Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School / Board of Education.

  • Great Britain. Board of Education. Consultative Committee
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School / Board of Education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    differentiate between junior or primary instruction on the one hand and senior or post-primary instruction on the other hand, since the number of pupils who remained over the age of 10 in most primary schools was comparatively small. It is, however, interesting to find that from the very inception of the movement for the provision of popular elementary education on a large scale there was a noticeable tendency to differentiate the provision made for infants under the age of 6 from that for children over that age. (2) The British and Foreign School Society founded in 1808, and the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, founded in 1811, supported the monitorial systems of Joseph Lancaster and Dr. Andrew Bell respectively. The principal aim of these systems was to impart to children of 6 years of age and upwards the rudiments of religious knowledge and of the 3 Ks., with a little needlework for the girls. For instance one of the rules of the British and Foreign School Society was that no child under the age of 6 should be admitted to a British school, and that when there was serious pressure on the school accommodation, the minimum age of entrance should be 8.(#)- At a stage in the development of primary education, when two years was regarded as sufficient for a child to acquire a knowledge of reading, writing and cyphering, and when mass instruction by means of monitors was in vogue, it could not be expected that much attention would be given to the educational needs of children of different ages (*). (1) In practice, children of the age of 4 were admitted in many districts to the monitorial schools associated with the National Society, and children under the age of 6 were also admitted to many British Schools. It would appear that the actual age of admission depended largely on local circumstances. As time went on, and as the monitorial system failed to realise its first promise, there was a marked tendency for the average age of children in attendance at these monitorial schools to fall. For instance, in 1850 approximately 50 per cent. of the children in attendance at Elementary Schools were under 8 years of age cf. Reports by Mr. Cook and Mr. Moseley in Minutes of Com- mittee of Council on Education, 1851-52 ii, 5 and 34. Cf. also Gill’s School Management, 3rd Edition (1858), p. 110, § 4:— “The admission of infants to the elementary school is a dis- advantage to the infants themselves and to the other scholars.”’ (7) One of the earliest systematic attempts to organise an Elementary School with careful classification of pupils according to age was made in the Barrington School at Bishop Auckland, opened in 1810, by the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Shute Barrington). The School was divided into six classes, each containing about 30 children. The lowest class consisted of children of the age of about 5 (Sir T. Bernard, The Barring- ton School, 3rd Edition (1815), p. 100).
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