Committee of the Privy Council on Education

Privy Council Committee overview
Formed	10th April 1839
Preceding Privy Council Committee	None
Dissolved	Apr 1900
Superseding agency	Board of Education
Jurisdiction	England & Wales
Privy Council Committee executive	Lord President of the Privy Council Vice-President of Committee of the Privy Council on Education Permanent Secretary for the Department of Education (senior civil servant)

The Committee of the Privy Council on Education was a committee within the Privy Council and the first central government authority in England and Wales dedicated to promoting education, it is the original predecessor of the modern day Department of Education, it lasted fifty two years before being eventually replaced by the Board of Education. During its time, it expanded continuously in terms of its budget, powers and the size of its civil service but it was never a standalone ministry with a cabinet minister until it was replaced. It was was originally set-up through secondary legislation by order of the Privy Council on April 10th 1839 to superintend the application of any sums voted by Parliament for the purposes of promoting Public Education.

Background

Education of poor working class children

In the early 19th century, most poor working class children were expected to work in factories or on farms at a very young age so received little or no education. In this environment, a debate was held in Society on whether the state should intervene and promote universal education, for instance along the lines of the Prussian education system, the case for such state intervention was comprehensively articulated by philosophers-of-the-age in their major works such as Adam Smith ( Wealth of Nations) and Tom Paine ( Rights of Man). ^{[1] [2]} Many members of the establishment though, were belligerently opposed to such change on the following grounds: -

• Minimal State; - There existed a deep rooted idea that the state should not interfere in peoples live including for the provision of education which should be left to the churches and charities ^[3]
• Subservience; - It was thought that educating the working class would cause unrest, whereas the uneducated working class were more accepting of their place in society and their poor living and working conditions ^[4]
• Taxes; - Landowners and factory owners were against being forced to pay rates for education, they argued this should be funded by benevolent voluntary donations ^[4]
• Secularisation; - The Anglican church was concerned that the state would eventually introduce secular education undermining the Anglican faith in future generations ^[5]
• Non-Conformists; - Non-conformists were concerned that state provided education would become dominated by the Anglican denominational teaching, undermining their faiths for future generations ^[6]

These arguments were used to successfully block a major attempt in parliament for the state to take some sort of responsibility for education of the poor through the Parochial Schools Bill of 1807 submitted by Samuel Whitbread. ^[7]

Parliamentary inquiry

Parliament did eventually accede to a comprehensive public inquiry on the subject, hence a parliamentary select committee chaired by Henry Brougham was set-up to inquire into the education of the lower orders in the metropolis. The committee published three reports in 1816 which described the types of schooling available to poor working class children, their findings are validated by the London Statistical Society who did a similar study : -

Type		% Children	Fees	Notes	Standard
Sunday Schools	Anglican	20%	No Fees	Church volunteers provided teaching Both volunteers & children could work in week	Limited
	Dissenters/Other Denominations
Charity Schools	Anglican National Society	15%	Some Schools Charged Fees	Madras Monitorial teaching system	Good
	British & Foreign School Society			Lancasterian Monitorial teaching system
	Parochial Schools			For children of parishioners (church-goers)
	Schools for Instruction & Industry			Children were taught a trade
	Orphanages, Foundling Hospitals			Foundlings were abandoned babies
	Charities for affinity groups			Such as Irish, Welsh, Freemasons, Professions
	Workhouse Schools			For the children of the poor in workhouses
Private Schools	Dame Schools	10%	Small Fees	Mainly widows child-minding infants	Limited
	Common Day Schools		Fees	Lowly paid lay people acting as teachers
No Schooling		55%	n/a	n/a	None

Income

Schools for the poor were not funded by the state, instead they had many different sources of income: -

1. A subscription charity or public society was often set-up to fund schools, these would collect monies in the form of: -
   • Subscriptions; - Annual or larger lifetime subscriptions could grant subscribers rights such as positions (governor, steward, guardian etc.) , voting rights, membership on the committee, attendance rights at the AGM, invites to socials and the prized rights to recommend children
   • Socials; - Paid attendance to musical renditions, festivals, social dinners and meet-ups in taverns
   • Sermons; - Preaching in churches & cathedrals, the school children would also often attend to sing hymns, the collections from the congregation helped fund the schools
   • Donations; - Simple charitable donations
   • Inheritances; - On death wills would often bequeath land & property, with the rent used to fund the schools. Similarly last testaments could bequeath monies or other assets, with the interest & dividends used to fund schools
2. Schools often taught children skills such as sewing, needlework , spinning and straw plaiting, these were then used to earn income for the school. ^[8] This was especially the case for the schools for instruction and industry. ^[9]
3. Most schools for the poor were free but some, such as private schools, charged either a fee on joining the school &/or a small attendance fee

Expenditure

1. The employment of school masters was expensive, whereas there was a great number of poor children to teach and the income for this purpose was meagre, so the following approach was taken: -
   • Volunteers; - Sunday schools only taught on the Sabbath, allowing a great many volunteers to gratuitously teach on their rest day whilst they worked for the rest of the week
   • Monitors; - Day schools used the monitorial teaching system so the teacher taught older scholars (monitors) who themselves taught the younger scholars, in this way a single teacher could teach a very large number of scholars. One teacher controlling so many children necessitated usage of corporal punishment.
   • Unqualified; - Private schools for the poor such as Dame schools employed low-paid unqualified teachers who were barely educated themselves
2. Some schools received children so poor that they had to be clothed and maintained (fed) especially in winter
3. Schools had to provide benches and books and writing materials
4. The greatest expenditure was the school-house building and land

Summary

From the inquiry, Brougham concluded the following: -

1. The charity schools provided by far and away the best education for poor children, they were mainly free, they tended to have good teachers and they gave a broad general education taught throughout the week. Unfortunately there were simply too few such schools, who would turn away hundreds of children. They provided between 15% - 20% of all the school places needed for poor children.
2. The Sunday schools enabled children to learn to read on the Sabbath whist they could work during the week, they were free but focused purely on reading then religious instruction so children did not learn to write, carryout arithmetic or any other subject or skill. They provided about 20% of poor children with basic schooling.
3. The Dame schools were no more than child-minders, mainly catering for very young infants. Private Common Day schools provided a resemblance of schooling but used unqualified teachers to keep the fees low enough but still only the most well off of the poor could afford the fees. These private schools provided about 10% of schooling for the poor.
4. Over 50% of poor children received absolutely no education whatsoever. This was partly explained by industrialisation which had led to mass emigration to the industrial cities from rural counties, as such these metropoles lacked the school houses needed to provide the school places for the expanded population. The construction of the school-house and acquisition of the land was the most expensive element to setting up a new school.

Brougham concluded that educating the poor could be greatly improved if the state helped fund the construction of new school-houses for charity schools then left those charities to run the schools in the efficient manner they were accustomed to.

Charles Dickens

Coincidentally, Charles Dickens childhood (1812-1827) occurred at the roughly the same time of the inquiry (published 1816) and in the same place, London. In Charles Dickens autobiographical accounts, he describes some of the schools catalogued by the inquiry: -

• Charles Dickens initially went to a Dame School as an infant
• His primary school education was at a parochial school
• At the age of eleven, his father was incarcerated with the rest of his family in a debtors prison his education was halted and he was separated from his family to work ten gruelling hours a day instead
• When his grandmother passed away and his father inherited wealth, Dickens resumed his middle-class education at a private day-school

Charles Dickens benefited from a middle-class upbringing until his family fell on hard times when he witnessed first hand the trepidations of poverty, child-labour and no education, he was able to resume his middle-class life and became one of the great writers of the time, his literary works often drew on the traumatic time in his childhood working at the Blackening Warehouse

State Intervention

Many people though, were opposed to the idea on the following grounds: -

• Minimal State; - There was a deep rooted idea that the state should interfere in people lives as little as possible including for the provision of education which should be left to the churches and charities
• Subservience; - It was thought that educating the working class would cause unrest, whereas the uneducated working class were more accepting of their place in society and their poor living and working conditions
• Taxes; - Landowners and factory owners were against being forced to pay rates for education, they argued this should be funded by benevolent voluntary donations
• Secularisation; - The Anglican church was concerned that the state would eventually introduce secular education undermining the Anglican faith in future generations
• Non-Conformists; - Non-conformists were concerned that state provided education would become dominated by the Anglican denominational teaching, undermining their faiths for future generations

These arguments were used to successfully block the three major attempts in parliament for the state to take some sort of responsibility for education of the poor in particular: -

• 1807 - The Parochial Schools Bill submitted by Samuel Whitbread ^[3]
• 1820 - The Education of the Poor Bill submitted by Henry Brougham, ^[10] in response to the detailed findings of a government inquiry into the education of the lower orders ^[11]
• 1833 - A National Education resolution was proposed by John Roebuck ^[12]

Treasury Grant

At this point, Earl Grey's Whig government who had in the previous year won a substantial majority in the reformed parliament (1932), ^[13] pushed to finally provide some government assistance for education. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Althrop surreptitiously moved a Treasury grant for education through parliament. This was done in mid-August of 1833, a fortnight before the summer recess when few parliamentarians remained in the Commons, at 2am in the early hours of Friday 16th August 1833 at the very end of the Supply and Miscellaneous Estimates committee session and without any notice to the committee he sprung a surprise resolution proposing an annual grant of £20,000 for the construction of school-houses. ^[14] On passing committee, the very next day, the supply of the grant was debated and passed in a sparse parliament by 50 votes for and 26 votes against (only 76 MPs out of a possible 658 were present). This was done in the face of protests in the Commons at the unprecedented way in which such a significant matter had been swiftly slipped through the House with little debate. The Treasury grant was structured so as to nullify the previous arguments preventing the state promoting education: -

• The grant was for the construction school-houses only and not for the provision of education which was to be funded in the normal way by parish communities
• The size of the grant at £20,000 was small so as to not cause concern amongst rate payers
• The grants were to be matched with benevolent donations, so as to continue to encourage charitable funding of education
• The majority of the grants were to be directed to the National Society, supporting Anglican denominated schools
• The remainder was directed to the British and Foreign School Society, supporting non-conformists such as the Wesleyan church

This deliberate policy to absolve critics worked, because when the government changed from Whig to Tory, the treasury grants had become firmly established and were simply renewed.

Citations

References

HANSARD

• Whitbread (1807). "The Parochial Schools Bill". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 9. Parliament of the United Kingdom. col. 853.
• Parochial Bill (1807-08-11). "PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS BILL.". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 9. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Lords. col. 1175–1178.
• Brougham (1820-07-11). "EDUCATION OF THE POOR BILL.". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 2. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Commons. col. 365–366.
• Roebuck (1833-07-30). "National Education". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 20. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Commons. col. 139–174.
• Lord J. Russell (30 April 1839). "National Education". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 47. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Commons. col. 681–682.
• Lord Althrop, Chancellor of the Exchequer (16 August 1833). "SUPPLY—MISCELLANEOUS ESTIMATES". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 20. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Commons. col. 730–731.
• Giddy (1807-06-13). "PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS BILL". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Vol. 9. Parliament of the United Kingdom: House of Commons. col. 798–799.

REPORTS

• Brougham, Henry (1816-06-20). Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed to inquire into the Education of the Lower orders of the Metropolis (Report). London: Gale & Fenner, Paternoster Row (published 1816-01-01). Retrieved 2021-12-09.
• Arnold, Matthew (1816-06-20). Reports on Elementary Schools 1852-1882 (Report). London: Macmillan and Co. (published 1889). Retrieved 2021-12-09.
• Murray, John (1823-01-01). The Annual Subscription Charities and Public Societies in London (Report). Retrieved 2021-12-11.

LEGISLATION

• "ORDER IN COUNCIL", legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives, 1839-04-10, SI 1948/1, retrieved 2016-04-30

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

• Records of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education, ID: ED 9 & ED 17. National Archives.

PAPERS

McManners, T. (1952). "The work of Lord Brougham for English education" (PDF). Durham Theses, Durham University – via Durham E-Theses Online.

BOOKS

• Selby-Bigge, Sir Lewis Amherst (1927). The Board of Education. London & New York: Putnam & Company Limited.
• SHUTTLEWORTH, SIR JAMES KAY (1853). PUBLIC EDUCATION AS AFFECTED BY THE MINUTES OF THE COMMITTEE OF PRIVY COUNCIL FROM 1846 TO 1852. London: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
• Rallings, Colin; Thrasher, Michael, eds. (2000). British Electoral Facts 1832–1999. Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
• Smith, Adam (1802). Inquiry into the Nature & causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: A. Strahan. pp. 150–236.
• Paine, Thomas (1792). Rights of Man. Fleet Street: J.S.Jordan.
• Paz, D.G. (1980). The Politics of Working Class Education in Britain 1830 - 50. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN  9780719008115.