Education Acts and the Long Campaign for Compulsory Schooling

The campaign for compulsory education was one of the most important social movements of the nineteenth century, and the Education Acts that resulted from it transformed the lives of millions of children.

The Origins of the Education Campaign

The campaign for compulsory education had its origins in the early nineteenth century, when reformers became concerned about the educational deprivation of the children of the working class. The traditional system of education in Britain, based on church schools, charity schools, and dame schools, was inadequate to the needs of the new industrial society, and large numbers of children, particularly in the industrial cities, received little or no education at all.

The campaign was given a major boost by the 1842 Children’s Employment Commission, which revealed not only the conditions in the mines and factories but also the educational deprivation of the children who worked in them. The commission found that most children who worked in the mines and factories had received little or no education, and that they were unable to read or write.

The Early Education Acts

The first major piece of education legislation in Britain was the Factory Act of 1833, which required that children employed in textile mills receive at least two hours of schooling a day. The Act was an important first step, but it was limited in its scope and difficult to enforce.

The next major step was the establishment of the Committee of Council on Education in 1839, which was responsible for distributing government grants to schools and for inspecting the schools that received the grants. The committee was led by the reformer James Kay-Shuttleworth, who played a central role in the development of the British system of elementary education.

The Elementary Education Act of 1870

The Elementary Education Act of 1870, also known as the Forster Act after its sponsor W.E. Forster, was the first major Education Act of the modern era. The Act established school boards in areas where there were insufficient school places, and it gave the boards the power to build and maintain schools, to set the curriculum, and to charge fees for the schools.

The Forster Act did not make education compulsory, but it established the principle that the state had a responsibility to ensure that all children had access to elementary education.

The Elementary Education Act of 1880

The Elementary Education Act of 1880 made school attendance compulsory for children between the ages of five and ten, and it required the parents of children who failed to attend school to pay a fine. The Act was a major step forward in the campaign for compulsory education, and it ensured that all children in Britain received at least some elementary education.

The Effects of the Education Acts

The Education Acts had a transformative effect on British society. By ensuring that all children received at least some elementary education, the Acts helped to spread literacy and numeracy to the entire population, and they laid the foundation for the development of a modern industrial society. The Acts also helped to break the cycle of poverty that had kept the children of the working class trapped in the factories and mines, and they opened up new opportunities for social mobility.

The Long-Term Legacy of the Education Acts

The long-term legacy of the Education Acts is still being felt today. The British system of education, which began with the Education Acts of the 1870s and 1880s, is one of the most developed in the world, and it has been a major factor in the development of British society and economy.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about the Education Acts is the one that has been raised about every other piece of 19th-century social legislation: did they work? The traditional answer, going back to the 1870s’ Board School propaganda and given its modern form in the standard accounts of British educational history, is that the Acts were a great success: by 1900, elementary school attendance was above 90 percent, by 1910 adult literacy was above 95 percent, and the Acts laid the foundation for the British industrial economy of the 20th century. The revisionist answer, developed in a generation of historical work since 1960, is more cautious: the standard literacy figures were inflated by the 1870 Education Act’s own definition of literacy, the actual quality of the elementary education was much lower than the rhetoric suggested (Brian Simon’s Education and the Labour Movement (1965) found that working-class children left school at 12 with reading and arithmetic skills well below middle-class levels), and the comparative international data show that Prussia and the United States had similar or higher literacy rates by 1900 without the same kind of state-mandated system. The interesting current question, raised in the work of economic historian David Mitch and developed in the recent literature on the British industrial decline, is whether the British elementary education of 1870-1900 was good enough to support the British industrial economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or whether the British system was already falling behind the German and American systems of secondary and technical education by 1900. The honest answer, given the comparative data, is probably: the British system was adequate for the elementary-school stage, but it was substantially less adequate at the secondary and technical-school stage, and this gap is one of the reasons that British industrial leadership passed to the United States and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Selected Sources

Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England (2010).
Mary Sturt, The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (1967).
Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement 1870–1920 (1965).
Pamela Silver, The Education of the Poor 1800–1870 (1965).