!

brought patent evils in their train and from motives obviously humanitarian. There was no such clear call for State intervention in education. In touching that sphere, the State was touching interests which, hitherto, had been regarded as the concern of the Churches. The beginnings of State intervention in education were, therefore, far more tentative than those applied to industry. In fact, as we shall see, a very different spirit from that of compulsion, or even of interference, pervades the earliest utterances of our first Government office which dealt with education. Yet it was generally agreed by the time of the Reform Bill among the leading men of all Churches and parties, that something must be done by the State to civilise the growing industrial population, and that voluntary organisations unaided were not equal to the task. So reluctant, however, was the State in England to interfere with education, that no law dealing at all comprehensively with education was placed on the Statute Book until the "School Board Act" of 1870. The line chosen and followed throughout was to assist voluntary effort, and State control was gradually extended in the form of making conditions for the receipt of public money. In 1833, the date of the first Factory Act, the first State grant for popular education was voted. It was a thin house on 17th August, 1833, when by fifty votes to twenty-six, it was resolved, "That a sum not exceeding £20,000 be granted to His Majesty, to issue in aid of private subscriptions for the erection of school houses for the education of the children of the poorer classes in Great Britain, to 31st March, 1834." The grant was administered for the next six years by the two great educational societies which had been founded, the British and Foreign School Society, in 1808, and the National Society, in 1811.

17. Appointment of first Inspectors.-No Government inspectors appeared until 1839. In that year the Committee of the Privy Council on Education was created with Dr. Kay, who afterwards became Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, as Secretary. Dr. Kay was fully in touch with the reforming thought of the time, and was a man of the widest social sympathy and most active mind. Indeed, during the first busy twelve months of his secretaryship, he actually conducted the new Training College at Battersea and lived there himself. We see his hand clearly in all the official acts and minutes which followed his appointment in April, 1839. In June of the same year, the right of inspection was, for the first time, claimed by the Committee, and, in this claim there was implicit a principle of administration which was to have very far-reaching consequences, viz., that if the State spends money, it has a right to see that it is spent in a manner of which it approves and that full value is obtained for it. In the following December the Rev. W. Allen and Mr. Tremenheere were appointed to be the first inspectors of schools in England. The advent of the new inspectors was not hailed with delight as was that of their factory colleagues. Those in whose interests they

were to act were not clamouring for inspection as were the victims of the factory and the mine. They had to make their way by persuasion and the force of reason, and, in the first place, they had to conciliate the Churches who held the field. In 1840 what was called the concordat was agreed to, by which the names of inspectors to be appointed were submitted for the approval of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and also that part of their instructions which related to religious teaching. This arrangement necessitated another on similar lines with the other religious denominations supporting schools; and, as a result, inspection was at first organised, not according to districts, but according to the three religious types of school, Church of England, Nonconformist, and Roman Catholic.

18. Scope of the earliest Inspection.-Although Dr. Kay strictly limited his inspectors' powers of compulsion, he had the widest and highest possible idea of their usefulness on all other practicable lines. Nothing is more enlightening, nothing illustrates better the continuity of the English spirit in administration, than a review of Dr. Kay's first minutes on the aims of inspection. The policy was then, as the policy has been ever since, to combine, by a process of persuasion and suggestion based on experience, the two fundamental objects which inspection of the English type may achieve. On the one hand, there is the first and most obvious duty towards Parliament and the whole body of taxpayers which it represents, to see that public money has been duly spent for the purposes and under the conditions for which it was voted. This is a definite object which can only be secured by definite regulations. On the other hand, there is the wider and more difficult field of strictly educational action, that is, to secure that the agents of the State shall contribute, as they go, to the improvement of the work which they are called upon to inspect and to the greater fruitfulness of the public money spent on it. In Dr. Kay's first annual volume of "Minutes for 1840, he detailed some 170 questions which the inspectors were to put on all aspects of the well-being of the school. Inspectors were not only to ascertain if public money had been well spent; they were to spread information on improved methods of teaching; they were to assist and encourage local efforts, but not to restrain them; they were to stimulate, but not to compel. They were to do nothing which "could tend to impair the authority of the school committee or chief promoters of the school over the teachers or over the children, or of the teacher himself over his scholars." In fact, the Committee of Council and Dr. Kay were so anxious to promote self-help that the inspectors were instructed not to offer any advice or information. except where it is invited." To this direction, which, literally followed, would have reduced the inspector to a registering machine, it is hardly necessary to add that subsequent practice has not adhered. It would have been impossible for him to inquire into the hundred or more details of

school organisation without, at the same time, making suggestions for their improvement, and one of his most valuable functions has always been to carry from place to place the results of experiments happily conceived or well executed elsewhere. One aspect of Dr. Kay's conception of the function of a school, especially in smaller places, appeals more strongly to us at the present day than it has in some of the intervening decades. He made a great point of the social function of the Elementary School-the use of the playground, the intercourse between parents and teachers, the efforts to establish connection between the school and its former scholars. He suggested that the school might be used for many purposes not strictly connected with teaching. He says, for instance, in the Minute of 1840, "The parochial or village library can nowhere be so conveniently or usefully kept as at the school house under the charge of the school master," and recommends that the school might also be employed as a meeting place of various village clubs and societies.

19. The earliest Reports.-Reports of the earliest inspectors show that they fully appreciated and loyally carried out the liberal intentions of the first Secretary. Keen sympathy with the conditions of the poor, and insight into the social possibilities of school work, are apparent everywhere. It would be interesting, if space permitted, to give some extracts from these early reports; as it is, we can only find space to give the main headings of the first report ever issued, viz., that written by Mr. Tremenheere in 1840, upon the results of " An enquiry into the state of Elementary Education in the Mining Districts of South Wales." They are as follows: Number of common day and dame schools; proportion of population attending; nature and extent of education imparted; deficiency not supplied by domestic instruction; facts illustrative of education of adults; information furnished by booksellers as to publications chiefly in demand; indisposition of parents to procure instruction for their children; causes producing this indisposition; poverty not the cause of inattention to education; rates of wages; prevalence of intemperance and temptations to it; payment of workmen at public houses prejudicial; plan of holding meetings of benefit clubs at public houses favourable to intemperance; paucity of inducements to exercises of forethought; description of deposits. in savings banks; truck system still prevalent; Sunday schools and places of worship; utility of Sunday schools; advantages to be anticipated from well-conducted schools; circumstances worthy of consideration in making attempts to introduce an improved system of education."

20. Growth of Inspection.-So the work went on during the first decade of inspection until 1850, when twenty-three inspectors were engaged in the work, and Matthew Arnold was shortly to be added to their number. Developments had taken place during this period, especially in 1846, when a most important

advance took place. The Committee of Council in that year not only provided for more frequent visits and a consequent increase in the number of inspectors, but brought under the notice of the inspector the quality and training of the teachers themselves. They resolved to introduce a system of training apprentices for the work of teaching on a plan which Dr. Kay and others had studied in Holland, although, from respect to insular prejudices, little was said of its origin. Selected pupils were apprenticed at the age of thirteen to a teacher for five years, during which they received instruction from him, and were then, by means of the well-known "Queen's Scholarship Examination," sent to a Training College. Certificates were issued to teachers as a mark of competence to give this instruction. Certain other important resolutions were passed, providing among other things retiring pensions for approved school masters and mistresses. One effect of these resolutions was to add to the work of the inspectors and to increase their number still further. But so far as concerns the actual inspection of schools, the position remained much the same as it had been from the beginning and is described in favourable terms by Matthew Arnold in his well-known general report of 1863. We must, however, remember that he had a natural bias in favour of the existing arrangement, and, wishing to contrast it with the later system, no doubt described it at its best.

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Inspection under the old system meant something like the following.-The inspector took a school class by class. He seldom heard each child in a class read, but he called out a certain number to read, picked at random as specimens of the rest; and when this was done he questioned the class with freedom, and in his own way, on the subject of their instruction. As you got near the top of a good school these subjects became more numerous; they embraced English, Grammar, Geography, and History, for each of which the inspector's report contained a special entry, and the examination then often acquired much variety and interest. The whole life and power of a class, the fitness of its composition, its handling by the teacher were well tested; the inspector became well acquainted with them and was enabled to make his remarks on them to the head teacher, and a powerful means of correcting, improving, and stimulating them was given. In the hands of an able inspector . . . this means was an instrument of great force and value."

(b) From 1862 to 1902.

21. The Revised Code of 1862 and the introduction of the Annual Examination.-We will give a little later some account of what took place after the Revised Code was introduced; but it is necessary here to consider for a moment what led Parliament to sanction the change which dominated English elementary

education for over thirty years, and which Matthew Arnold in the report just referred to, goes on to deplore. Robert Lowe, who was at that time Vice-President of the Committee of Council, was the responsible Minister, and some twenty years later he claimed a personal initiative in the "reform," and gave his own reasons for a belief in its necessity. He found that the country boys and girls sent in to read to him when his eyesight was failing, could hardly ever read really well. He came, therefore, to the conclusion that " as regards reading, writing and arithmetic, the three subjects which can be definitely tested, each child should either read or write a passage, or do some simple sum of arithmetic." But it must be remembered that Lowe had behind him a strong report from the Commission on Education, under the chairmanship of the Duke of Newcastle, which was appointed in 1853 and reported in 1860. The Commissioners were of opinion that There is only one way to secure this result, i.e., the efficiency of the teaching of every scholar, which is to institute a searching examination by a competent authority of every child in every school to which grants are to be paid, with the view of escertaining whether these indispensable elements of knowledge are thoroughly acquired, and to make the prospects of the teacher dependent to a considerable extent on the results of this examination." Lowe followed up this report by introducing a revised Code in 1861; the first Code of all had only appeared the year before. In the proposed Code of 1861, the grants to schools were made to depend almost entirely upon the results of the examination of individual scholars in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but this was slightly modified in face of opposition, and the Code of 1862 known as the Revised Code, provided that all children over eight were to be examined, and the grants were to depend, as to twothirds, upon the examination results, and, as to one-third, upon attendance.

This was the document on which the practice, both of schools and of inspectors, was based for over thirty years. It carried its effects for good or evil to the furthest limits of the British Empire, and only died officially in the 'nineties. Its influence may still be traced in countless ways on the language, conception and practice of elementary education.

22. Some advantages of the Annual Examination.-The system thus inaugurated went out almost without a protest between twenty and thirty years ago, and no one now would desire anything like its reintroduction. Yet it must in in fairness be admitted that, with all its defects, it could claim certain advantages. Lowe and those who were with him were right in insisting on a minimum of attainment for every normal. child; they were right also in conceiving of this minimum as the power of reading and expression in simple and intelligible English and in the elements of calculation. It was quite possible that a large part of the scholars should pass through the school without