their rolls. Within that total, 11,777 were Anglican (with 1,885,802 pupils) and 1,045 Roman Catholic (with 255,030 pupils). The ties between the Established Church and the Tory Party were close and constant. In 1895, Arthur Balfour – even then the heir presumptive to the Conservative Leadership – had promised that, if he was elected to government, he would do his best to protect the interests and guarantee the continued existence of church schools.

  The great reorganisation that he accomplished – and which set the pattern of school administration for the next hundred years – has become, according to the conventional histories, one of the fortuitous products of party politics – government responding to the demands of its traditional supporters. Certainly the political imperative provided the stimulus to quick action. But there were ministers – and professional educationalists – who knew that the education system in E
ngland and Wales was, irrespective of the demands of the Established Church, in urgent need of overhaul. Fortunately Arthur Balfour was among them.

  In 1895, a Royal Commission under the Chairmanship of Sir James Bryce – scholar, lawyer and Liberal MP – had reported on the state of secondary education. It had concluded that development of schools policy had been ‘neither continuous nor coherent’6 and that, in consequence, the ‘first problems to be solved’ must be ‘those of organisation’. The first need was ‘greater unity of control’. That could only be achieved by a ‘local authority’. Since some central direction would be necessary, there ‘should also be a central authority’.7 The Commission therefore recommended the creation of a distinct and autonomous education ministry under the control of a Cabinet minister. ‘Local authorities’ – county councils, county boroughs and other boroughs with more than 50,000 inhabitants – should set up Local Education Authorities which would be responsible for all matters of administration in every state school in its area of jurisdiction. Inevitably this call for a new system of education administration covered the management of all schools – elementary and technical as well as secondary.

  Passionate voices were raised in opposition. The Bishop of London feared that the tighter organisation of schools policy would ‘politicise’ education. He conceded: ‘There are some advantages, no doubt’, but went on to say, ‘The disadvantages are obvious enough, namely that you let in upon education (which ought to be a steady thing) all the fluctuations of party politics. The advantage of not having education under Parliament is, of course, that it ought to be independent of all those fluctuations of opinion.’8

  A unified Education Ministry was set up in 1900 by the amalgamation of the old Education and Science and Art Departments of the Privy Council with the division of the Charity Commission which supervised endowed schools. It was to take responsibility for the elementary schools (1870 Act), Technical Schools (1889 Act), Voluntary Schools (1897 Act) and whatever development of secondary schools followed the Bryce Commission’s Report. There – in a state of complacent chaos – it might have remained had it not been for the vision of Arthur Balfour and the determination of one Robert Morant, a dedicated, indeed some would say obsessive, civil servant. The two men’s endeavours were assisted by a happy chance which enabled them to seize the moment and revolutionise the organisation of schools in England and Wales.

  The new Education Department was briefly headed by the Duke of Devonshire who – as Lord President of the Council – had previously been responsible for all those aspects of government which were not supervised by a specific ministry. The Vice President, John Gorst, MP, was soon to take over – though his reign was cut short by the eventual acceptance that his abrasive personality was not suited to the delicate work of reconciling diametrically conflicting interests. But the real tension within the department – unusually creative, as it turned out – was between full-time officials.

  The permanent secretary was Sir George Kekewich, a gentle civil servant who – although he had fought hard and successfully to replace the ‘payment-by-result system’ with an agreed teachers’ salary – was not tough enough to stand up to Gorst. In consequence he was blamed for all failures of policy, including the abortive bill of 1896 which was supposed to resolve the dispute between ‘maintained’ and ‘voluntary’ schools but proved unacceptable to each strand of religious opinion represented in the House of Commons. The effective deputy secretary was Michael Ernest Sadler, whose official title was Director of Special Enquiries and Reports – the Education Department’s research branch. Sadler spent a great deal of his time visiting other countries to see what he could learn from their schools. He persuaded Kekewich that the research department needed a deputy director. R. L. Morant, educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford – and sometime tutor to the Crown Prince of Siam – was appointed to the new post.

  Morant became convinced, from evidence acquired in his research into English schools, that the School Boards were a major obstacle to educational advance. In his view, the development of ‘higher grade schools’ offering more than basic instruction was at best complicated and at worst actually prevented by the form in which the 1870 Education Act had chosen to administer education. And higher grade schools – indeed all forms of education which were ‘higher’ than elementary – were essential to national prosperity. Some board schools provided what they called ‘higher tops’ – more advanced instruction for pupils who were thought likely to benefit from the extra tuition. A few school boards trespassed on previously religious territory by organising higher grade schools to which children of especial talent could be sent when their elementary education was completed. The churches – particularly the Church of England – argued that the provision of ‘an education, the curriculum of which cannot possibly be defined as elementary’9 was ultra vires. In London, opposition within the school boards themselves prevented the creation of higher grade schools until 1890. The opposition did not come just from within the boards or from the churches. The ancient grammar schools – particularly those with generous scholarships and bursaries – objected to the pool of working-class talent being drained by a rival which was subsidised by the state. Often the school boards yielded to their pressure. Morant’s determination to see them replaced in a general reorganisation in line with the Bryce Commission’s recommendations became a near obsession. His research remained eclectic. Adult education schemes were encouraged, and the Macmillan sisters supported in their pioneer work in the development of nursery schools. But the school boards were always on his mind. His article on Swiss education which appeared in volume three of Reports on Educational Subjects confirmed, apparently casually, that it was illegal to spend money earmarked for elementary education on the higher grade or technical schools.

  It was then that fate intervened. Morant was acting as temporary private secretary to John Gorst, the minister, just as a dispute between the London School Board and the London Technical Education Board came to a head. The School Board had, the Technical Education Board claimed, acted ultra vires by subsidising ‘higher grade’ education. A complaint was made to the minister on the Technical Education Board’s behalf by the Camden School of Art. Gorst – relying on Morant’s advice and happy to humiliate Kekewich – found for the Camden School of Art and referred the whole case to T. B. Crockerton, the Government Auditor.

  Balfour now realised that the ambition which he had cherished for years could be achieved. He had attributed the Tories’ unexpectedly good result in the 1895 election at least in part to his promise to save the voluntary schools, and he had tried several times without success to be as good as his word. The problem which had stood in his way was not any lack of enthusiasm amongst his honourable friends for saving the church schools. The insurmountable opposition arose when he tried to use the crisis in religious education as a vehicle on which to carry forward education reforms in which he had believed since he had read the Bryce Commission report. The wrangles inside the Cabinet and fears of obstruction by the Opposition had forced him to lower his sights.

  The general objections to state aid are familiar to the Cabinet as also is the single strong argument in its favour – the argument that, without state aid, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, in the face of the growing appetite of parents, for educational luxuries and the growing expenditure of School Boards to meet (and very often to anticipate) that appetite, for Voluntary Schools in large towns to hold their own now or to avoid extinction in the near future.10

  There, but for the intervention of the Camden School of Art, the reorganisation might have rested, with the Church of England satisfied, the Nonconformists disgruntled at the ever closer relationship which was developing between Church and state, and the government doing no more than meeting the basic demands of its Church of England back-benchers. But Gorst referred Camden’s complaint to Crockerton and the Auditor found against the London School Board.

  Crockerton ruled that neither instructi
on in science nor fine art could legitimately be described as ‘elementary education’, the only activity for which the Board was entitled to spend public money. The London School Board appealed and the case moved slowly through the courts until it reached the Master of the Rolls. In 1901 he found for Camden. Unless the law was changed, board schools all over the country would be required to abandon the provision of anything like secondary education.

  The strong view about the inadequacy of the English school board system – held in the Department by Morant and the Cabinet by Balfour – was confirmed. Balfour decided that he must at least attempt to reorganise the whole provision of education in England and Wales. The churches were outraged both by the delay in Balfour’s rescue operation and by the prospect that the new legislation might result in the board schools still providing better education than the religious schools could offer. But Balfour was not a man to draw back, particularly when he had a plausible justification for doing, at last, what he had wanted to do for years. The result was the great Education Act of 1902, a major reorganisation of school management and the guarantee of eternal life to denominational schools of every sort.

  There is no doubt that Balfour saw the need for a new Education Act as more than his party’s obligation to protect Church of England denominational education. Asked at a public meeting in Manchester to justify ‘disturbing the public peace’ by introducing a bill to which the Nonconformist churches objected, he replied, ‘The answer is this. The existing educational system of this country is chaotic, ineffectual, is utterly behind the age and makes us the laughing stock of every advanced nation in Europe and America.’11