Area Training Organisations and the Education of Teachers

Abstract

Colleges for the training of teachers began to be provided, originally by the churches, in the 1840s. In England, as in Western Europe, they were designed to equip the most able pupils from elementary schools to go back and teach in them. (Grammar-school teachers were recruited direct from the universities, holding degrees, and therefore were not considered to be in need of training.) As late as 1928, in some parts of the country, it was the practice to appoint a boy or girl of 14 as a ‘pupil teacher’, whose duties were to help the schoolmaster or schoolmistress with the teaching of children sometimes only a year younger than himself, to study in the evenings, and to have formal tuition at the weekends. After three or four years he might then be found suitable to enter a training college and take a two-year course there which qualified him to teach in an elementary school. I treasure my own letter of appointment as a rural pupil teacher in the North Riding of Yorkshire, at a starting salary of £5 a year, rising to £15 in the fourth year. By the end of the 1930s, however, pupil teachers were only a memory, and recruitment to the colleges was from grammar-school boys and girls who either did not aim at university or who failed to qualify for entry there.