The Growth of Schools: 1889–1898

Abstract

FOR ALL the innovations in the last quarter of the century at Winchester, Rugby, Harrow, and Uppingham that followed the Public Schools Act of 1868, the evidence is still overwhelmingly that in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s classics, ‘the grand old fortifying curriculum ’, took up most of the timetable for everyone. When the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 sought to give legislative strength to the recommendations of the Taunton Commission for the grammar schools, one of its main consequences was to make the grammar schools feel that they were the poor relations of the public schools, and most of the grammar schools of England modelled themselves as far as possible on what the public schools did between 1870 and 1920. The achievement of universal elementary schooling by state provision after 1880 and especially after 1902 was itself the major objective for the education of the poor, and the aftermath of payment by results left its own distinctive mark probably until the 1930s.