Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907-1950 (Woburn Education Series)

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BECOMING TEACHERS

Texts and Testimonies 1907–1950

Woburn Education Series General Series Editor: Professor Peter Gordon ISSN 1462–2076 For over thirty years this series on the history, development and policy of education, under the distinguished editorship of Peter Gordon, has been evolving into a comprehensive and balanced survey of important trends in teaching and educational policy. The series is intended to reflect the changing nature of education in present-day society. The books are divided into four sections— educational policy studies, educational practice, the history of education and social history—and reflect the continuing interestin this area. For a full series listing, please visit our website: www.woburnpress.com Educational Practice Slow Learners. A Break in the Circle: A Practical Guide for TeachersDiane Griffin Games and Simulations in ActionAlec Davison and Peter Gordon Music in Education: A Guide for Parents and TeachersMalcolm Carlton The Education of Gifted ChildrenDavid Hopkinson Teaching and Learning MathematicsPeter G.Dean Comprehending ComprehensivesEdward S.Conway Teaching the Humanitiesedited by Peter Gordon Teaching Scienceedited by Jenny Frost The Private Schooling of Girls: Past and Presentedited by Geoffrey Walford International Yearbook of History Education, Volume 1edited by Alaric Dickinson, Peter Gordon, Peter Lee and John Slater A Guide to Educational Researchedited by Peter Gordon The English Higher Grade SchoolsMeriel Vlaeminke Geography in British SchoolsRex Walford Dictionary of British EducationPeter Gordon and Denis Lawton A History of Western Educational IdeasDenis Lawton and Peter Gordon

BECOMING TEACHERS Texts and Testimonies 1907–1950

PETER CUNNINGHAM PHILIP GARDNER University of Cambridge

WOBURN PRESS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First published in 2004 in Great Britain by WOBURN PRESS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London N14 5BP and in the United States of America by WOBURN PRESS c/o ISBS 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213–3786 Website: www.woburnpress.com This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2004 Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cunningham, Peter, 1948– Becoming teachers: texts and testimonies, 1907–1950.—Woburn education series) 1. Elementary school teachers—Training of—England—History—20th century 2. Student teachers—England—History—20th century 3. Elementary school teachers— Training of—England—History—20th century—Case studies 4. Student teachers— England—History—20th century—Case studies 5. Elementary school teachers— Training of—Wales—History—20th century 6. Student teachers—Wales—History— 20th century 7. Elementary school teachers—Training of–Wales—History—20th century—Case studies 8. Student teachers—Wales—History—20th century—Case studies 9. Education—England—History—20th century 10. Education—Wales—History— 20th century I. Title II. Gardner, Phil, 1951– 370.7′1′042 ISBN 0-203-49126-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58110-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7130-0213-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-7130-4032-7 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cunningham, Peter, 1948– Becoming teachers: texts and testimonies, 1907–1950/Peter Cunningham Philip Gardner. p. cm.—(Woburn education series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7130–0213–1 (cloth)—ISBN 0–7130–4032–7 (pbk.) 1. Student teachers—Training of—Great Britain—History—20th century. 2. Student teaching—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Gardner, Philip, 1951– II. Title. III. Series LB2157.G7C86 2003

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370′.71′0941–DC21 2003053532 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

x

Introduction

xi

Problems and Approaches

2

PART I 1 PART II 2

Policy Developed: The Student-Teacher Scheme and its Origins

21

3

Policy Debated: Conflicting Ideals for Teacher Education and Training

47

4

Policy Concluded: Demise and Legacy of Student Teaching

67

5

A Stolen Profession? Social Class and Teacher Supply

83

6

A Narrow Life? Teachers and Professional Identity

105

7

Practice: Experience of Training from Classroom to College

123

8

Person

145

9

Mr Brian Sawkin

151

10

Mrs Delia Skelley and Mrs Lesley Thornbird

163

11

Mr Gerald Phillips

178

12

Miss Daisy Shipley and Mr Arthur Shipley

190

13

Miss Barbara Mill

208

Conclusion

221

Select Bibliography

228

PART III

ix

Index

238

ABBREVIATIONS

ADSE AHM HMI LEA NFAT NUT PES PNEU PP PRO PT TC TCA TTA

Association of Directors and Secretaries for Education Association of Head Mistresses His (Her) Majesty’s Inspector(s) Local Education Authority National Federation of Assistant Teachers National Union of Teachers Public Elementary School Parents’ National Education Union Parliamentary Papers Public Record Office Pupil Teacher Training College Training College Association Teacher Training Association

INTRODUCTION

What do the words ‘student teacher’ call to mind? For most of us— certainly for those born in the years since the Second World War—they evoke a simple, even a mundane, image. They describe a straightforward technical designation: simply that part of a teacher-training course involving practical experience in school settings. Understood in this way, the term is descriptive and substantially unproblematical, defining one of the successive stages in the process of becoming a teacher, much in the way that being a child is understood as a stage in the process of becoming an adult. This has not always been so. The title of ‘student teacher’ has a substantial and unexpected history.1 In the early decades of the twentieth century, it was not at all the bland appellation with which we have become familiar. It was a contested concept. It was used in different ways by competing interest groups in the pursuit of a key objective, and one which is today once again widely contended. That goal was, and remains, control over the right to define what a classroom teacher should be, and how such a teacher should be prepared for a life in the classroom. In this way, the words ‘student teacher’ meant one thing to the classroom teacher of the early twentieth century, something other to the training college principal and something different again to the maker of educational policy. By the end of the 1920s, this dispute had been effectively resolved, and its resolution helped to shape many of the perceptions of teaching and teacher professionalism which would dominate the remainder of the twentieth century. In seeking to understand and to relate this process, our account will take the figure of the student teacher himself or herself as its central focus. How should we endeavour to approach a history of this sort? The duty of the historian is to record, as best he or she can, the way in which the past actually happened. But no less important, the duty of the historian is to show that the past is always also composed of resources, often overlooked by posterity but which, in other circumstances, might have set the trajectory of historical development along a different path from that which it actually came to follow. This is not solely a matter of restoring to history some of the lost voices which have been excluded from our educational past, nor is it merely the indulgence of a counterfactual conceit. Rather, it is to recognise that in the work of creating a better future, the past always holds out much more to us than we may at first

xii

imagine. As Raphael Samuel was wont to remind us in relation to the development of the modern Labour Party, the work of those who have gone before always bequeaths more than one tradition to those who follow. If history has a lesson for policy, it is that there are many useable pasts; there are always alternatives.2 The banal truth that we cannot live in the past is a handy slogan for obscuring this fact—as, in a very different way, is the more challenging assertion that all history is the history of the present. Neither of these claims will do. We cannot live in the past but neither can we prevent the past from living in us. And if the present always strives to bend the past to its own ends, the past is never helpless in the face of such manipulation. The past may resist the present as well as succour it.3 Opening ourselves to this recognition is not to see ourselves as imprisoned by time, but to understand that the true relation between present and past is always a dialogical one. Each is created, maintained and energised by the other. We may decide that we do not actively wish to take part in this dialogue. This may afford us the comfortable illusion that we have somehow freed ourselves from history. In fact, of course, though we may try to ignore the voices of our potential interlocutors from the past, they cannot be denied and they will never go away. We would do much better wholeheartedly to engage in the dialogue to which history invites us. With these broad observations in mind, let us now turn to the object of the dialogue which we are about to enter. The student-teacher scheme is a largely forgotten episode in the educational history of England and Wales. We ourselves had little prior awareness of it and were introduced to it in the course of many indepth interviews with retired classroom teachers who, in their youth, had served as student teachers: ‘And then I became a student teacher.’ Over and over again, the phrase bubbled out of these conversations which constitute, in effect, the formative ground for this work as well as the source of much of its original data. Student teaching comprised a programme of school-based preliminary—in other words, pre-college—training which was undertaken by many of those young men and women who sought to become teachers in elementary schools in the first half of the twentieth century. Introduced in 1907 as an experimental successor to the long-established pupil-teacher system, the scheme was designed to give intending teachers an initial indication of the realities of everyday work in an elementary school and to allow them some opportunity to make their first practical forays into classroom teaching. Though the pattern of the scheme varied from one local education authority to the next, its underlying principle was a common one—to support the transition of students from the secondary school to the teacher training college through the introduction of an intervening year spent principally in the educational environment of the elementary school itself. Critically, this required that experienced serving teachers should be directly and extensively involved in the training process. As an epitome of what such teachers could perceive the scheme to stand for, the views of the Newcastle Head Teachers’ Association, expressed in 1927—near the height of the popularity of the scheme—are as good as any. During the student-teacher year, a trainee

xiii

becomes familiar with the conditions and routine work of a school; copies and imitates other teachers at work, and eventually develops initiative; learns the art of preparing lessons, of keeping children busy and interested in their work; gains confidence in his power in securing and maintaining discipline and all that it entails; has a measure of responsibility thrown upon him, for he is in time given charge of a class; and lastly he has entered upon his study of the characters and idiosyncrasies, the cravings and longings of the young people with whom he is to spend so much of his life.4 Our interviews with former student teachers shed much new light on how these practical and professional goals were operationalised within the broader context of national and local policy objectives for teacher training. But they revealed more than this. They also began to show that student teaching may have played a significant but previously unrecognised role in the development of much bigger questions of professional identity. In this respect, this book is not simply an investigation of the technical form of teacher training in the early twentieth century. It is also about the ways in which training contributed to the maintenance of stable or enduring images of teachers and teaching. It is about the ways in which training worked towards the transformation of those images. It is about the ways in which teachers and their work were perceived by policy makers and the ways in which teachers and their work were perceived by teachers themselves. And it is about the ways in which the student-teacher scheme came to occupy a major place in all of these controversial matters during the early decades of the twentieth century. The task of uncovering or illuminating a neglected corner of the past requires no more powerful justification than the historian’s ceaseless requirement to understand our shared history better. And upon that elemental goal we should not be unhappy to rest. But it would not be difficult to justify our investigation further on a number of additional grounds, two of which commend themselves with particular force. In the first place, the story of the student-teacher scheme shows that many of the central questions about the training of the nation’s teachers which dominated both professional and political debate from the turn of the nineteenth century, whether in terms of practice or policy, have been very enduring ones. Though in very different social, cultural and political contexts, many of the same questions which framed the teacher-training debates of the early decades of the twentieth century did so again in the corresponding debates of its last.5 These were questions concerning essentially practical matters such as the content, sequencing, siting and ownership of training arrangements but which also ramified with the wider issue of the public evaluation of the teaching profession itself. A clearer appreciation of how, and with what results, earlier generations approached and negotiated educational challenges which are closely related to

xiv

those we face today is in itself instructive. What is perhaps more valuable still is the degree to which such an understanding may help us to comprehend why it should be that such questions—along with so many others in the area of modern educational policy—have proved, over long periods of time, to be so enduringly difficult to progress. The issues which came together in the inception and the operation of the student-teacher scheme have, in one way or another, taxed all of those who have had any significant dealings with teacher training over the last century. Should the teachers of the people come from the people themselves? Should prospective teachers’ first classroom experience come earlier or later in their training regime? Is teaching better approached through apprenticeship under the guidance of a skilled practitioner or through academic studentship in a college setting? Is teaching better understood as a technical process or a delicate art? Is it ultimately a craft or a profession? And how should the business of teacher training stand in relation to the work of the universities? It is against a chorus of conflicting answers to questions such as these that the origins, operation and demise of the student-teacher scheme were played out. That is why a study of student teaching may reveal far more to us than the bare bones of the scheme itself. It opens a symbolic site through which, in one way or another, many of the twentieth century’s most cherished educational aspirations have been filtered. In the second place, the student-teacher scheme survived long enough and on a sufficient scale to be traceable in the living memories of many of those who experienced it, as well as in the archival record generated by those who administered it. The scheme therefore offers an important opportunity to place the evidence of one category of historical sources under the scrutiny of another and quite different category. By looking at both—the spoken as well as the written—we may not only come to understand the common object of both, the student-teacher scheme, better. We may also gain some more general insight into what we might legitimately expect from an approach which engages the past through written documents which are contemporary, but dead; and an approach which comes at the past through spoken voices which live in the present but, in memory, both assert and evoke the past. The book is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a single chapter which elucidates our methodological strategy and establishes a rationale for the approach we have taken in engaging our central research questions. Part II examines the student-teacher scheme in terms of policy (Chapters 2–4), profession (Chapters 5–6) and practice (Chapter 7). The developing argument across Part II draws upon data derived from oral testimony as well as from the documentary record. It does so incremen tally, however, with the spoken voice of the practitioner little in evidence in the chapters on policy, starting to be heard in the chapters on profession and dominating the chapter on practice. This movement is completed in Part III where, following a brief introductory chapter, the experiences of a number of the former student teachers whom we interviewed are set within the broader contexts of their professional life histories. Here, we are seeking to follow the emphases that our respondents have applied for making

xv

sense of their own lives in teaching and, in so doing, to set the richness of their own understandings alongside the analysis that we have offered in Part II. The research upon which this work is based was carried out between 1993 and 1998. It was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust (award number F. 462E), to whom we are very pleased to acknowledge our grateful thanks. All the audio recordings and interview transcriptions of our many conversations with former student teachers are now housed at the Archive of Teacher Memory at the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge.6 This collection, comprising the personal and professional recollections of more than 200 former teachers, is the accumulated product of a number of major research projects, the most recent of which, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, has investigated teachers’ memories of wartime evacuation. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the exceptional group of research associates who worked on the Leverhulme project with us— Wendy Robinson, Bobbie Wells and Richard Willis. From the outset we also enjoyed valuable advice and support from Steve Humphries, Roy Lowe, Stuart Maclure, Harold Silver and Paul Thompson. The list of others to whom we are indebted is a long one. We are glad to record our sincere thanks for the wisdom, the support and the encouragement that, in one way or another, each of them has given to us. Thank you to Richard Aldrich, Richard Altenbaugh, Madeleine Arnot, Grant Bage, Carey Bennet, Patrick Brindle, David Crook, Jo-Anne Dillabough, John Gray, Ian Grosvenor, Sheila Hakin, David Hargreaves, Steve Hussey, Martin Lawn, Mark Lofthouse, Gary McCulloch, Donald McIntyre, Terry McLaughlin, Rob Perks, Kate Rousmaniere, Jean Rudduck, Brian Simon and Frank Simon. To Peter Gordon, our series editor at Woburn Press, go very special thanks. Peter’s patience and forbearance in the face of so many delays on our part, together with his calm and unflagging support throughout the project have been far beyond the call of duty. Above all, we thank all those men and women who came forward in response to our press appeals to share with us their memories of the times, more than half a century ago, when they were student teachers. This work would have been impossible without their help, and we dedicate it to them. NOTES 1. Variously capitalised and punctuated in the primary sources, we have chosen the lower case form and hyphenated the term only when used adjectivally. 2. Kevin Brehony, ‘Introduction’, History of Education, 29:2 (2000), p.101. 3. Michael Schudson, ‘The Present in the Past Versus the Past in the Present’, Communication, 11:2 (1989), p.110. 4. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix E, ‘Memorandum from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association’, May 1927, p.1. See also Peter Sandiford, The Training of Teachers in England and

xvi

Wales (New York, Teachers College Press, 1910), pp.58–9. In accordance with then prevailing convention, most contemporary documentary sources habitually utilise the masculine pronoun though the very large majority of student teachers were of course women. 5. David Crook, ‘Universities, Teacher Training, and the Legacy of McNair, 1944– 94’, History of Education, 24:3 (1995), pp.231–3. 6. Respondents have been anonymised for the purposes of this study and names used throughout the book are pseudonyms. Individual testimonies have been assigned an identification number through which they may be traced at the Archive of Teacher Memory.

Part I

1 PROBLEMS AND APPROACHES

As we set about our substantive historical problem, the elucidation of the studentteacher scheme, it soon became clear in the course of the research that our attempts to address it were raising other important issues which were more concerned with the process and procedures of addressing the question itself. In other words, we were ineluctably led to reflect upon issues of method as well as of substance. Why should this particularly be so in the case of this piece of research? In the past each of us had written substantial historical studies which had not provoked, to quite the same degree, problems or responses of this sort. The primary answer derives principally from the systematic use of oral history techniques as a central part of the research method for this study.1 As we gathered evidence, we found ourselves immersed not only in those forms of archival data with which we were already very familiar, but also in the testimony—and thence the lives—of living women and men.2 The experience of extensive encounters with our respondents —with texts that talked back to us, to use Patrick Brindle’s telling phrase—was simultaneously liberating, challenging and humbling.3 It was an experience which, as we had anticipated, certainly contributed enormously to our substantive knowledge of the subject, but—as we had anticipated far less readily —also raised issues about the nature of the different kinds of evidence that were available to us and the ways in which we might seek to use them legitimately. To put this another way, the inescapably relational or dialogical aspect of oral history —and particularly, of course, the moment of the interview itself—inevitably brought us towards some wider consideration of history as a process of intellectual production as well as discovery.4 It is clear that the relation between the types of sources available to us has served in some degree to determine the kind of history that we have produced in this account. In broad terms, these sources comprised, on the one hand, evidence expressed through the written word and, on the other, evidence expressed through the spoken word. The first of these— documentary sources—constitute the elemental raw materials with which all historians are familiar and from which most habitually work. In the case of school teachers, there is an abundance of such documentation, emanating chiefly from official or semi-official agencies

PROBLEMS AND APPROACHES

3

such as the Board of Education, local education authorities, training colleges, teachers’ professional organisations and journals, and from local and national newspapers. It would be quite feasible to write a history of the profession by drawing upon this material alone. Indeed, there are a number of such histories, ranging from the older, traditional accounts of Tropp and Gosden, to more recent revisionist accounts such as those, for example, of Lawn and Kean.5 But each of these, whether adopting the putatively objectivist position of what Arthur Marwick once dubbed the ‘straight-line professional’,6 or the self-consciously engaged position of the revisionist, shares an important characteristic in common. Each—largely as a consequence of the characteristic nature of the sources— substantially passes over the figure of the classroom teacher.7 Because it is just this figure with whom our study is concerned, our approach has necessarily been different. The classroom teacher of the early twentieth century, stolid and substantial in popular stereotype, turns out to be a shadowy and elusive historical quarry in practice, apparently not much given to professional reflection, either in the course of a working life or thereafter.8 Written memorials are few and far between. We have therefore used a methodology in which the retrospective recollections of the individual classroom teacher have been centrally important. What are the implications of this? What are the promises and the problems entailed in the recovery of what might be thought of as the teachers’ voice?9 The promise held out by oral history is as seductive as it is substantial. This is probably why professional views on its use vary so widely. In the optimistic camp we might, for example, wish to celebrate the admission to the historical record of previously unheard oral testimony on the grounds either of its earlier history of exclusion or simply because of its unparalleled richness of depth and detail. On the one hand, these are remembrances which can be seen as opening up an evidential dimension which the existing documentary record was seldom designed to capture. On the other, this is evidence which can be presented as simultaneously vitalised and validated by its elemental status as the intimate record of narrated individual lives. In either case, oral history has the capacity to generate a sense of authenticity which can seem irresistible. In the pessimistic camp, we can remind ourselves of the range of concerns which have traditionally been raised against oral history as a method. The most important of these have to do with questions of reliability and representativeness. Questionable reliability is a charge which is often brought against the data produced by oral history interview. The charge rests principally upon three grounds; that such data draw upon the vagaries of individual memory; that they are the products of the present and not, as with the historical document, of the past; and that they are always critically influenced by, perhaps fundamentally shaped by, a conspiring interlocutor wearing the guise of objective historian.10 The charge asserts that if we wish to know about the past, then we would do well to found our knowledge upon evidence which is consonant with it. We should, to put the matter emphatically, recognise ‘memory as the enemy of history’.11 Such a recognition would claim that the latter, at its very least, orients us towards a

4 BECOMING TEACHERS: TEXTS AND TESTIMONIES 1907–1950

scientific reconstruction of the past whilst the former ultimately takes us towards a mythical representation of it.12 Such a stark dichotomy obfuscates quite as much as it clarifies.13 The relationship between history and memory, as has been pointed out in a number of telling recent works, may be seen in an altogether more positive light.14 In the words, for example, of Alistair Thomson, ‘One of the most significant shifts in the last twenty-five years of oral history has been th [e] recognition that the so-called unreliability of memory might be a resource, rather than a problem, for historical interpretation and reconstruction.’15 Memory may, in other words, have as much to tell us about the nature of the past by way of its selective or fictive devices as by virtue of its factual accuracy. In the same way, memory also alerts us to those aspects of the past which become sedimented through regular repetition in life narratives, against those which stand out as singular or occasional recollections. As for the charge that oral testimony is a product of the present, this must be unanswerable. In its nature, such testimony is separated—and often by very long periods of time—from the events of which it purports to speak. By contrast, the temporal integrity of the historical document, its status as a trace from its own time, is unequivocal. It maintains itself inviolate through time in a way that is clearly impossible for the spoken word. Indeed, it is the very qualities of permanence and temporal consonance upon which historians are most likely to draw in order to warrant their claims for the production of objectivist histories. Any such claim would argue that whilst the oral historian is irredeemably implicated in the generation of his or her data, the documentary historian may stand as the honest reporter of pre-existing evidence which happens to come before his or her scholarly attention.16 Long before Foucault, however, Croce and Carr had reminded us of the flaws in such an optimistic assertion. The permanence of the historical traces cannot, of itself, convey any corresponding guarantee of a similar quality in the histories composed from them. In this respect, the position of the oral historian and the documentary historian are not in fact so very dissimilar.17 If their characteristic data may be shown to be distinctively different, they are nevertheless made sense of through the inevitably interpretive strategies of the historian himself or herself, operating in the here and now. Each interpreter can do no other than interrogate a source from within their own place in time and can never, therefore, entirely escape the mundane charge of constructing ‘histories of the present’. The problem of unreliability is not, however, simply one to be associ ated with the procedural inadequacies of this or that documentary historian. To take this view would be to suppose that the fault must rest entirely with the worker and not his or her tools. It would be to assert that the truths inscribed within the documents of the past remain capable of being fully released but have yet to find the hand of that definitive historian sufficiently gifted to do so. But if the historian may not be up to the job, we must remember that the same is often true of the tools to hand. In the circumstances of their production, historical sources can reveal only certain privileged corners of the past to us and then only in a partial or


5

tendentious fashion.18 Though we repeatedly find ourselves obliged to overlook this point in practice, the capacity of the survival of certain favoured categories of documentary evidence—whether through accident or, more usually, through the design of their originators—to determine how history might be written, has come to constitute a staple of historio-graphical common knowledge. Recognition of that very inability of the conventional historical record to reach out to, and adequately engage, so many aspects of the everyday worlds of the past was, after all, one of the motive forces for the turn to oral history in the first place. Unreliabilities there will certainly be in all oral testimony. But the same is also true, if for different reasons, of more formal historical sources.19 If they are unavoidably to be found interwoven in individual memory, Elizabeth Tonkin reminds us that ‘the argument that myth and history are inextricably linked applies equally to written histories’.20 Rather than reassuring ourselves of the relative soundness of our chosen data sources by picking holes in the quality of alternative sources, we would do better to be attuned to the dangers of unreliable, contrived or partial evidence wherever it raises its head and to be alert to strategies for minimising or countering it. It is precisely for this reason that the use of oral and written sources alongside each other—the strategy followed in this book— commends itself as a particularly fruitful one. One of the inherent and inevitable difficulties of any oral history must be that it involves very small numbers of respondents in relation to the size of the original target group. As a function of the natural mortality of potential respondents from that group, scientific sampling is simply not possible in this kind of work, even if it were seen as desirable.21 Indeed, in its close methodological relation with life history, it might be argued that what is always represented to us in oral history interview are fragments of a unique individual life, a singular biography. There is, of course, a sense in which this is always the case. Each life is borne forward as an individual narrative. And yet, the story of each life always represents much more than an existential singularity. Nothing conveys this realisation so powerfully as the accumulated experience of oral history interview itself. Our interviews were conducted with men and women from broadly similar age groups, but beyond this, they had nothing in common other than their professional careers as school teachers. They came from all parts of the country, from diverse social backgrounds and few had any personal or geographical links with, or knowledge of, the others.22 And yet, in many respects, they spoke with the same voice. It is just this regular, collective insistence across a range of key educational sites and issues which allows us to move from individual account to more general representation with considerable confidence. Each account never constitutes an isolated source. Each voice from the past is unique but it is also never solitary. It has a semiotic dimension as well as a semantic one. Though the recollection of memory is always specific to each individual life, within such recollection there is always much that speaks with a truly representative voice.23 Throughout the private recollection of former school teachers, we hear over and over again of fundamentally common rhythms of


professional experience, expectation and orientation. We listen to similar reasons for becoming a teacher, similar experiences of classroom management, similar regard for local educational administrators, similar disregard for the central Board of Education, similar strategies for deflecting or diminishing the attentions of inspectors, and so on. Such rhythms constitute an immense, if latent, inherited professional discourse, always experienced within local contexts but with resonances extending, both in time and place, far beyond them.24 We are able, in other words, to locate each voice within larger historical contexts simultaneously recognisable to itself and comprehensible to us. But the representative quality of the testimony is not expressed only through its thematic serial replication. It also draws precisely upon its evidential ‘other’, upon the written word, and specifically upon the record purveyed in the official documentary record. This constitutes a body of evidence that opens upon a past that is shared by the spoken word, but in a quite different way.25 This combination of the common and the divergent, the shared and the distinctive, offers real opportunities for synergic analysis which draws upon the spoken and the written together. On the one hand, we may see the data generated by oral history as offering a challenge to the traditional seniority of official documentary sources in representing the past.26 On the other, we may observe that it is precisely the seemingly impersonal e vidence of the written word which, by the same token, guards against the elevation of oral data to a plane of existential purity where notions of external validation may be seen as of little consequence.27 But the relationship is far too complex to be left in these simple terms. The bringing together of the spoken and the written is not just a matter of optimising our opportunities for comparative analysis in any straight-forward way. It is also to acknowledge something more problematical; that the documentary record to which we attend as historians has already been attended to—if under different conditions and in very different ways—by just those former teachers whose oral testimony we seek today. The story told by the official document is therefore to some degree always an integral part of each individual oral testimony even though it may often be presented or perceived as largely extraneous or even opposed to it. This means that embedded in the private rememberings of each former teacher, there are also elements of shared or collective memories of teaching as an activity formally constructed within the discourse and exercise of public policy. And if the memories of most of our respondents fly more readily to the diverse private sites of this or that classroom in the past, they are also always brought together in collective memories of what it meant to be a member of a publicly constructed, regulated and gendered profession, formally dedicated to the service of the common interest.28 Just as each form of remembering—the one oriented towards teaching as a private activity and the other to the recognition of its simultaneously public character—is most revealing when it is brought alongside the evidence emerging from the documentary record, so private recollection itself is never fully


7

intelligible in isolation from the traditions of collective memory. That is why the fundamental guiding question which has been in our minds throughout this work has not been solely the reconstructionist one of mainstream history: ‘What happened?’ Neither has it been exclusively the interpretivist injunction of classical hermeneutics: ‘What was its meaning?’ Instead, we have sought to bring elements of both together to ask the question ‘How was it?’29 How was the pattern of past events chronologically sequenced and causatively linked? How was that pattern of events experienced and made sense of by those who lived through it? For us, this apparently simple formulation simultaneously engages the idea of discernible patterns of broad historical description and narrative explanation inscribed in both the documentary record and in the traditions of collective memory, and unifies them with that of the uniqueness of individual experience and perception.30 Our extensive use of oral history emphatically does not imply any rejection or demotion of the importance of conventional documentary sources. To do so would simply be to trade one omission for another, merely to invert the prevailing hierarchy of historical sources—from the lofty official document to the lowly personal memory—within which many historians work.31 It would, in other words, accord with what might be called a competitive model of historical data collection and analysis, a model in which different categories of sources vie for the mantle of exclusive authenticity or the crown of evidential purity. In place of such an exclusive model, we have been anxious to make extensive use of a comprehensive range of sources. This is not to say, however, that written and spoken data do not differ either in their epistemological status or in the scope they offer for historical analysis. It is not helpful, for example, to see data from oral interview as constituting simply a new mine of factual detail to be quarried and tipped onto the already voluminous heaps of information that are available to us from more conventional sources.32 In other words, we need to be cautious about what might be seen as a complementary model of source analysis; that is to say, an approach which sees information yielded through the spoken word as simply a matter of ‘filling the gaps’ left by an incomplete documentary record. In the same way, we need to guard against a model of data analysis which is conceived as simply corroborative, with each type of source seen as a channel through which the other might be confirmed, checked or validated. If the relationship between our sources cannot precisely be described as competitive, and neither complementary nor corroborative, then how might it otherwise be expressed? In the same way that effective social analysis can only make sense by finding ways to address the problems of structure and agency simultaneously,33 so our investigation of teacher training and professional identity calls at once upon the written and the spoken word. It calls, in other words, both upon the official document and upon the testimony of former teachers. Whilst these distinctive sources originate in quite different contexts, it would be misleading to see them as inherently oppositional or even as comparative in the conventional sense. This is because each of them is, to some


degree, ultimately involved in the production of the other.34 Each addresses, if from different locations and perspectives, a common set of educational issues. And in doing so, each is always aware, more or less explicitly, of what it perceives to be the interests and concerns of the other. In this respect, we should not expect that the two sources can be set against each other in any simplistic or essentialist way—as, for example, rhetorical account against realistic account.35 We should not expect to apply to the one for fundamentally subjective and representational accounts and to the other for objective and reconstructive data. Both emerge from common discursive contexts; both are linguistic productions. Each may tell their stories in different ways and with distinctive emphases, but many of their interests and much of their discursive vocabulary is the same. In this sense, just as the setting of structure against agency must always trap the historian in methodological dead ends, so the endless, confrontational opposition between the claims of historical reconstruction and historical representation ultimately diminishes historical endeavour. Instead, we need to address the languages within which these oppositions are formed. Whether we are reading documents or listening to testimony, whether we are guided by discourse analysis or by speech-act theory, our relation to our sources is fundamentally the same. In effect, we take the role of latecoming participants joining a continuing conversation which began long before we—and indeed our protagonists—began to contribute to it. As new prospective interpreters of our sources, we are always destined to arrive, in the words of Richard Kearney, ‘in the middle of an exchange which has already begun and in which we seek to orient ourselves in order to make some new sense of it’.36 The contributions that any of us may make to such an exchange are ours alone, but they never originate solely from us. Our sources share something else in common. Each is always incomplete. Stories about life are not life itself.37 Documentary records are not reality itself. Though each is always organically and inseparably connected to that which it seeks to relate, there are always spaces within which the narrative of the other account, as it were, can be set. In this respect, though the documentary record and the record of oral testimony may often be in dispute, they are always, if we allow them to be, also in permanent dialogue with one another. In sum, the relationship between our two principal sources, between spoken testimony and documentary evidence, is best represented as a union of distinctiveness and inseparability. It is a union in which each partner returns to the other a greater realisation of its evidential potential than it could ever generate on its own terms and from within its own resources. *** Having sketched some of the methodological issues upon which the book rests, let us now turn to situating the substantive historical question to which it is directed. A good deal of contemporary research in education has been increasingly interested in extending enquiry—as opposed to inference—to what goes on in


9

classrooms and to the lives of those who work there. The result has been a growing concern to explore the pyramid of educational activity not just at its pinnacle, at the level of policy formation and execution, but also at its broad base, at the point of pedagogy and professional practice.38 This has been a trend which, among other things, has helped to redirect attention from a dominating concern with historical explanation towards a renewed emphasis on individual experience and subjective meaning.39 This movement has been most sharply expressed in the revival of interest in narrative approaches directed, in Michael Huberman’s words, towards ‘the perplexities of capturing the course of teachers’ professional lives as rendered by the teachers themselves…’.40 Whilst this turn towards narrativity has been much debated in mainstream educational research, its impact upon the history of education—at least in the British case—has been much less profound.41 In this field, traditional research emphases have tended to retain their dominance. As Michael Katz succinctly puts it ‘histo-rians usually sit on the shoulders of reformers, legislators or administrators’.42 This has meant that the majority of the work that is undertaken remains disproportionately concentrated on that which goes on, so to say, at the apex of the pyramid.43 In other words, the field continues to take the record of the elite formulation and implementation of policy as its central problem. Such a traditional approach has much to commend it. Most obviously, it has yielded many important and revealing results in the past, and there will always be many further questions to which it has yet to turn. In other words, the pinnacle of the pyramid remains a productive, legitimate and leading site for continuing systematic historical research.44 But this is far from being the only issue. Most educational historians are indifferent neither to classroom-based research nor to life history approaches. Neither are they oblivious to the important theoretical questions signalled by such methods. The problem, however, is that, by comparison with the historian’s familiar methods of documentary analysis, the adoption of such techniques raises intractable difficulties in relation to sources. Necessarily, the historian has to work from sources which are both valid and sufficiently extensive to support defensible historical interpretations. Without sources which satisfy this requirement, the development of such positions becomes at best paralysingly difficult and at worst simply impossible. This implies, in short, that there will always be historical questions which, despite our desire to address them, must remain beyond the reach of disciplined enquiry. On this view, such issues are suited only to guarded speculation or occasional illustration or allusion, with the practice of serious historical enquiry restricted to those questions for which the available documentary record is sufficiently extensive to support sustained engagement. The nature of the accessible record means that these questions will always predominantly be those which cluster at the summit of the pyramid. The further we descend from the apex, the greater becomes the paucity or poor quality of legitimate sources. Somewhere very near the base of the pyramid is the world of the classroom in past time. This is the level—though not the only site—with which this book is


explicitly concerned. Here, reliable and extensive sources of the kind which proliferate at the apex are dramatically fewer. In particular, the voices of those who actually peopled this world are poorly represented, and notably so by comparison with those who determined its parameters, such as policy makers and administrators, or those who dropped in on it for episodic observations, such as school inspectors. This does not mean, however, that such voices—and through them, the educational worlds of which they speak—are lost to us.45 A central goal of this research has been precisely to seek them out and to attend to them as important new historical evidence for addressing some of the questions we wish to ask. Through listening to these voices, we hope to find that the base of the educational pyramid is a place that historians can explore in much more detail than might have been supposed until now. The notion of the reconstruction of the working world of classrooms from the past has provided us with a tantalising research focus. The fulfilment of such an ambitious project, however, will be complex, difficult and very time-consuming. It will require many detailed and innovative local and national studies and considerable collective effort effectively amounting to the opening of a whole new research front.46 In the present work, therefore, we have concentrated the range and the scope of our investigation into one discrete area of enquiry. In range, we have concentrated upon the period 1907–50. These were years of educational transition, spanning the two world wars. ‘Years of transition’ is an overworked phrase. But in terms of the development of national education, it is one which sits well upon these four decades or so. These were the years in which what might be seen as a ‘long nineteenth century’ for education was coming to an end as the ideological bases for the traditional segregation between elementary and secondary sectors of schooling dissipated and as the inclusive settlement of 1944 was prefigured. In scope, we have concerned ourselves particularly with classroom teachers rather than with pupils, parents, governors or local authority administrators. It is important to remind ourselves just how slight is our knowledge of interwar classroom teachers. They are undoubtedly figures who are etched deeply in popular memory, yet in a rather curious way. Teachers may seem familiar but in fact they remain substantially unknown. Why is this? Picture a teacher at work in her classroom. She stands before the class, elaborating some point of detail for her small audience. For her pupils, the entire purpose and the promise of this moment resolves itself into the person of this solitary, unifying figure. The teacher is the central and defining agent of classroom life. Her hand is upon everything—what is taught and learned, how it is taught and learned, how the physical space constructed by the classroom walls is configured and how its prevailing atmosphere is defined. Each of us will be able to think back to numberless moments to illustrate this from our own experience. But in growing up, in leaving our school days behind us, we also left behind our teachers, and what they still had to say to us. And when, as scholars and academics, we set to work to make historical sense of the trajectory of


11

modern popular education, it has been easy to compound our forgetfulness of those individuals around whom our educational worlds once revolved. The erstwhile stars of the show, in other words, have been written out of the reviews. In their place, we have readily turned to generalised representations, whether literary, scholarly or popular, drawing overwhelmingly on a narrow range of pedagogical stereotypes. There are doubtless many reasons for this, for our failure as historians properly to attend to the voices of those to whom we once listened so intently all those years ago. Whatever these reasons might be, they have had a profoundly deleterious effect upon our efforts to relate educational history in the twenty-first century. To the extent that we ignore the once powerful voices of the classroom teachers themselves, the histories of education that we offer must be etiolated, unbalanced or incomplete. They will conspire with what Kate Rousmaniere in her important book, City Teachers, calls ‘the historical silence on teachers’ work’.47 To a degree, the images—such as they are—of the classroom teacher conveyed by existing histories of education are analogous to our own childhood experiences of those who once taught us. In both accounts, though ever present, teachers retain a characteristically mysterious and ambivalent quality. When we were ourselves at school, it was easy for our teachers to become the objects of rumour, myth, speculation and blanket generalisation. And this is how we continue to see them.48 Within the literature we may find, for example, the elementary school teacher portrayed as brutal and uncaring sadist; as quiescent, self-sacrificing cipher; as selfless social missionary; as hapless dupe of the rich and powerful; as embittered personal failure frustrated by lowly social status; or yet as emergent political and trade union activist. Listening to the voices of individual teachers will help us both to challenge such easy historical stereotypes and to uncover the genuine distinctions which marked the teaching profession in the inter-war years. In seeking to approach these figures and their perceptions of professional identity, we have conceptualised four areas of particular significance. These are: policy, profession, practice and person. None of these, on its own, can offer us a sufficiently powerful focus for an understanding of the nature of professional identity. Taken together, however, they give us an opportunity to paint a comprehensive picture of the ways in which a complex professional culture was constructed, experienced and reworked. Each of the four areas links to distinctive, though clearly related, fields of enquiry. So, for investigating the person, we have chiefly been concerned with life story; for the profession, with status; for policy, with teacher training; and for practice, with life in classrooms. These, clearly, are analytical distinctions. In practice, each is inextricably implicated in the others. For example, life stories are comprehensible only through the social, political and professional contexts within which lives are lived. Policy formulation is always shaped by conceptions of pedagogy and judgments about the limits of professionalism.49 Professional status is strongly defined by the character of professional training and public perception of


classroom practice.50 Forms of practice are endlessly negotiated against changes in the configuration of policy and professional formation. And professional identity itself is engaged and permanently reconstructed at the intersection of life story, professional status, policy and practice. Precisely because each of our four areas of concern flows into each other in the construction of professional identity, we sought for a single historical location at which all four came together, and through which we might investigate each both independently and in conjunction with the others. We found such a location—more accurately, thanks to the insistence of the combined remembrances of many former classroom teachers, it found us—in the shape of the student-teacher scheme, introduced in 1907 under the Campbell-Bannerman government which had swept to office in the Liberal landslide of the previous year.51 The scheme’s inception represents something far more significant than a mere administrative refinement. Its key historical importance has seldom, however, been fully appreciated. The student-teacher scheme made its first appearance in new regulations for the preliminary education—the pre-college preparation—of elementary school teachers. The principal architect of the regulations was the Permanent Secretary at the Board of Education, Sir Robert Morant, a controversial figure in his day and scarcely less so among historians ever since.52 The scheme has unique importance as the policy intervention which was interposed between the nineteenth century tradition of school-based apprenticeship training and the college-based forms of professional preparation which were progressively to dominate the twentieth century until its close. To this degree, it represents the principal hinge upon which turned what were, in their most extreme form, two distinctive approaches to elementary teaching either as a practically-based craft activity or as a theoretically informed profession. That is why so many of the positions rehearsed in the teacher-training debates of the 1990s were so closely pre-figured in the debates of the first decade of the century and whose resolution found practical expression at this point in the form of the student-teacher scheme.53 In 1943, when the student-teacher scheme was a very long way past the point of its highest popularity among local authorities, Maurice Harrison, the Director of Education for Oldham, offered a useful reflection upon the central issues it had raised in educational circles. The majority of candidates for the profession enter training college or university training department after pursuing a secondary school course… whereby they are considered to prove their intellectual and academic appropriateness for a career of teaching. Some enter college after a year of student teaching, and the value of the student teacher year is a subject of controversy. A student teacher is one who after continuous attendance at school till seventeen years of age…then spends a year gaining experience in some school. He receives a small nominal salary of about £1 per week… The controversy concerning the value of the student teacher year arises


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from the question whether it is to the advantage of the student to continue a full-time school course until he goes to college or to omit a year’s school work and to obtain practical teaching experience in schools. There are those who argue that the student who has tried his hand at teaching appreciates more truly the problems that will face him as a teacher, and therefore takes more seriously…college training. Others, as well qualified to judge, contend that…in fact, the youngster who perambulates the school as a student teacher largely wastes his time…and the opportunity of taking classes himself is more dangerous than valuable, for, having no knowledge of what his aims should be, he is as likely to form bad habits as good.54 The real significance of the student-teacher scheme in the construction of professional identity is not, however, most immediately apparent from the documentary record. It was not from such sources that our awareness of the scheme’s seminal importance initially came. This was first brought home to us by those who had had first-hand experience of the scheme itself —that is to say, by former student teachers themselves. We found unprompted references to the scheme cropping up again and again.55 The student-teacher year, to my mind, was a very good year. They did away with it but I could never see why. And it was a most wonderful thing because you found out whether you could face a class or if you couldn’t. That was a wonderful arrangement which they’ve abandoned now of course, and it’s a mistake. I think my year as a student teacher was the year that made me into a teacher. I always thought that. I mean, you had to go through the college as well, because you had to get your certificate… This student-teachership was an excellent idea, it gave you a real insight. [The student-teacher scheme] had just finished before I started. The year before was the last year, and I think it was excellent—I think it was jolly good. I missed it because it had finished the year before. I went straight to college at eighteen.56 And in the animation with which many teachers spoke of the scheme, we began to recognise the possible existence of a concrete local setting for a constellation of shared experience constituting what Maurice Halbwachs would have seen as the basis for an identifiable place of memory.57 From here, we went on to conjecture that, in listening to memories of the student-teacher scheme, we were listening to much more than the recollections of a brief and transient phase in individual life stories. In fact we were hearing accounts of a site where awareness of professional identity and culture may have been dynamically produced, thereafter to be deeply sustained and developed in memory, through time. If this were so, it would give the history of the scheme a special importance. For if the student-teacher scheme appears in the documentary record


as just another passing chapter in the development of training policy, it appears in a quite different configuration in the recollections of former student teachers. Here it stands as a central motif of collective memory and a defining landmark in the mental geography of the teaching profession in the first half of the twentieth century. From this perspective, the student-teacher scheme might be presented as one of the central elements from which a relatively stable collective professional identity was constructed for generations of teachers who began their careers in the 1910s to the 1930s and which carried them through into the last years of their classroom lives in the 1950s and 1960s. In this respect, the withdrawal of the support of central government for the scheme from the mid-1920s onwards might be seen as constituting something rather more significant than an administrative refinement in an incremental programme of policy development. Rather, it appears as something far more fundamental, as an attempt not to reform the figure of the classroom teacher, but to make it anew. For this process to be successful, two elements were necessary. In the first place, a new idealisation of the teacher needed to be established and incorporated within the policy discourse of education. In the second, the practical realisation of this new ideal required that the conditions which had supported an older, outdated tradition of pedagogy be removed. The first element was promulgated in the first decade of the century by the key figure of Sir Robert Morant. The second was achieved by making that which had always been the site best known to teachers—the classroom itself— into an unfamiliar, into a strange, place.58 The combined effect of these two strategies promised to re-make the figure of the classroom teacher. But by the mid-1920s, it was clear that the continued and unexpected survival of the student-teacher scheme was a threat to them both. If the professional self-perceptions of classroom teachers in the 1920s and 1930s were, by the testimony of former practitioners from those years, relatively settled, recent studies of contemporary classroom teachers have painted a very different picture of professional identity at the end of the twentieth century—as fractured, confused, spoiled and, in key respects, lost.59 Such a sense of loss can undoubtedly be linked to many factors, including the accelerated pace of change in professional life which 20 years of fundamental and sustained policy activity has brought. For many contemporary practitioners, teaching no longer seems to be what it once was—or was once supposed to be. Against this background, a particularly seductive form of insulation from rapid change and potential threat is held out in appealing to a mythic golden age somewhere in the not too distant past. Such appeals can doubtless be heard daily in staffrooms up and down the country. But what teachers have found more difficult to do is to mount a response to change which is more securely informed both by history and by a reconnection with an assured collective memory of the development of their own profession through time. In its highlighting of the inter-war student-teacher scheme, our research may indicate one of the historical foundations upon which such a response might have been built.


15

NOTES 1. M.Frisch, A Shared Authority (New York, State University of New York Press, 1990), p.xix. 2. John Nerone, ‘Professional History and Social Memory’, Communication, 11 (1989), pp.89–104. 3. Patrick Brindle, ‘Past Histories: History and the Elementary School Classroom in Early 20th Century England’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1998), University of Cambridge. 4. Andrew P.Norman, ‘Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms’, History and Theory, 30:2 (1991), pp. 119–35; Martin Cortazzi, Narrative Analysis (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1993), pp.21–3. 5. Asher Tropp, The School Teachers: The Growth of the Teaching Profession in England and Wales from 1800 to the Present Day (London, Heinemann, 1957); P.H.J.H.Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession: A Study of the Contribution of Teachers’ Associations to the Development of School Teaching as a Professional Occupation (London, Basil Blackwell, 1972); Martin Lawn, Servants of the State: The Contested Control of Teaching 1900–1930 (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1987); Hilda Kean, Challenging the State? The Socialist and Feminist Educational Experience 1900–1930 (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1990). 6. Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London, Macmillan, 1970), p.87; see also Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (London, Fontana, 1969). 7. But see the notable attempt to re-introduce this figure in Gerald Grace, Teachers, Ideology and Control (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 8. Tropp, The School Teachers. 9. Richard Altenbaugh, The Teacher’s Voice: A Social History of Teaching in Twentieth Century America (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1992). 10. Alistair Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’, Journal of American History, 85:2 (1998), pp.584–8. 11. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York, Columbia University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Tonkin, ‘History and the Myth of Realism’, in Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By (London, Routledge, 1990), p.25. 12. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel and Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By. 13. Paul Thompson, ‘Believe it or Not: Rethinking the Historical Interpretation of Memory’, in Jaclyn Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall, Memory and Oral History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience (Lanham, NJ, University Press of America, 1994), p.2. 14. Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1993); Matt Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996); Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992); Le Goff, History and Memory. 15. Thomson, “Fifty Years On”, p.585. 16. Elton, The Practice of History, pp.71–8; also see Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), pp.8–9.


17. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, 3rd edn), pp.265, 273; Scott W. Webster, ‘A Historian’s Perspective on Interviewing’, in R. Josselson, The Narrative Study of Lives Vol. 4 (London, Sage, 1996), pp.199– 201; Peter Cunningham, ‘Narrative and Text: Women, Teachers and Oral History’, History of Education, 29:3 (2000), pp.273–80. 18. Sidney Monas, ‘Contemporary Historiography: Some Kicks in the Old Coffin’, in Henry Kozicki (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1993), p.12. 19. Patrick Hutton, ‘Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities: The HalbwachsAries Connection’, Historical Reflections, 15:2 (1988), pp.311–22, 317; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the Working Classes (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2001), p.2. 20. Tonkin, ‘History and the Myth of Realism’, p.25; Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1991), p.3. 21. J.M.Foot, ‘Words, Songs and Books. Oral History in Italy: A Review and Discussion’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3:2 (1998), p.170; Thompson, The Voice of the Past, (3rd edn), p.289. 22. Amongst the auto/biographical accounts in Part III below we do, however, include a pair of childhood friends (Chapter 10) and a pair of siblings (Chapter 12) for the resonances which common experience of school and family can provide. Shared experiences of training college feature in a number of the testimonies we gathered, but college experience does not provide the main focus of this book. 23. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 124; also Thompson, The Voice of the Past (3rd edn), p.305; Cortazzi, Narrative Analysis, p.20. 24. Samuel and Thompson, The Myths We Live By, p.10. 25. Luisa Passerini, ‘A Memory for Women’s History: Problems of Method and Interpretation’, Social Science History, 16:4 (1992), pp.676–7. 26. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 1987). 27. Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’, in R.Johnson et al. (eds), Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics (London, Hutchinson, 1982), p.227; Thompson, ‘Believe it or Not’, p.3. 28. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society Since 1800 (London, Routledge, 1989). 29. Norman offers a similar formulation in ‘Telling it Like it Was’, p.168. 30. Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, pp.83–4, 93–4; John van den Hengel, ‘Paul Ricoeur’s “Oneself as Another” and Practical Theology’, Theological Studies, 55 (1994), pp.458–80; Allan Megill, ‘Recounting the Past: “Description”, Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography’, American Historical Review, 94:3 (1989), pp.627–53; H.P. Rickman, ‘Hermeneutics’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 7:3 (1976), pp. 167–76. 31. Frisch, A Shared Authority, p.xviii; Thompson, The Voice of the Past, pp.101, 265; J. Swindells, ‘Liberating the Subject? Autobiography and “Women’s History”: A Reading of the Diaries of Hannah Culwick’, in Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1989).


17

32. Steven G.Crowell, ‘Dialogue and Text: Re-Marking the Difference’, in Tullio Maranhao, The Interpretation of Dialogue (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1990), p.339. 33. G.Stedman Jones, ‘The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), pp. 19–35; Miguel A.Cabrera, ‘Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History’, Social History, 24:1 (1999), pp.74–89; Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984), ch.1. 34. See Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (London, Allen & Unwin, 1994), pp.xi-xxiii. 35. Documents of course are not themselves free from many problems of reliability; see, for example, Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, p.7. 36. R.Kearney, ‘Ricoeur’, in Simon Critchley and William R.Schroeder (eds), A Companion to Continental Philosophy (London, Blackwell, 1998), p.447; Cabrera, ‘Linguistic Approach’, p.82. 37. G.Q.M.Widdershoven, The Story of Life: Hermeneutic Perspectives on the Relationships Between Narrative and Life History’, in R.Josselson and A.Lieblich (eds), The Narrative Study of Lives, Vol. 1 (London, Sage), pp.1–20. For a different view see D.Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory, 25:2 (1986), pp.1 17–31; also see Norman, Telling It Like It Was’, p.156; Alan Munslow, Deconstructing History (London, Routledge, 1997), p.11; Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (London, Routledge, 2001). 38. See particularly Harold Silver, Education as History: Interpreting Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Education (London, Methuen, 1983). Also Stephen J.Ball, Education Reform: A Critical and Post-Structural Approach (Buckingham, Open University Press, 1994); Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere (eds), Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York, Peter Lang, 1999). 39. R.Moore, ‘Back to the Future: The Problem of Change and the Possibilities of Advance in the Sociology of Education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 17:2 (1996), p.146; Susan Stedman Jones, Durkheim Reconsidered (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001), pp.218–26. 40. M.Huberman, ‘Working with Life History Narratives’, in H.McEwan and K.Egan, Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research (New York, Teachers College Press, 1995), p.128; Cortazzi, Narrative Analysis. 41. Cunningham, ‘Narrative and Text: Women, Teachers and Oral History’, pp.273–80. 42. Michael B.Katz, ‘Devotion and Ambiguity in the Struggles of a Poor Mother and Her Family: New York City, 1918–1919’, in Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps (eds), Reconstructing the. Common Good in Education (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000), p.186. 43. For notable examples of locally oriented studies in the history of education, see particularly the accumulated work of W.E.Marsden. 44. Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old. 45. See particularly Marc Depaepe, Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practice in Primary Schools, Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2000).


46. Our current contribution to this work takes the form of an ESRC-supported oral history of the pedagogical and personal relationships established by teachers with their pupils during the collective experience of wartime evacuation throughout the Second World War, and their subsequent impact. 47. Kate Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York, Teachers College Press, 1997), p.5; also see Altenbaugh, The Teacher’s Voice; Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1880–1990 (New York, Teachers College Press, 1993, 2nd edn). 48. Something of this point is caught in a brief but perceptive piece in The Schoolmaster, 15 August 1908, p.264. ‘People have little or no experience of their teachers during youth and manhood. “When I was a child I thought as a child”, with what seems to me now an exaggerated opinion of my teacher, whose knowledge and erudition appeared so extensive and pervading… So have millions of other children thought. So do millions of them think to-day. But the mind develops. The faculties which the day school quickened into life find full and wide scope in the busy world, and as the years go by the teacher is seen in his true perspective, as simply a human being. The veil falls from before the image. The idol has feet of earthly clay, like other men.’ 49. J.Elliott, ‘A Model of Professionalism and its Implications for Teacher Education’, British Education Research Journal, 17:4 (1991), pp.309–10. 50. P.Cunningham, P.Gardner, B.Wells and R.Willis, ‘McNair’s Lost Opportunity: The Student-Teacher Scheme and the Student-Teacher’s Experience’, History of Education, 24:3 (1995), pp.221–9; P.Gardner (1995a), ‘Teacher Training and Changing Professional Identity in Early Twentieth Century England’, Journal of Education for Teaching, 21:2 (1995), pp.191–217; P. Gardner (1995b), ‘Intending Teachers and School-Based Teacher Training, 1903–1939’, Oxford Review of Education, 21:4 (1995), pp.425–45. 51. A.K.Russell, Liberal landslide (Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1973). 52. John Leese, Personalities and Power in English Education (Leeds, E.J. Arnold, 1950), pp.225–57. 53. See, for example, Donald McIntyre, Hazel Hagger and Margaret Wilkin (eds), Mentoring: Perspectives on School-Based Teacher Education (London, Kogan Page, 1993); Martin Booth, John Furlong and Margaret Wilkin (eds), Partnership in Initial Teacher Training (London, Cassell, 1990); V.J.Furlong, P.H. Hirst, K.Pocklington and S.Miles, Initial Teacher Training and the Role of the School (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1988); John Furlong, Len Barton, Sheila Miles, Caroline Whiting, Geoff Whitty, Teacher Education in Transition: ReForming Professionalism? (Buckingham, Open University Press, 2000). 54. Maurice Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred (London, Pitman & Sons, 1943), pp. 16–17. Harrison was not himself a supporter of the scheme; also see ‘Ex-bursars and College’, The Schoolmaster, 10 October 1908, p.604. 55. Gardner, ‘Intending Teachers’, p.430. 56. Ibid., pp.430–1. 57. Lewis A.Coser (ed.), Maurice Halbwachs on Collective Memory (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1992); Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, p.1; Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1 (New York,


19

Columbia University Press, 1996), p.xvii; Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1997), ch.3. 58. As, during the same period, the child was increasingly ‘made strange’ through the science of psychology. See Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994). 59. S.Ball and I.Goodson, ‘Understanding Teachers: Concepts and Contexts’, in S.Ball and I.Goodson (eds), Teachers’ Lives and Careers (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1985), p. 4; P. Sikes, L.Measor and P.Woods, Teacher Careers: Crisis and Continuities (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1985), pp.8–9; M.Maclure, J.Elliott, A.Marr, I.Stronach, Teachers Jobs and Lives (London, ESRC, 1989). Also see Andy Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers, Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age (London, Cassell, 1994); Gill Helsby, Changing Teachers’ Work (Buckingham, Open University Press, 1999); Gary McCulloch, ‘The Reinvention of Teacher Professionalism’, in Robert Phillips and John Furlong (eds), Education, Reform and the State: Twenty-Five Years of Politics, Policy and Practice (London, Routledge/Falmer Press, 2001), pp.103–17.

Part II

2 POLICY DEVELOPED: THE STUDENT— TEACHER SCHEME AND ITS ORIGINS

The student-teacher scheme continues to be vividly remembered in the minds of the diminishing band of men and women who experienced it. It is not, however, represented so forcefully in the classic historical accounts of the development of teacher training. Gosden mentions the scheme only by way of a passing reference and a solitary footnote.1 Dent makes a brief allusion to the scheme as finding favour with local authorities but less amongst the teachers themselves.2 Tropp records the scheme’s existence in a single line.3 The student-teacher scheme, then, constitutes a largely ignored episode in a historical narrative which, in traditionally leaping from the hegemony of pupilteacher apprenticeship to that of college training, is seriously deficient. In simply eliding student teaching in this way, the existing accounts have compressed a historical space which needs to be re-opened. Perhaps the elision is, to some degree, a pardonable one if we take the documentary record as our only historical resource. This is not at all because the record is silent on the matter of the scheme, as we shall shortly see. It is because, in terms of national policy formulation, the scheme was marginalised and discredited from its inception, not least by those who devised it in the first place. The fundamental principles upon which the scheme rested were seen at the Board of Education to be intellectually dubious and, in practical terms, profoundly outdated. It is unsurprising that historians have failed greatly to attend to a piece of policy which, despite being largely his own initiative, Robert Morant, Permanent Secretary at the Board of Education for most of the first decade of the twentieth century, thought little of and regarded as holding no lasting significance for the reformation of teacher training. Why was this? At the start of the twentieth century, the legacy of the traditional pupil-teacher system, with its hallmarks of early apprenticeship and precocious technical proficiency in the classroom, continued to exert a powerful symbolic influence upon a profession made up overwhelmingly of former pupil teachers.4 But if the teachers themselves commonly had a considerable regard for the traditional configuration of their training, the Board of Education did not. Here, the pupilteacher system was seen as the principal cause of


that narrowness of intellectual and professional outlook which had long been felt to be one of the weakest points of the profession, and which, it can hardly be doubted, was largely due to the inhuman and deadening influences under which generation after generation of pupil teachers had been educated.5 Morant’s goal in reforming the pattern of teacher training was to eradicate these negative attributes from the teaching force and, in their stead, to implant a more advanced professional culture for the long term.6 But the turn towards a new type of recruit, better educated and less socially restricted, also raised short-term problems of which Morant was well aware. One of these related to the inherited difficulties caused by the excessive size of the school classes with which teachers were typically confronted. In the Board’s judgment, large classes and mechanical teaching—traditionally associated with pupil teaching—were twin manifestations of the failure of an outmoded system and the reform of each was seen to be, to some extent, contingent upon the other. Teacher training was more immediately responsive to reform than the lowering of average class sizes, a process which would clearly take much longer.7 This meant that there was likely to be an interim period in which the new type of elementary school teacher might continue to be residually faced with the large classes of the old School Board era. This prospect did not unduly trouble the Board of Education. ‘It is not to be doubted’, it announced in 1907, that a teacher who has had the experience of a Pupil-Teacher is better able to handle the inflated and sometimes unruly classes of a Public Elementary School than one who makes his first acquaintance with such classes when he enters them as a Training College student at the age of 17. Such students cannot, it is complained, stand up to a class. They are embarrassed, shy, and at first helpless. They get impatient and confused.8 But, as anticipated falls in class sizes came into effect, the Board judged that any short-term problems in classroom management would be more than offset by the long-term benefits entailed in the quality enhancement of teacher supply. After all, the size of the classes…is diminishing and should tend to diminish further. Inexperience in enforcing discipline is capable of remedy, whereas it is beyond remedy if teachers are brought into schools without the trained intelligence and refinement of character which are alone able to make their work permanent and effective.9 Morant acknowledged the immediate dangers in giving up the emphasis upon early technical prowess which had been the hallmark of the pupil teacher. As a temporary consequence of his reforms, he went so far as to say that it would not be surprising ‘if, as time goes on, it is found that many of our schools are in the

POLICY DEVELOPED: THE STUDENT-TEACHER SCHEME AND ITS ORIGINS

23

hands of teachers who have been very inadequately equipped in some important directions for the daily duties of their profession’.10 Moreover, however much the Board might wish for the planned improvement in teacher supply to be achieved as rapidly as possible, it was clear that the practical, financial and logistical costs of finally moving the locus of training from the elementary school to the training college would be substantial. If these difficulties were taken together with the predicted dislocation of customary skills in classroom management, they jointly seemed to commend the retention of a transitional variation on traditional preliminary training as a useful expedient. The studentteacher scheme was precisely the result of such thinking. The break in professional culture and expectation which Morant sought was, of course, achieved in the fullness of time. But in what might be seen as the professional interregnum which followed the 1907 training reforms, the schoolbased scheme which the Board had sanctioned as no more than an experimental stop-gap established itself unexpectedly deeply, both practically and symbolically, in the minds of many young entrants to the profession. It also won powerful supporters within most local education authorities and, more unexpectedly, amongst a substantial group within the national inspectorate. If, for the Board of Education, the scheme was designed as a temporary exercise, this is not how it came to be represented in the professional lives and remembrances of many of those with direct experience of it. For former student teachers in particular, the experience of the scheme would often come to establish a salient and enduring place in their personal and professional life narratives. Let us turn briefly to the historical and policy context for Morant’s reforms before looking in more detail at their practical implementation and subsequent negotiation. *** Teacher-training reform in the early twentieth century was marked by a number of developing policy objectives. Chief among these were the raising of the minimum age of recruits entering the profession, the attenuation of premature teaching experience and the enhancement of the personal and general education of recruits. Each of these was seen to constitute a prerequisite for good professional practice in the classroom.11 In adopting the terms of this agenda, Morant was following a line of think ing which had been gathering momentum from the time of the 1888 Cross Commission’s minority report, which had considered the pupil-teacher system to be ‘the weakest part of our educational machinery…great changes are needed in it if it is to be continued’.12 The 1895 Royal Commission on Secondary Education built upon this lead by identifying the model of training which a reforming policy might adopt. ‘So far as secondary teachers are trained, the order of development in their training is better: (1) general knowledge, (2) special training. The elementary system needs reform to bring it more into line with this order.’13 Three years later, the report of a


departmental investigation into the pupil-teacher system followed this principle in announcing that The time has come when the primary school ideal that has been followed heretofore in the construction of the courses for pupil-teachers should give way to something higher…the preparation of young teachers can and ought to approximate more closely to the liberal methods and studies which would help to bring them to the same level as the best scholars of our secondary schools.14 Cumulatively, such arguments assembled an irresistible critique of the tradition of pupil teaching, of teaching’s dependence on that strain of premature or precocious professionalism which increasingly appeared to policy makers as restrictive, unimaginative and, moreover, generally risible. In raising the minimum age for recognition as a pupil teacher, in restricting the hours that he or she might teach and in enhancing their courses of academic instruction, new pupil-teacher regulations, issued by Morant in July 1903, were explicitly directed at transforming the traditional character of preliminary teacher training.15 Dent describes these measures as ‘revolutionary’.16 This adjective is better reserved, however, for the next phase of the reform process. More dramatic changes came with the publication of the training regulations of April 1907, as a consequence of which pupil teaching was effectively abolished in all but remote rural areas and preliminary preparation was resettled more securely within the elevating atmosphere of the secondary school. This defining reform was achieved at the ultimate cost of the pupil-teacher centre, a relatively recent institution which represented the old tradition of training in its highest form.17 The Board of Education certainly did not envisage the centres as a potential wellspring for continuing innovation and experiment in the personal and professional preparation of teachers. Instead, it looked forward, without attempt to disguise the pejorative tone of its language, to ‘the ultimate conversion of those centres which are well staffed and properly equipped into real Secondary schools’.18 As Dent observes, the symbolic disappearance of the words ‘pupil-teacher’ from the title of the 1907 regulations was a power ful and pointed signal to the profession. The new regime, according to the Board, would diverge ‘so widely from the original conception of Pupil-Teachership…that it would be misleading to apply to the persons instructed and trained in accordance with it the name of “Pupil-Teachers”’.19 This was the moment at which the designations ‘bursar’ and ‘student teacher’ claimed their place within the teachertraining lexicon, becoming the terms with which the youthful ambitions of most of our interview respondents would become entwined—just one, Barbara Mill, came through the residual rural pupil-teacher route. This was also the moment when Morant’s vision of a new teacher for a new age most fully declared itself; ‘the value…of a liberal education for teachers can hardly be overestimated’, such an education being not only the means ‘to preserve intellectual freshness and


25

moral vigour through the arduous labours of a teacher’s life’, but also, and equally significantly, now additionally understood as the individual teacher’s ‘right’.20 The 1907 regulations comprised two principal elements. In the first place, a system of bursaries was to be established, ‘by which it would be possible for intending Elementary School Teachers to receive continuous education at Secondary Schools during the first year of their recognition’.21 Such would-be scholars, in other words, would now have their secondary education publicly financed up to the minimum age of 17 (rather than to the age of 16, as provided in the regulations of 1903), in return for a commitment to follow a career in teaching.22 Bursars were the embodiment of the Board of Education’s desire to secure for intending teachers ‘as long a period as possible of continuous education in a Secondary School’.23 The second element introduced by the new regulations did not enjoy the same official mark of approval; this was the student-teacher scheme.24 It is not…anticipated that it will be possible for all Bursars to proceed direct to Training Colleges, and it is even probable that some Authorities may prefer an intermediate period of employment in Elementary Schools under the supervision of competent Head Teachers, in order to lay a foundation of practical experience as a basis for more scientific training at a later stage… It will therefore be open to any Authority to submit…a scheme for the employment and supervision of Student-Teachers.25 The Board was aware that a number of local authorities were interested in maintaining a practical school-based element as part of the established pattern of their programmes of preliminary training, and it was prepared to allow a good deal of latitude to individual authorities in the detailed design of schemes for student teachers.26 The Board, however, reserved its right to press for specific modifications in the organisation or operation of local schemes and, if necessary, to withdraw approval altogether. In effect, the Board was keeping the scheme at arm’s length. Significantly, the student-teacher year provided for a prolongation of personal education in addition to elementary school-based practical experience. The stipulation of an ongoing academic component of this kind reinforces the view that Morant’s concession to the apprenticeship model was fundamentally a reluctant or grudging one. Whilst the precise form of the continuing education to be supplied was a detail left to be negotiated between the local education authority and individual secondary schools, the most common strategy was for students to maintain continued contact with their former secondary schools for one day per week. There were other variations but, whatever the pattern it took, the significance of this element and the varied impact of different arrangements figure prominently in many student teachers’ recollections, as will be seen in Chapter 7. As was always the case, arrangements for rural areas were rather


different. Here, with no educational infrastructure to support the full studentteacher model, a modified pupil-teacher system was allowed to continue. This was known as the rural pupil-teacher scheme and a few of our respondents, including Barbara Mill, followed this route (see Chapter 13). Morant had never seen the student-teacher scheme as anything other than a residual concession, prompted as much by practical considerations of teacher supply and pressure on training college places as by the need to respond to the expressed interests of classroom teachers.27 The Board of Education hoped that, in the fullness of time, the established norm would be ‘that Ex-Bursars will proceed direct to Training Colleges’, there to ‘receive their earliest experiences in the difficult art of teaching’.28 This intimation of permanence stood in sharp contrast with the prospects of the student-teacher scheme which was designated as ‘an experimental one’.29 Unusually for a period in which the tendency across all areas of educational policy was for the raising of ages of qualification, the 1907 regulations facilitated the expectation of direct enrollment at training college by reducing the minimum age of entry from 18 to 17.30 The recommended elision of the student-teacher year reflected Morant’s particular disdain for what he called ‘the heroic method’ associated with the old pupilteacher system.31 Though it came to embrace the principle of student teaching—albeit for little more than a decade—the National Union of Teachers (NUT) was initially deeply suspicious, seeing the scheme as part of a wider project of reform which threatened its traditional perceptions and expectations of teaching as a profession. ‘The Student Teacher, a mere germ in 1907’, wrote The Schoolmaster, ‘has now incubated out, and in 1908 is ready for entrance into the educational world, fraught with all sorts of possibilities for himself and for the future of the profession at large.’32 These possibilities were perceived, for the most part, as likely to be negative. Student teachers were themselves seen as potential victims, prey to overwork in the elementary classroom and to neglect in the secondary schools to which they were scheduled to return for their continued academic education.33 They were also regarded as an incipient threat, stirring memories of ‘[t]he unfortunate Art. 68, with…qualifications of age and vaccination mark’ and raising deep, if unwarrantable, residual fears of professional dilution.34 This was a specious comparison but, in this respect, the figure of the student teacher was more symbolic than real, a visible expression of a pervasive atmosphere of general change which seemed to threaten traditional understandings of teaching from all sides. From this embattled perspective, the student teachers ‘will provide a corps of novices who will attack the status of the teacher from below, just as the gay and irresponsible opening of Training Colleges in many parts is furnishing another corps which is attacking it from above’.35 Local education authorities were apprised of the details of the new training scheme in Circular 597, ‘Student Teachers’, issued in August 1908. This document conveyed the Board’s subtle but profound reluctance about the scheme in a number of key passages. Though the presence of students in elementary


27

schools was officially sanctioned, the Board fretted about how this potentially promiscuous practical experience might impinge on an otherwise carefully choreographed regime of professional preparation. At the root of this concern, if less brutally expressed, lay that same ignorance and distrust of elementary school teachers which would— not least for the career of Robert Morant himself —so disastrously mark the Holmes-Morant Circular, written in January 1910 and made public the following year.36 A characteristic passage in Circular 597 expressed an unwillingness to abandon student teachers entirely to the influence of the staffs of the elementary schools in which they were placed. In order that local schemes were properly regulated and that the progress of students was fully recorded, the circular indicated ‘it is important that the supervision of StudentTeachers should not be left wholly to the Head Teachers under whom they are placed’. The suggestion was that the most appropriate figure for the exercise of this supervisory role would be a local authority officer or members of the local education committee itself. In this respect, the likely deficiencies of head teachers were clearly hinted at. [I]t is not possible to exaggerate the importance…of securing that this person should combine sufficient experience of practical teaching with high ideals as to the functions and responsibilities of the teacher’s calling, and as to the professional aptitudes and liberal cultivation which it requires.37 The student-teacher scheme was considered by Dent to be Morant’s ‘escape clause’ in the face of anticipated opposition to his reforms from teachers and from local education authorities.38 It was, in this view, a ploy which offered space and time to bring round the sceptics as well as to make good the structural deficiencies—notably the dearth of training college places—standing in the way of an expanded training regime. Dent’s interpretation is undoubtedly warranted. But Morant would certainly have been both surprised and disappointed by the fact that at the year of his own death, 1920, an essentially transitional scheme was growing steadily in popularity and had yet to reach the point of its greatest influence.39 Far from withering away in the manner of a short-term concession, the scheme seemed to be establishing itself as the new platform upon which continued working-class access to elementary school teaching was being built. If fewer in number than before, potential recruits from traditional working-class constituencies were learning, so to speak, to live practically with the studentteacher scheme as a slimmed down variation upon pupil teaching. In this respect, the scheme turned out to be unexpectedly effective in maintaining a workingclass bridgehead within the teaching profession. But there was a corresponding loss. If the student-teacher scheme proved to be more popular than expected, the reverse was true of its senior partner, the bursar system. The Board of Education had placed very high expectations upon the appearance of bursars for the revivification of national education. And the Board never failed to assert its confidence that, in the figure of the bursar, the long-term


transformation of the education system was indeed assured. But the celebration of the greater intellectual quality and cultural sophistication of post–1907 recruits over those from the old pupil-teacher days could not compensate for the alarming fall in the actual numbers coming forward. Many of those who might have been expected to do so were dissuaded by the postponement of earning which the new arrangements entailed. Recruitment tumbled. And as traditional working-class support waned, no immediate upsurge of interest from the lower-middle class seemed to be stepping into its place.40 Year on year, for more than a decade, it became increasingly apparent that many working parents were simply unable or unwilling to countenance the setting aside of their child’s earning capacity for an additional year of schooling, as the bursar system required. In this regard, the Board’s planning had involved a serious miscalculation: The Board think it probable…that there will…be a large number of boys and girls whose parents desire them to become teachers in Public Elementary Schools and are prepared, if not in all cases to continue to pay fees for their education up to the age of seventeen or eighteen, at any rate to continue the maintenance of them without assistance until that age.41 Such confidence was not fulfilled. Meanwhile, the Board’s anxieties about teacher supply grew steadily greater. In its report for 1912–13 it recorded a ‘serious decline’ compounding the ‘present very grave situ ation’.42 In 1906–07, the last year of the pupil-teacher system, there had been 11,018 new recruits to the profession. In 1913–14, the corresponding number of bursars and residual pupil teachers stood at just 4,486.43 The number of Bursars and Pupil-Teachers, the Board warned ‘has diminished in the most alarming manner during the last six years.’44 The first report of the post-war period showed that this general trend had not been reversed. ‘Throughout the period beginning with 1908 there has been a continuous downward tendency, interrupted only by a slight improvement during the three years from 1913 to 1915.’45 The observation that current recruitment levels—that is, for 1919–20—were marginally raised was noted without great optimism.46 But, in fact, this was a critical indicator for the future trend. The corner had been turned, if only just. In the first few years of the new decade, the crisis eased. The number of new bursars continued to nudge upwards.47 As it did so, and as the pressure of the immediate supply problem lifted, official thinking found the space to return to that more critical spirit which had stimulated the 1907 reforms in the first place. The student-teacher year returned to the policy spotlight. And though the early years of the 1920s saw the student-teacher scheme at its brief zenith, the consequence of this renewed political attention was that, by the end of the decade, the scheme was well on the way to its extinction.48 Initially, however, the prolonged slump in teacher recruitment prompted the Board’s policy makers to expressions of unusual candour in their search for explanations. Fundamentally, the problem was perceived to rest upon the


29

attenuation of the traditional working-class constituency for teaching—a trend, of course, about which the Board was deeply ambivalent. It recognised that its own policy of effectively postponing the threshold of wage-earning for young teachers was at the root of the difficulty. At the same time, if much less clearly, it was also beginning to understand that the very move towards greater opportunity in education through which it sought to drive up the quality of teaching in the nation’s schools was having a further and more unexpected effect. It was placing the prospect of previously unreachable career ambitions within the grasp of many clever working-class girls and boys for the first time. And once this prospect began to take hold, it became progressively more implausible to encourage only so far, and no further, the expectations of the brightest and the best of the teaching profession’s traditional recruitment constituency. Many such able young people would seek to go beyond teaching.49 So it was that the very mechanism which was designed to improve the quality of the teaching profession would have the additional effect of pointing the way to a more general experience of secondary education and gradually depriving teaching of its traditional first pick of working-class youth. This is why the Board could note with real concern the constraints which an extended secondary education placed upon the working-class household. Many parents cannot afford to forego till such a late age all contributions from their children to the household expenses, still less to incur the additional expenditure, however slight, involved in retaining a child at Secondary School till that age. There is much evidence that the barrier thus set up has diverted a number of children from the teaching profession.50 But at the same time, where such constraints were faced and defeated by resilient, courageous and self-sacrificing parents, the end result for the teaching profession could turn out to be just as dire. ‘It must be admitted that in many parts of the country conditions prevail which, in so far as they are realised by potential candidates for the profession or by their parents, must tend to turn them to other callings.’51 The expansion of a white-collar labour market resulted directly in a steady increase ‘in the number and variety of other openings for boys and girls who might, but for these, have become elementary school teachers’.52 Both the recognition and the securing of such openings was primarily due to that ‘extension of facilities for obtaining a Secondary School education [which] has made them better able to avail themselves of these other opportunities’.53 In short, the supply of new entrants to the teaching profession would in future be more closely determined than ever before by instrumental concerns, ‘by its attractiveness in respect of emoluments, immediate and prospective, status and security’.54 The Board felt itself in a singular dilemma. Its key strategy for the progressive enhancement of national education threatened to undermine its own objectives. It


was certain that the bursar system was an essential strategy for any general improvement in the quality of teacher supply. At the same time it was also, unavoidably, a strategy which held out prospects of personal fulfilment which militated against the overall quantity of that supply. ‘[T]here is certainly the danger that the Bursar may find when after a long and expensive education he begins the actual business of teaching, that he has a pronounced distaste for it.’55 The change in the direction of training policy from 1907 was, however, a permanent one. The general recognition of the need to modernise the education system meant that the drive towards ‘a marked improvement in the general education of intending teachers’ stood as an unassailable policy objective.56 To contemplate giving it up, even under the severest supply pressures, was recognised as ‘inimical in the long run to the efficiency of elementary education’.57 All the Board could do in such an intractable situation was to introduce minor revisions at the margin of its central policy thrust. These included, for example, extensions and enhancements in the contribution of central government to the local system of maintenance allowances for intending teachers.58 Further, the Board moved to relax the original limitations placed upon the workload of student teachers within the elementary schools to which they were attached. No longer were student teachers necessarily required to spend 20 per cent of their time in attendance at a secondary school for the furtherance of their own general education. In some circumstances, the full-time employment of student teachers by their elementary schools was permitted.59 After 1920, with the supply crisis fading, policy makers could reflect in a more measured way upon the changes since 1907. They could turn from the relentless struggle against recruitment shortages to direct more of their attention to that critical consideration of the quality of teacher supply which had been behind the original reforms of 1907. By the early 1920s, the student-teacher scheme was well established. The members of its first cohort were now experienced classroom teachers in their thirties. New recruits could not remember a time when the scheme had not been in operation. In 1923, nearly 45 per cent of entrants to training college had served as student teachers, with many others simply proceeding directly from student-teachership to uncertificated posts in schools.60 As with the case of the enforced retention of pupil teaching in rural areas, the continued presence of uncertificated teachers throughout the elementary system mocked the high ambitions invested in the reform of policy for teacher supply. The existence of such a substantial uncertificated group highlighted the extent and the resilience of a traditional systemic reliance upon a pool of untrained teachers, whether uncertificated, untrained certificated (serving teachers who had taken the Acting Teacher’s Certificate) or, at the bottom of the pile, supplementary teachers.61 The Acting Teacher’s Certificate was not withdrawn until 1926 and, plagued by the problems of teacher supply, the Board’s ambitions to dispense with the service of supplementaries had to be postponed.62 This was ‘sufficient evidence, if any were needed’, according to the


31

contemporary educational reformer Lance Jones, ‘of the slowness of educational progress in this country’.63 Against this background, the student-teacher scheme, now established as a key feature of the educational landscape of the early 1920s, found its way back into the policy spotlight. Here was the point when all those parties who had lived with the student-teacher scheme, who had a professional interest in its operation and who had judgments to make upon it, began most forcefully to bring their views before the consideration of government. Prominent among these groups were the local education authorities, the training colleges and the National Union of Teachers. Each was driven by a range of concerns, resolving respectively into issues predominantly of supply, quality and status. All of these were questions which, in one form or another, also occupied the attention of the Board itself. Each of these powerful interests held distinctive perceptions of both the appropriateness and the efficacy of the prevailing pattern of preliminary training emerging from the 1907 reforms. In each case, these perceptions rested ultimately upon an idealised image of the elementary school teacher. As they passed through the phases of their professional preparation, each of the individuals whose memories have contributed to this study had no reason to regard the pattern of their training as governed by anything other than a settled norm, as simply reflecting ‘the way that things were’. In this fact lies surely one of the greatest insights that oral history may have to bring to us about teachers in the past, as in the present. And that is that their dominating concerns and aspirations cannot simply be read off from those announced in the official documentary record. In fact, of course, those training arrangements that teachers took for granted were continuously at stake in the policy world. Our respondents were unaware that in some regions of that world, the form of their professional preparation was regarded not only as inefficient, but positively damaging. In such a view, the prevailing model of the classroom teacher needed to be further reconstructed in line with the principal policy objectives of Morant’s original reforms. This meant discarding the aspects of those measures which had been regarded as essentially temporary, experimental or concessionary. It demanded, in effect, the completion of the work of re-making the teacher for the twentieth century. In March 1923, the Board of Education set up a departmental committee, headed by Viscount Burnham, to undertake just this task.64 The committee’s terms of reference were to review the existing arrangements for the training of teachers for public elementary schools, with particular regard to three imperatives. The first—‘the economy of public funds’— was a standard expression of an inherited concern from the nineteenth century which would also dominate most of the twentieth. The second— ‘the attractions offered…by the teaching profession as compared with other professions’—reflected the concern of the recent and protracted crisis of teacher supply. The third—‘the facilities afforded by Secondary Schools and Universities for acquiring academic


qualifications’—directed the committee to Morant’s original concern with the personal culture of prospective teachers. The committee’s report appeared in 1925, making a wide range of important recommendations, the bulk of which were accepted by the Board.65 For our purposes, it is the following recommendation which is of most interest: That in view of the length and continuity of the future teacher’s course of secondary education Pupil Teachership and Student Teachership should be discouraged.’66 In recognising that some local authorities had built up a greater investment in the scheme than others, the report neither advocated nor anticipated its simultaneous abolition in all districts ‘by a stroke of the pen’.67 But its recommendation signalled emphatically that the period during which the Board was prepared to look sympathetically upon local student-teacher schemes should come to an end. Though a number of local authorities persisted with their schemes for many years more, the impact of the 1925 departmental report turned out to be decisive in curtailing the significance of student teaching as a national issue. In adopting the report’s recommendations in relation to preliminary training, the Board proceeded to cut central government financial support for such training and asked all local education authorities ‘to consider seriously whether after August, 1927, Student-Teacherships should be continued in any area’. In place of such training, local authorities were encouraged to offer courses of full-time secondary education with students ‘receiving, where necessary, from the age of 17 to 18 maintenance allowances instead of salary’.68 These measures had a very significant effect.69 In the year 1926–27, 106 local authorities had run student-teacher schemes; in 1927–28, this number fell to 56.70 By 1928, the Board could report that [s]ystems designed to provide a period of preliminary training in teaching before the Training College are now much less common than formerly. The number of authorities conducting systems of student-teachership has decreased by about one-half during the last few years, and the number of student-teachers appointed has fallen from 4,615 in 1925–26 to 4,266 in 1926–27, and to 1,967 in 1927–28.71 In 1928–29, ‘the number of student-teachers…is considerably less than a quarter of the number of annual admissions to training colleges’.72 In 1930, the Board’s annual report noted that, ‘many local education authorities have discontinued their arrangements for the preliminary training of teachers as student-teachers or pupil-teachers.’73 For 1934, the report announced that [T]he number of authorities continuing arrangements for preliminary training of candidates as student-teachers and pupil-teachers shows a further decline, and the number of candidates selected for this training in 1934 was substantially lower than in any recent year.74


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The report for 1935, for the first time, contained no dedicated section relating to preliminary training and no textual reference was made to student teachers or the student-teacher scheme. By 1937–38 total numbers stood at less than 600.75 Despite this decline, the single most important fact about the student-teacher scheme remains its unexpected longevity. But how can such resilience be explained? The memories of our respondents show that student teaching enjoyed a considerable popularity among those who experienced it directly as trainees. But the views of classroom teachers, unsurprisingly, carried little direct weight for policy makers, supposing that such views were known about at all. One of Morant’s enduring legacies in this respect was a policy perspective which operated with an idealised model of what a teacher should be, rather than any close understanding of the ways in which teachers operated in practice. The realisation of the former, however laudable or noble its impulse, would always be difficult to the extent that it failed to take some note of the latter. The new teacher, to the chagrin of the policy maker, could not simply be imposed upon the old. Moreover, to the degree that classroom teachers sensed such impositional designs, their suspicion or straightforward shunning of policy was heightened. This is why former student teachers characteristically still express incomprehension or bemusement in reflecting upon the demise of student teaching. For them, the scheme had often seemed to work well and to answer genuine needs that had a professional and not just a purely practical importance. In their eyes, the scheme represented a channel of internal transmission between experienced and inexperienced practitioners within a largely traditional and highly skilled occupational culture. In this way it held significance for professional identity quite as much as for practical proficiency. As they passed through it, the scheme could appear as in some way both natural and timeless—a perception that was encouraged by the widespread collective memory, still strong throughout the profession, of the pupil-teacher tradition.76 The policy maker, of course, would tell the student teacher—should they have met—that this scheme of which they were a part was of relatively recent origin, that it was experimental, that it was transitional, and that it was essentially an expression of the nation’s educational past which, in the public interest, government was seeking to transcend. For the student teacher, and still more for his or her classroom mentors, policies directed towards the elimination of the scheme could seem unintelligible, destructive and even wilful. In a sense, this divergence of perception was a product of that temporal dislocation between policy makers and practitioners which must always operate to some degree, but which was particularly prevalent, perhaps, in the years following the First World War. For the practitioner, the time was now, the present. The past was deeply important, but chiefly as an accumulation of countless earlier practical ‘nows’ from which the present could learn through precedent, precept and emulation. In this way, though change in teaching might always be noted—if generally through the temporally diffuse device of ‘the old days’—past and present could also be made to stand together, with culture dominating chronology. For the policy


maker, the time was the future. The past was important as the successive record of institutional or organisational imperfections, or even errors, to be progressively rectified by policies each successively improving upon the last. Here, chronology dominated culture. The student-teacher scheme was simply an identifi able and discrete policy initiative with a clearly delineated temporal origin and purpose within a broader movement of educational progress. When the policy purposes of the scheme had been served, then policy would move on, with the scheme taking its place in an archive of national educational development. The different interests of classroom teacher and educational policy maker meant that each consistently failed—largely because to make such an attempt would not have occurred to either party —to understand what the student-teacher scheme might mean in the perception of the other. In alluding to its unexpected longevity, the 1925 departmental report noted that the student-teacher scheme ‘had proved more acceptable than had been anticipated’.77 Here is a statement which points up in a striking way the gap between the thinking of the policy maker and the practitioner. For the latter, engagement with the student-teacher scheme was seldom a matter of calculating its ‘acceptability’; it was more a case of simply rehearsing accepted custom and practice. The policy maker understood that the individual student teacher was enrolled on an experimental scheme; the student teacher, for the most part, understood no such thing. He or she was simply following an established path into a familiar profession. If support for the student-teacher scheme had come only, so to speak, from the ground, from teachers and trainee teachers, then its formal demise would undoubtedly have been more rapid than it was. But approbation, if often for different reasons, came from other and more powerful quarters as well. This fact elevated the question of the scheme’s future from a simple matter of perceived professional conservatism to a significant policy controversy and, as such, arguably did much to shape understandings of the meaning of teaching across the remainder of the twentieth century. In seeking to do justice to the depth and vigour of this debate, the departmental report of 1925 offered the following appreciation. Many [student-teacher] schemes have come into existence since 1907 and are in operation. The question for consideration is whether this year of practical experience before admission to a course of [college] training (or recognition as an Uncertificated Teacher) has justified itself. The evidence which we have heard in regard to it is conflicting. On the one hand, the teachers concerned in Elementary Schools, Secondary Schools and Training Colleges are, as a whole, against it… Its principal supporters are found among witnesses representing Local Authorities.78 This summation of the positions taken up by the competing forces was strictly accurate but, in important respects, also misleading. The report’s allusion to the


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teachers, naturally enough, encompassed the views expressed by the representatives from the professional associations who gave evidence to the committee. However, these views were not always those taken by individual classroom teachers and, at the local level, there was often a strong axis of support between education officials and the teachers themselves when it came to the student-teacher scheme. Spurley Hey, for example, the Director of Education of Manchester and a strong supporter of the scheme, declared as a matter of professional pride that within his Authority, ‘I myself, every year, meet the 200 or more newly-appointed teachers.’79 As regards the weighing of the evidence offered by its witnesses, the report was able to sum up the main lines of the debate in clear terms. There were significant differences over the efficacy of student teaching as an initial test of fitness for the profession; over the problematical relation between the practical aspects (based in the elementary school) and the academic aspects (based in the secondary school) of the studentteacher year; and over the local variations in the quality of experience which student teachers might encounter in their elementary school placements. The cardinal issues of disagreement, however, principally occupied that same key ground upon which Robert Morant had first launched his crusade for a new teaching profession. Morant’ s drive had had two principal objectives. These were, first, to raise the culture—and therefore the status—of the nation’s teachers, and secondly, to reform their pedagogical practice. Of these, the former took precedence as a sine qua non for the latter.80 By the time of the departmental enquiry, however, the goal of pedagogical reform had assumed a position of greater independent importance, largely through the ambitious agency of the teacher training colleges. As a consequence, the 1925 Report had to adjudicate between very different accounts addressing both the cultural and the pedagogical ramifications of the student-teacher scheme. Those who deprecated the scheme objected, as Morant had done, to the damage it wrought upon that ‘growth of mind and character’ which an additional year devoted to sixth-form study promised to secure.81 Those who supported it claimed on its behalf a ‘marked effect in developing the student’s personality… sense of reality…and…academic interest… they become better human beings and better teachers’.82 But alongside these cultural arguments, there was now a more insistent practical dimension. The defenders of student teaching might insist that ‘no theoretical training is likely to be realised and properly assimilated by those who receive it unless they have had experience of practical work and its difficulties beforehand’.83 The riposte of those who were opposed centred upon the degree of premature stress that student teaching might involve for those who endured it; ‘the great strain which the year’s work may be, especially for girls’.84 For some witnesses, this constituted ‘the principal objection’ to the scheme.85 For others, the chief concern was that in the course of the student-teacher year ‘bad habits of teaching and a false perspective may be acquired, and that practice under difficulties at the beginning without a clear notion of the end in view may be unfairly discouraging’.86


These were complex arguments which it may be possible to read as part of a more general contemporary trend towards the progressive prolongation of juvenile dependency through education.87 But the debate over student teaching was not yet, fundamentally, a technical one about the sequencing of training by reference to chronological age. If this had been the case, then the powerful minority report of the departmental committee—which made a highly advanced case for the postponement of professional training until the completion of all academic education, preferably to degree level, under conditions of genuine equality of opportunity—would have found more support than it did.88 Ultimately, what was at stake was the construction of the act of teaching itself. Who was to define what it meant to teach in the nation’s elementary schools? Who was to establish what the pedagogical norms of the teaching profession were to be? To whom were trainee teachers to look for guidance? The recommendations of the 1925 departmental committee endorsed the critics of the student-teacher scheme. In so doing, they ensured that more and more of the nation’s future teachers would enjoy the benefit of a full course of secondary education. As such, they would ultimately become—to follow the logic of official policy—not just better teachers for the elementary sector, but transforming ones. This new type of teacher was central to educational advance not only because of his or her superior intellectual and cultural qualities, but also for the practical model they would constantly hold out to those whom they would teach. The education system in the inter-war years remained a structurally divided one.89 Secondary education for all, even of the new hierarchical variety introduced after 1944, lay in the future. The scholarship routes which connected the institutionally separated elementary and secondary sectors were, for the most part, narrow and difficult to traverse. But in the person of their teacher, elementary school pupils could find a knowledgeable and encouraging guide. Contemporary policy makers had accepted that the pathfinders for these routes should be those who, having begun their educational lives in the elementary school, had committed themselves one day to return there as trained teachers.90 For these pioneers, financial support from the public purse was necessary. But policy makers recognised that in affording such special help, they were also erecting an artificial barrier between trainee teachers and the main body of secondary school pupils. This was most visibly expressed in the widespread segregation, within secondary schools, of intending teachers and students following conventional academic courses.91 From 1907 onwards, a common theme in teacher-training policy was the need, as soon as it became practically possible, to end the artificial public subsidies by which teachers were drawn into the profession and to render teaching a freely chosen career within an undifferentiated secondary school pupil cohort. Special inducements over too long a period were seen as likely to damage the social standing of the profession. In the short term, however, in a historically segregated system of education, such special measures were also seen to present the only viable avenue of educational advance.92 As the personification of educational mobility then, and more


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generally in the daily example of his or her demeanour and approach to learning, the trained elementary teacher would be the agent through which the transforming social and educational benefits of the secondary school could be brought into the heart of the elementary school. Paradoxically, for the new elementary teacher to operate in this way, it was seen as desirable that until the moment when he or she began their full-time teaching life, their contact with the elementary school should be curtailed or controlled. To the degree that they were to become familiar with the ethos and the expectation of the secondary school, the elementary school had to be correspondingly constructed for them as an essentially unfamiliar place. In 1939, with the student-teacher year extinct in most areas, the NUT could observe that thousands of pupils intending to become teachers now leave Secondary Schools for Training Colleges and Universities without having seen the inside of an Elementary School since they left it themselves at the age of eleven—indeed, pupils whose entry into Secondary Schools has been through some other avenue may have no knowledge whatever of the work and conditions which exist in an Elementary School.93 This was the consequence of a policy process, applauded by the NUT, which both practically and symbolically destroyed the residues of student teaching by reconstructing the elementary school essentially as a strange place for the prospective teacher, where once it had been intimately known. The students on entering Training Colleges were never less familiar, at that stage, with Elementary Schools. The greater proportion of these students have little knowledge of, and little enthusiasm for such Schools, although most of them are destined to pass their teaching life within them.94 The advanced personal education of the young teacher was the gift that he or she would bring to the elementary school.95 But there were losses too. The gap between the culture of the secondary school which had formed them and that of the elementary school in which they would exercise their civilising mission rendered the latter a potentially dangerous place for the young teacher. This was seen to be particularly so in the case of women, who formed, of course, the bulk of the teaching force. ‘Few people who have tried Elementary School Teaching will question that, for young beginners at any rate, it is trying work. We were told that many girls seemed stupefied with the exhausting work of the Student Teacher year.’96 Precisely because the elementary school had been progressively remade as ‘strange’ in this way, the student-teacher year could be presented as an inappropriate, premature and potentially damaging introduction to it. Policy therefore became concerned to safeguard young trainees from the dangers of being ‘plunged into strange conditions without due preparation or explanation’.97


And the mechanism to which policy makers increasingly looked for the fulfilment of these tasks was the teacher training college, that institution which Robert Morant—in common with his nineteenth-century predecessor, James KayShuttleworth—saw, in an ideal world, as providing the optimal preparation for a career in teaching. Yet, as they aspired to drive up the level of the personal education of their students, colleges found it increasingly difficult, as well as increasingly uncongenial, to concentrate on the practical skills which had been the stuff of pupil teaching. Training Colleges do not train teachers in the practice of their profession because…such a task is beyond their powers… Training Colleges have allowed it to be assumed that they do, in fact, train intending teachers in the actual practice of teaching, and most of the misunderstandings which have arisen may be traced to this unwarranted assumption.98 Spurley Hey believed that the unease felt by colleges about the question of practical classroom training had actually resulted in ‘an increasing tendency on the part of Principals of Training Colleges to give preference to those who have not been student-teachers’.99 Some indication of this and of the process of remaking the individual teacher, of liberating her from the confines of classroom apprenticeship, can occasionally be glimpsed in the training college record. It is here that we see the colleges’ professional idealisations of teaching at the point of their projection upon real people rather than simply upon policy. The case of Grace Fallowfield offers us an example of this. Grace Fallowfield was a student, learning to teach at Homerton College, Cambridge, where she had enrolled in 1919. She was not, however, a stranger to the classroom. She was a former pupil teacher, having taken her preliminary certificate in 1907, the year that pupil teaching was replaced by student teaching. Thereafter, she had served as an uncertificated teacher in a Suffolk school for 11 years. Now she was at college, in pursuit of the teaching certificate which, once gained, would elevate her salary and her professional status, and testify also to a formal proficiency in the classroom. Her classroom experience may have been circumscribed but, of its kind, it was very extensive. For more than a decade, the classroom had been a familiar place to her, a place where she had deployed a range of occupational skills which she understood as those of the teacher. College showed her that this was not so. It showed her that her years of teaching experience did not even constitute a platform upon which a revised professional expertise could be built. Her experience was worse than useless; it was an impediment. She must have cut an unhappy sight, Grace Fallowfield, as in the midst of her much younger fellows, she contemplated her teaching practice reports. First Report Miss Fallowfield has had years of experience of a kind that has made her set and conventional in method. She has little habits of class control


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and appeal which she uses now unconsciously almost. She has all the ‘tricks’ of an Infant Teacher in the Elementary School… It is interesting to see the new ideas, which she accepts at present all too completely, struggling with her old established habits. Her strong accent is a great disability. Mark: BJune 1919 Second Report Miss Fallowfield does not seem likely to modify her methods very much as the result of her college course; she lacks the power to grasp and apply principles. With a fairly conventional first class her old methods and habits returned to her. She can be effective but without appealing to the children’s interests. When, on the other hand she tries to adopt what she takes to be modern methods she loses all control and devotes herself exclusively to a very few of the children. In discussion she is slow to see why certain things are wrong, but she is much in earnest. More demonstration and a further period of practice are strongly recommended. Mark: C Feb 1920100 Finally scraping a ‘B-?’ grade in her additional teaching practice, Grace Fallowfield managed to secure her certificate and returned to her old school later in 1920. As she did so, the first signs of a gradual recovery in national teacher recruitment were stirring, encouraging the training colleges to take a more active lead in a growing campaign against the student-teacher year. This agitation led to the airing of a wide variety of entrenched opinion and contributed to the setting up, in 1923, of the departmental committee. Whatever it might represent to other parties interested in the progress of education, student teaching held out an unalloyed threat to the hegemony of the training colleges. Through its association with the distinctive residual legacy of an apprenticeship model of training, student teaching was seen by many in the colleges as, at best an irritant and, at worst, a profoundly destabilising presence.101 In any event, as long as the scheme existed, the making strange of the elementary school classroom could not be completed. And until that was achieved, the re-making of the teaching profession could not be fully secured. NOTES 1. P.H.J.H. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.210. 2. H.C.Dent, The Training of Teachers in England and Wales 1800–1975 (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), pp.54–5. 3. Tropp, The School Teachers, p.186. Even Alison Oram’s recent study, which draws upon some oral history evidence, makes no reference to student teaching. See


4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics 1900–39 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996), ch.2. See Richard Aldrich, ‘The Evolution of Teacher Education’, in Norman Graves (ed.), Initial Teacher Education: Policies and Progress (London, Kogan Page, 1990), pp. 12–24. Board of Education, General Report on the Instruction and Training of PupilTeachers, 1903–1907, cited in ‘The Instruction and Training of Pupil Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 13 July 1907, p.94. For some indication of the regime of the traditional pupil teacher, see ‘Interesting Notes by “Distinction” Candidates’, The Schoolmaster, 20 July 1907, p. 142. Neil Daglish, Education Policy-Making in England and Wales: The Crucible Years, 1895–1911 (London, Woburn Press, 1996), p.210; Olive Banks, Parity and Prestige in English Secondary Education: A Study in Educational Sociology (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp.44–7; Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.202; Lawn, Servants of the State, pp. 10–11; Gerald Grace, ‘Teachers and the State in Britain: A Changing Relation’, in Martin Lawn and Gerald Grace (eds), Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1987), pp. 200–1. G.A.N.Lowndes, The Silent Social Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, 2nd edn), pp.124–5. PP 1907, lxiv, General Report on the Instruction and Training of Pupil-Teachers, 1903–1907, with Historical Introduction, p.25. By contrast, ‘student teachers and teachers of experience tell us that they have gained by learning to face a large class more or less without fear’. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Inspectors § 587’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from FB Stead, 28 June 1920, p.1; also see ‘The Training of Teachers’, letter from Mr Ellis Chadwick, Bournemouth Times, 11 December 1925: ‘The problem is how to equip a young teacher to handle a class of from forty to fifty children, probably in a room with other classes, varying in age and ability and coming from homes where they are subject to little parental control.’ It is worth noting that the process of selective weeding of the public record over the years would suggest that teacher training was not expected to be of great historical interest. As a consequence policy files concerned with the training of intending teachers prior to 1924 have been destroyed, as have files relating to the development of teachertraining policy prior to 1918. Despite this depletion, much of value still remains. The main classes of interest at the Public Record Office are Teachers: Local Education Authority: Supply files, 1912–15 and 1924–49 (ED 67) and Teachers: General files, 1903–35 (ED 86). PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.25. PP 1907, lxiv, Regulations for the Preliminary Education of Elementary School Teachers. Tropp, The School Teachers, p.184. Quoted in Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.27; also PP 1888, xxxv, Final Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Elementary Education Acts, p. 87. ‘There are those who represent the employment of pupil-teachers as the weakest part of our educational system’; also p.269. Also see ‘The Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 30 May 1908, p.1093. PP 1895, xliii, Royal Commission on Secondary Education, Vol 1, Report of the Commissioners, p.207.


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14. PP 1898, xxvi, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Pupil-Teacher System, p.5. 15. ‘Prefatory Memorandum’, in PP 1903, li, Regulations for the Instruction and Training of Pupil-Teachers and Students in Training Colleges; ‘The Opening of the New Era’, The Schoolmaster, 11 July 1903, pp.61–2; Bernard M.Allen, Sir Robert Morant: A Great Public Servant (London, Macmillan, 1934), pp.209–10; ‘The Pupil Teacher System’, The Schoolmaster, 26 December 1903, pp. 1245–7. 16. Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.50. 17. ‘The Annual Report of the Board of Education’, The Schoolmaster, 1 February 1907, p.223. ‘Despite the opinion of many practical educationists on the splendid work done in the P.T. centres we are told that: “The process of merging pupil teacher centres of the old fashioned kind in secondary schools is one upon which the Board of Education can only look with satisfaction.”’ Also T.G.Tibbey, ‘Some Training College Problems’, The Schoolmaster, 25 January 1908, p.150. For the development of the centre system see PP 1888, xxxv, Final Report, pp.270–6; also PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, pp.3–29. 18. PP 1907, LXIV, General Report. Also Wendy Robinson, ‘The Pupil-Teacher Centre in England and Wales in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Policy, Practice and Promise’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge. 19. PP 1907, lxiv, Regulations, p.vi. 20. Ibid.; also see ‘The Board of Education and Preparation for the Teaching Profession’, The School Guardian, 11 July 1907, pp.820–1. 21. PP 1907, lxiv, Regulations, p.vi; also see Lance Jones, The Training of Teachers in England and Wales: A Critical Survey (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1924), pp. 48–9; Cunningham et al., ‘McNair’s Lost Opportunity’, pp.221–9. 22. Board of Education (1907), How To Become A Teacher in A Public Elementary School (London, HMSO), pp.6–7. Bursaries complemented the many existing local schemes which had been put in place by local authorities to provide earmarked secondary scholarships, usually at the age of 14, for boys and girls prepared to pledge themselves to return to the service of the authority as a teacher; see PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.29. From 1913, the Board of Education began to commit funds in support of such local arrangements in recognition of the declining numbers of those coming forward as bursars; this was a consequence of the fact ‘that many suitable candidates owing to want of means are unable to face the expense of the Secondary School course and the postponement of wage earning’. PP 1913, 1, Regulations for the Preliminary Education of Elementary School Teachers, p.vii. In 1907, the Board’s expectations about the likely impact on teacher supply of the new arrangements for preliminary training had been more sanguine; ‘In most areas it is to be expected that there will be a fair proportion of children whose parents desire them to become teachers, and will be prepared, if not in all cases to continue to pay fees for their education until they enter a Training College, at any rate to continue the maintenance of them without assistance until that period.’ PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.29. For an influential contemporary view on the development of the idea of the ‘scholarship’ in the educational system of England and Wales, see M.E.Sadler and H.Bompas Smith, ‘The Scholarship System’, The Educational Times, 1 October 1907, pp.443–4. 23. PP 1913, 1, Regulations, p.vii.


24. See Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.48: ‘Probably no part of the preliminary training of the teacher has met with more criticism than this year of StudentTeachership.’ 25. PP 1913, 1, Regulations, pp.viii-ix. 26. See Leicestershire Record Office, 19D59/46–54, Minute Books of Teachers’ Sectional Committee, for an example of the drafting in 1908 of a local scheme for student teachers under the supervision of a ‘Director of Training Classes’ reporting to the Education Committee. The programme of training was to be the responsibility of the elementary school head teacher and was to include, amongst other things, the observation of lessons delivered by certificated teachers and the writing of reports on them, the delivery of criticism lessons, assisting in various classes and ‘opportunities for the gradual acquirement of the sense of responsibility and the power of control’. The further general education of student teachers comprised two half-days per week under the guidance of the head teachers of their former secondary schools and was to include instruction, private study, and general advice and guidance. Under the regulations, as was the case in most localities, student teachers and their parents had to sign their intention of eventually studying at college for the teacher’s certificate, but a number of them subsequently sought recognition as uncertificated teachers. The Minute Books record individual cases where the main deterrent appears to be the expense of college training. Also see Jones, The Training of Teachers, pp.49, 392–3. For the ‘Pledge’, see Board of Education (1944), Teachers and Youth Leaders: Report of the Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Consider the Supply, Recruitment and Training of Teachers and Youth Leaders (London, HMSO), ch.9; Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.131. 27. Those authorities which gave up their schemes more readily from the mid-1920s onwards tended to be those, such as London, where there was an adequate supply of training college places. 28. PP 1913, 1, Regulations, p.viii. In London and a number of other localities, some schemes initially involved training college staffs in the selection and, sometimes, the supervision of student teachers. See Greater London Record Office EO/STA/2/ 1, LCC Council Agenda, 28 July 1908; Manchester City Council Minute Books (Education), Vol. 4 (1920–25), 3 July 1922, p.138. 29. Board of Education (1908), Circular 597 ‘Student Teachers’, 1; also PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.26; also The Schoolmaster, 22 May 1909, p.901. 30. PP 1907, lxiv, Regulations, p.viii. 31. Board of Education (1908), Circular 597 ‘Student Teachers’, 3; also see Daglish, Education Policy-Making, p.207. Michael Sadler’s more restrained epithet for the traditional form of teacher training was ‘empiric’. M.E.Sadler, ‘Introduction’, in Sandiford, The Training of Teachers. 32. The Student-Teacher Bacillus’, The Schoolmaster, 30 May 1908, pp.1081–2. 33. Ibid., p.1082. The Student Teacher will be an intractable unit in the organisation of the secondary school, a nuisance to the staff at large, a time waster himself—left severely alone.’ 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. See Peter Gordon, ‘The Holmes-Morant Circular of 1911: A Note’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, x:1 (1978), pp.36–40.


43

37. Board of Education (1908), Circular 597, ‘Student Teachers’, p.2. 38. H.C. Dent, Twentieth Century Reports on the Training of Teachers’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 7 January 1972. 39. A very brief but useful assessment of Morant’s wider impact on education can be found in Harry Judge, ‘R.L.Morant and English Schools’, New Society, 2 December 1982, pp.3 78–80. Also see Meriel Vlaeminke, The English Higher Grade Schools: A Lost Opportunity (London, Woburn Press, 2000), pp.22–8. 40. Dent, ‘Twentieth Century Reports’. 41. PP 1907, lxiv, Regulations, p.vii. 42. Board of Education (1914), Report of the Board of Education for the Year 1912– 1913 (London, HMSO), p.148. 43. Ibid., p.149. 44. Ibid. The Board’s calculation was that an annual minimum figure of 9,000 new recruits was required to meet normal wastage. Board of Education (1920), Report of the Board of Education for the Year 1918–1919 (London, HMSO), p.53. 45. Ibid., p.52. 46. Ibid., p.53. 47. Board of Education (1926), Report of the Board of Education for the Year 1924–25 (London, HMSO), p.136. 48. Our best estimate, based on the combined available sources, is that approximately 70,000 teachers participated in the scheme in the years between 1907 and 1939. 49. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961); also Michael Young, ‘Down With Meritocracy’, The Guardian, 29 June 2001. 50. Board of Education (1914), Report for 1912–1913, p.151. Though all Bursars receive free education during the year of Bursarship and many hold scholarships… these awards seldom cover the whole cost of keeping a boy or girl at school.’ Ibid., p.150. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. Also see Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998). 53. Board of Education (1914), Report for 1912–1913, p.151. 54. Ibid., pp. 149–50. 55. Ibid., p.157. 56. Ibid., p.153. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., pp. 153–8. 59. Ibid., p.157. 60. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Training of Teachers for Public Elementary Schools, p.16. In 1929–30, former student teachers made up about 15 per cent of the total training college intake; in 1937–38, the figure was down to 7 per cent. Cunningham et al., ‘McNair’s Lost Opportunity’, p. 225. 61. Tropp, The School Teachers, pp.118, 187–8. 62. Ibid., p.188. 63. Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.218. However undesirable in the contexts of educational improvement and an aspiring profession, so numerically important were uncertificated teachers to the staffing of elementary schools that the NUT


64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

admitted them to membership and they received the benefits of superannuation under the Burnham salary settlement of 1918. See Tropp, The School Teachers, p.213. See W.Roy Niblett, Darlow W.Humphreys and John R.Fairhurst, The University Connection (Windsor, NFER, 1975), pp.13–18; Dent, The Training of Teachers, p. 98. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.267–73. Ibid., p.159; also Tropp, The School Teachers, p.244. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, p.75. Board of Education (1926), Circular 1377, Revision of the Regulations for the Training of Teachers: 1926, pp.2–3; PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, p.74. See, for example, PRO ED 67/19, County Council of the Isle of Ely, Education Committee, ‘Regulations Relating to the Preliminary Education and Training of Teachers’, p.1: ‘The Committee have decided in accordance with the recommendation of the Departmental Committee on the Training of Teachers for Public Elementary Schools to replace as from 1st August, 1927, the year of Student Teachership by a second year of Bursarship, during which the intending teacher will remain in full-time attendance at the Secondary School.’ PRO ED 67/94, handwritten note giving statistics of student-teacher scheme for England only, 25 October 1928. Authorities giving up the scheme included Barrowin-Furness, Birkenhead, Birmingham, Grimsby, Leeds, Leicester, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton and Stoke. Board of Education (1929), Education in 1928 (London, HMSO), p.55. Board of Education (1930), Education in 1929 (London, HMSO), p.56. Board of Education (1931), Education in 1930 (London, HMSO), p.61. Board of Education (1935), Education in 1934 (London, HMSO), p.62. Board of Education (1939), Education in 1938 (London, HMSO), Table 100. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.202–3. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, p.71. Ibid. Spurley Hey (n.d., c.1928), Some Influences Upon the Supply and Training of Teachers (London Councils and Education Press), p.14. Manchester in the time of Spurley Hey has been described by Brian Simon as being ‘in the van of educational advance, under a distinguished and energetic director’. B.Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform (Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), p.42; also p.306. See also Chapter 7 for respondents’ experiences of contacts with local directors of education. The latter also depended upon the progressive lowering of average class sizes. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, p.73. Ibid., p.72. Ibid., p.71. Ibid., p.73. Ibid. Ibid., pp.72–3. See Harry Hendrick, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present’, in Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1997), pp.34– 62.


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88. ‘Memorandum of Dissent’, PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, pp. 177–83; also see PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teachers’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from C.E. Carpenter, 26 June 1920, p.2; ‘Valuable as is the work in the P[ublic] E[lementary] School during the Student Tr year, I am not sure that it is in the right place in a teacher’s education, though I have no doubt it will help the students to understand and appreciate the lectures and teaching exercises in the Training College.’ Also see ibid., ‘The Student-Teacher System’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from A.T. Kerslake, 23 June 1920, p.4; ‘If it were possible, I would suggest the following programme:- (i) Enter College at 18 years straight from school. (ii) Complete academic studies in one year and pass examination in them at the end of it. (iii) Return to P[ublic] E[lementary] S[chool] for a year as a Student Teacher. (iv) Once more to College for a year’s training to be followed at the end by an examination in professional subjects.’ Also see Hey, Some Influences, p.14. 89. Jones, The Training of Teachers, pp.375–6. Michael Sanderson, Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England (London, Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 18– 44; Gary McCulloch, Failing the Ordinary Child: The Theory and Practice of Working-Class Secondary Education (Buckingham, Open University Press, 1998), pp.44–56. 90. Hey, Some Influences, p.4. 91. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp. 203–4. 92. ‘No doubt the difficulty remains insuperable so long as the problems of the selection and education of future Elementary School Teachers continues to be regarded as an isolated one. The position is, however, entirely altered when it is regarded merely as a part of the general problem of making an education in Secondary Schools freely available for all such children from Elementary Schools as are capable of profiting by it, whether they are destined to become teachers or to enter upon commercial or industrial pursuits. This…is an ideal upon the realisation of which the possibility of making the English people an educated people depends, and there are already signs that it is one which the more enlightened representatives of the working classes, no less than educational reformers, have at heart. But until the Secondary Schools are properly organised from this point of view the provision of a good and steady supply of Elementary School Teachers will continue to present the gravest difficulties. In the end it will prove to depend upon the provision of a good and abundant supply of secondary education for the whole of the class from which such teachers are or can be drawn. When this stage is reached, it will no longer be thought necessary to ask whether a scholar intends to become a teacher.’ PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.22. 93. NUT, The Training of Teachers and Grants to Intending Teachers (London, NUT, 1939), pp.5–6. 94. Hey, Some Influences, p.16. 95. Ibid. 96. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, p.73. 97. Ibid. 98. Hey, Some Influences, p.17. 99. Ibid., p.5. 100. Homerton College Archives, A1 10010, College Register 1918–1920.


101. Hey, Some Influences, p.9; ‘Generally, it is my view that, prior to the commencement of actual teaching, the certificated teacher has been under an influence which is out of harmony with the procedure and practice of Elementary Schools, probably because the teaching staffs of Secondary Schools, Training Colleges and University Training Departments have had too little actual teaching experience under Elementary School conditions.’

3 POLICY DEBATED: CONFLICTING IDEALS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION AND TRAINING

On 11 July 1921, Caroline Graveson, President of the Training College Association1 and Grace Fanner, President of the Association of Head Mistresses, wrote jointly to the President of the Board of Education, then H.A.L.Fisher. The letter alluded to a joint conference which had recently been held by the two associations ‘on the value of the Student-Teacher system’.2 It enclosed a summary of the principal arguments deployed during the conference, together with a reminder that a similar conference on the same topic had been held in May of the previous year.3 On that earlier occasion, representatives of the Association of Directors and Secretaries for Education (ADSE) and of the NUT had also been present. The burden of the resolution conveyed to the Board was that the opportunities of a final year (17–18) at the secondary schools should be open to all intending teachers and it therefore invites the Board …to bring to the notice of the Local Education Authorities the desirability of making the position of an intending teacher, whose parent or guardian can show that he needs the assistance, equal financially in the last year of school life, to that of the Student Teacher.4 The assumption here was that the financial inducement of the student-teacher year was the principal attraction for those who entered it. Once this essentially extraneous factor had been nullified, no further obstacle was perceived to stand in the way of its substitution by a further year of full-time secondary education. That the student-teacher salary was a key element in the scheme’s popularity with its working-class constituency cannot be doubted, as the testimonies of our former student teachers make plain.5 The assumption, however, that this was the sole reason for the scheme’s enduring attraction is a characteristic example of that kind of tendentious caricature which marked so much contemporary thinking about it. The reason for this, of course, goes well beyond the question merely of the student-teacher scheme itself. This is because, considerably in excess of its substantive policy importance, the scheme seems for many contemporaries, and not least for former student teachers themselves, to have held a broader symbolic significance for their general thinking about the direction of policy change in education. In fact, the scheme represented a site


that was symbolic as well as real, through which ran most of the major controversies about the systematic reform of national education in a new age of industrial democracy. Some indication of this can be seen if we look in a little more detail at the diversity of responses, among those seeking to influence policy, to the Training College Association’s attack on student teaching. In the wake of the Association’s first joint conference on the studentteacher scheme in 1920, the Board of Education sought further to illuminate the state of opinion on the subject in a number of ways. First, it circularised individual members of His Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) as to their experience of the student-teacher scheme and their considered thoughts on its future.6 Secondly, in October it invited representatives of the Training College Association (TCA), the Association of Head Mistresses (AHM), the NUT and the ADSE to a further joint meeting, this time with representatives of the Board, led by R.G.Mayor, Principal Assistant Secretary.7 The views which the Board’s endeavours elicited from these various consultations offer the most detailed critical appreciation of student teaching at the height of its influence. As such, they are worth considering at some length. The views of HMI were united only in their diversity. Judgments on the experiences of student teachers in the elementary schools varied from the very poor to the outstanding. A number found it hard to track down any head teachers ‘who understand what it means to train an apprentice of 17 years of age in the art of teaching’.8 Others, commentating on Cumberland and Leicester, among other localities, found the system to be operating very effectively. In Leicester, HMI Hartley suggested that, of the student teachers he had observed at work in the classroom, ‘some of them would have been classed “A” for practical teaching if they had been students at the end of their Training College Course’.9 Mayor, who was not himself a strong supporter of the student-teacher year, occasionally added a marginal note as he read through HMIs’ comments. These are always brief but frequently telling. At the mention of ‘A’—rated student teachers, he added, ‘What was their classification at 30?’10 Here, in its most distilled form, we see a characteristic example of a widespread and deeply rooted official suspicion of the precocious and apparently successful classroom practitioner. Like Morant, Mayor was more comfortable with a model of teaching that was essentially cerebral and much slower to mature. In this view, the student teacher’s ability ultimately flattered to deceive, drawing upon an intellectual resource that was stunted or otherwise deformed. By contrast, with the benefit of a full secondary education and college training, the initial return that might be expected in the classroom would probably be modest, but it would at least be supported by a depth and range of personal and intellectual qualities which, in the long run, would always produce the better teacher. And if the investment costs of such preparation were inescapably higher, then the long-term returns would be too. In commenting upon their impressions of the time—generally one day each week or its equivalent—which student teachers spent back at their secondary

POLICY DEBATED: CONFLICTING IDEALS

49

schools, inspectors found greater agreement. The trainee teacher and the secondary school did not mix. ‘The majority of H.M.s [head mistresses or head masters] regard the S.T.s as a nuisance.’11 In the same degree, many of the students themselves ‘often regard the day spent in the S[econdary] School as a slack day’.12 The episodic presence of student teachers was seen, moreover, as potentially damaging for the morale of the secondary school pupils proper. It was, in sum, ‘disturbing for the teacher, rather demoralising for the rest of the class and clearly not worth much to the student’.13 But that which, above all else, troubled secondary school teachers, and similarly troubled the staffs of the training colleges was, once more, that insouciant air of precocious practical competence which student teachers were sometimes wont to develop. Their direct and current experience of a very different and tougher pedagogical regime could be very threatening for the more sheltered atmosphere and ethos of the secondary school and, indeed, subsequently for the training college too. A small but evocative example complains that ‘girl S.T.s having put up their hair regard themselves as young ladies and proceed to take liberties in the matter of discipline’.14 Such apparently trifling matters speak to critically important differences of perception in the ways that student teachers were seen by themselves and by others.15 It is just such indications which led one HMI to make the capital observation that the student teacher essentially ‘falls between two stools’16—a motif, it might be said, which stands very well for the larger story of the school-teaching profession across the course of the entire twentieth century. On the wider residual effects of the apprenticeship model in the studentteacher scheme, the opinion of HMI was particularly sharply divided. This was a rift which could be expressed in a number of ways. None, however, was more striking than the contrast drawn between the relative effectiveness of student teaching and college training in terms of practical professional preparation. One group supported the former for its practical classroom emphasis in tones that are very close to those elaborated in the memories of the former student teachers to whom we spoke in the course of this research. But it is important to note that this celebration of the everyday life of the school did not at all rest upon a corresponding denigration of college training. None of the supporters of the scheme, whether from the ranks of HMI or from the student teachers themselves, saw it as an alternative to the training work done in the colleges. Both forms were valued for their distinctive strengths. Most student teachers who progressed to college found the experience delightful, culturally enriching and academically rewarding. The great difficulty, particularly for individual student teachers though seldom much less for many HMI, was in finding practical or organisational strategies by which these two distinctive strands of professional preparation could be made to cohere. As they traversed their teaching careers, many student teachers looked back with both fondness and appreciation both to their year of student teaching and to their two years at college. These two essentially distinctive sets of learning experiences remained substantially separated, feeding


different currents of professional practice, identity and memory.17 Each current was seen to supply that which the other could not. In the failure to bring the two together, in the failure on the part of policy makers even to desire to bring them together, lies the origins of that debilitating stand-off between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ which comprised the context for so many of the teacher training debates of the later twentieth century. Supporters of the training college commonly took a more hegemonic view of the relationship than did students themselves, seeing the student-teacher scheme as very far from a natural complement to the training college course, but rather as its antithesis. One who particularly applauded the value of the student-teacher year in the face of the training college was HMI Murray, who asserted that ‘the Student Teacher system is doing valuable work and work which cannot be done by the Training Colleges on their present lines’.18 I have not the slightest doubt that the year’s practice in the P[ublic] E [lementary] S[chools] is of real and permanent value to the intending teacher. It provides a background of experience, not as good as it might be, but yet of real value to the intending teacher when she enters the Training College. Without it the College lessons are in grave danger of missing the mark in that the student has no basis of experience from which to criticise, to appreciate, to apply herself. I find it easy to pick out from teachers who have just left College and taken up teaching posts those who have served for a time as Student Teachers.19 ‘My reply to the Training Colleges’, Murray concluded, ‘would be: “Physician, heal thyself.”’20 Another supporter was HMI Kerslake, who reported that ‘my own experience of the Student-Teacher System is that where properly applied it is most valuable and effective’.21 The training colleges, in Kerslake’s view, ‘are apt to minimise the advantages of the Student Teacher year’.22 The other side of the case was put by those like HMI Wark, who took a position which supported the concerns of the training colleges. This was a view which rested upon a severe general critique of contemporary pedagogical practice in the elementary school and which was therefore suspicious of any approach associated with an apprenticeship model. Miss Wark deprecates a student beginning her training before entering College as he or she contracts harmful methods and a wrong outlook in the P.E.S. and thinks that the main part of teaching is keeping children in order. On entering college he or she has not only to recover what has been forgotten, but the T.C. has to spend time in undoing.23 This was a dramatic position to adopt in relation to a training scheme which was, in principle, designed to help produce better teachers for the schools. HMI Wark’s account understood student teaching not to be merely ineffective but


51

positively damaging. Such a view recognised that any long-term reconstruction of pedagogy, any re-making of the classroom teacher, would have to be undertaken at a remove from the influence of serving teachers. It would have to be carried out at a distance from the classroom before being imported back into it. In this respect, the student-teacher scheme seemed to offer only the baleful influence of the nineteenth-century tradition of apprenticeship training. And far from complementing or developing the student-teacher experience, the task of the college now became a restitutive one, repairing the damage that had been wrought by an improperly supervised year spent under the narrow tutelage of elementary school teachers. HMI Stead noted that the student-teacher year cemented an unholy alliance between, on the one hand, the local authorities —‘what they really want is a number of useful Supplementary Teachers’24— and, on the other, the teachers. ‘Mr Stead does not believe in what he calls “the mysterious craft” of elementary teaching, according to which none should be allowed to train without a previous apprenticeship.’25 Most of those circularised by Mayor’s questionnaire fell easily into one or other of the two camps, supporters or opponents of the student-teacher year, each of which had substantially held their ground since the regulations of 1907. The response of HMI Phillips was unusual, both in taking a position somewhere in the middle ground and in citing reasons for reform which rested upon explicitly educational, rather than implicitly class-cultural, arguments. ‘I should have said’, he wrote, ‘that it would be a pity to abolish it.’26 The new educational needs raised by the development of a national system of education for the twentieth century, he went on, demanded a new type of teacher and a break with the old. This was a familiar of Morant’s influential rhetoric, but Phillips steered the argument in a direction that was more closely attuned to educational rather than social goals. ‘I should have thought that the type of teacher now needed … was something different from the type hitherto produced and was ungettable through either the Student Teacher or the Pupil Teacher system.’27 But what Phillips had in mind was a teacher that was new, not so much in terms of culture or bearing, but in terms of professional preparation for changing pedagogical demands in a new period of school organisation. Instead of a general practitioner, shut up within the four walls of a classroom and teaching a little of everything to forty or sixty children of roughly uniform attainments, we need a man or woman possessed of special knowledge in one or two subjects and, generally speaking, better educated… This teacher’s function will be to act as helper and supervisor of several groups of children who are learning under his supervision how to learn for themselves.28 Morant’s rejection of the old ‘heroic’ method of apprenticeship training was founded upon a cultural aversion to the figure of the working-class teacher. His project was to recast that figure in a new and more elevated pose, thereby to


bring sweetness and light to the lowest levels of the system of schooling. At the same time, the fundamentally hierarchical character of the system was to remain substantially undisturbed other than through the insertion of a narrow escape ladder connecting the bottom with the top.29 But such a resolution invoked a dynamic of change which could not ultimately be controlled. HMI Phillips’ words give us an indication that, once begun, the reform of teacher training could not be confined in the way Morant had anticipated. Its results would impact more widely and more deeply across the entire education system. This was a point echoed by HMI Stead who, in a phrase which Morant would have struggled with, saw teacher training reform as a question that was essentially a professional and not a cultural one. ‘This seems to me to go to the root of the matter. If we could think less of the training and recruitment of the elementary teacher as such and more of the teaching profession as a whole a good many difficulties would, I believe, disappear.’30 These were challenging words for a traditionally segregated system. The increasing access of prospective elementary teachers to enhanced personal education could not fail to raise their professional expectations and to expose the divisions within the education system as resting primarily upon non-educational grounds. One secondary head teacher of whom Stead inquired on this point responded that This involves the whole question of the unification of the profession… The longer we continue to turn out half-educated elementary teachers the longer we shall preserve the division between the two classes… We must face the fact that if we give the full year between 17 and 18 (in a S. School) a few may go off to Secondary teaching. When there are too many secondary teachers there must, of necessity, be a return to the elementary schools: meanwhile we must make one branch as attractive as the other in payment and surroundings and social standing.31 Armed with the challenging, if very far from consensual, findings of its consultation with HMI, the Board of Education now turned to an elucidation of the views of those notionally less objective educational organisations who had become increasingly exercised about the place of student teaching in professional training. On 14 October 1920, the Board’s planned conference convened and representatives of the Board, the NUT, the ADSE, the AHM and the TCA were invited to put forward their views. The AHM regretted that the student-teacher year robbed intending teachers of ‘the full value of the life of the Secondary School’.32 Full entry into the life and responsibility of the sixth form was ‘enormously valuable’ for the personal development of those who sought to enter the teaching profession.33 For the TCA, Winifred Mercier, Principal of Whitelands College, explained that the student teacher was disadvantaged in a number of important ways by contrast with the two-year sixth former. In the first place ‘she has lost intellectual interest and mental


53

grip’; in the second, she was likely to be precluded from advanced courses on account of ‘the loss of elementary ground-work and power of memory’; in the third, her ‘development of character’ might be impeded—‘She ought of course to be a prefect.’34 The former student teacher ‘goes to the work of teaching with too uncritical and too undeveloped a mind. She does not really look out for the right things or know what to observe0…and is very liable to pick up things which are unessential or even bad.’35 Most damaging of all—for it was clearly threatening to the professional authority of the training college—the student teacher was inclined to ‘a certain mechanical outlook on teaching’. The ex-bursar was, in this respect, more malleable; she ‘starts more freshly from this point of view and it is easier to get her to see what are the things of greatest importance’.36 There was, however, one important ground upon which it was possible to contemplate the continued, if strictly temporary, existence of student teaching. If it were abolished at a stroke, the training colleges would not be in a position immediately to offer the enhanced periods of school-teaching practice which would be required in compensation for the loss of experience gained during the student-teacher year.37 Miss Escott, for the AHM, advanced the key point, upon which policy since Morant had rested, that a complete sixth-form education was the best platform in preparing for a teaching career. The self-evident status accorded to this observation meant that any indication to the contrary in patterns of recruitment could be explained only in the base terms of pecuniary calculation or expediency. ‘The Association feels very strongly …that girls become student teachers very largely because of the financial aid. If they had the same financial aid if they stayed on at the Secondary School the path would be open to them.’38 But if the inherent attractiveness of a further school year for second-year bursars was taken for granted in this account, the schools themselves retained a degree of ambivalence about taking on all intending teachers. In particular, the AHM was not convinced that all such candidates would be suitable for the mainstream secondary school Advanced Courses. In place of these, tailor-made courses for intending teachers might be developed which would be ‘a little more elastic’.39 In their second year, such students ‘might be better doing advanced English, Drawing, and Music and would make better teachers in the Elementary Schools later on’.40 Whilst such a course was seen to constitute a superior alternative to student teaching for the large majority of intending teachers, there would remain a low status minority, chiefly those destined for infant teaching, for whom a residual variation of the student-teacher year might yet remain appropriate. ‘There are some candidates who reach a certain point in their intellectual development and then need a stimulus which is provided through their being with the actual pupils in the schools.’41 If, in other words, the upper branches of elementary school teaching were to be remodelled on more academic lines closer to those of the secondary school, traditional school-based training might continue to serve where the intended destination was infant teaching, or where the modest intellectual capacity of the intending teacher rendered it still


suitable. The greater preparedness of the secondary schools to embrace the generality of intending teachers—young people often without the social background normally associated with such schools—as long as they followed tailored courses did not surprise Herbert Ward, Chief Inspector with responsibility for teacher training. Ward subsequently wrote to Mayor: I had gathered myself—but I cannot now quote my informants—that the retention of Ex-Bursars…in the Secondary Schools would be an embarrassment to the Schls. These girls would not fit in to Advanced Courses, because they were not good enough and ought not to be in such Courses as a drag on the abler girls.42 If the secondary schools were increasingly prepared to take on the education of intending teachers for a second year of sixth form, if with the provisos for segregation that we have noted, the position of the NUT was even more clear cut. From an earlier position of support for student teaching on the grounds of its practical utility in preparing entrants to the profession, the union had made an important, perhaps a historic, shift in its thinking about the appropriate form of professional preparation for elementary school teachers. The old concerns about teaching as a profession ‘stolen’ by Morant’s reforms from its traditional constituency—a claim of which we will hear much more in Chapter 5—had dissipated. The emphasis now fell upon the academic rather than the professional aspects of teacher training. For the NUT, Miss J.F.Wood summarised the position in this way: Until recently they were strongly in favour of the student teacher year and thought it was most valuable but the experience of the last few years had led them to take a rather different view. They feel now that the student teacher is too young to grasp the inward meaning of the teaching in the Elementary Schools and that they grasped that meaning much more quickly when they are older. What the Elementary teachers suffer from is insufficient academic qualifications.43 This is a statement which signals the real end of the hegemony of a tradition of training which had represented, if anything did, the professional soul of teaching over many decades. Teachers’ organisations were now ready formally to relinquish it.44 Whilst the idea of the mystery of the ‘inward meaning’ of teaching was retained, it was now a mystery that would henceforth be revealed in a new way—no longer through precocious practice but through mature reflection. Wood’s words pre-figured the new policy of the NUT throughout the remainder of the inter-war years, culminating in the condemnation of the remnants of student teaching in its 1939 investigation of teacher-training provision.45 Wood’s position was endorsed in yet stronger terms by Mr G.H.Powell, the NUT’s second representative at the conference.46 The only surviving use for the student-


55

teacher year was, in his view, as a basic test of fitness for teaching before proceeding to college—a requirement that might be satisfied by a far shorter period of attendance at an elementary school. ‘A 12 months’ period is entirely unnecessary and it is a useless waste of time…the student…is likely to become a hindrance instead of a help and there are few schools where adequate supervision and training can be given.’47 Powell ‘was inclined to go further’ than the reform measures which the training colleges proposed. He sought a less equivocal position, requesting the Board ‘to deliberately encourage the proceeding direct from the Secondary School to the Training College. This will go a long way towards making more and better teachers.’48 And in a passing comment which would probably have troubled the secondary school representatives present, Powell hoped that more rigorous college training would enable a student ‘to develop into a useful teacher in any grade of school’.49 In the words of Wood and Powell, the perception of policies which had previously seemed to threaten, was quite transformed. The defence of the old ground seemed a poor strategy when suddenly there were large new territories which might be won. If the NUT were to absorb the new direction of policy, then it would do so more aggressively and more whole-heartedly than anyone else. It would take the logic of reform beyond the limits which its framers had set for it. When they turned from the teachers to the representatives of the local education authorities, Mayor and his colleagues needed to hear one further set of condemnations of the student-teacher scheme in order for the conference to have achieved unanimity. They did not, however, much anticipate such condemnations, and they were not forthcoming. The Local Education Authorities (LEAs) took a spectacularly different view of things. Though not apparently personally unsympathetic to the resolutions originally put forward by the Training Colleges Association, James Graham of the Association of Directors and Ernest Salter Davies of the Association of Education Committees had arrived with mandates from their associations to state a strong case. Graham announced that at a recent ‘lively’ meeting of his organisation, the views put forward by the training colleges had ‘had a rather bad time of it’.50 He went on to warn that ‘L.E.A.s were extremely keen that the student teacher year should not disappear altogether.’51 What arguments were raised in support of this plea? The LEAs were far from diffident in making a case on the grounds chosen by the training colleges themselves, that is to say, on the grounds of professional competence and educational effectiveness. Student-teacher courses run under the guidance of expert teachers were lauded not least for their capacity to maximise the training-college experience. Having completed a student-teacher year, ‘later on in the Training College the students would understand what the Master and Mistress of Method were talking about but at present and in most cases it is too abstract for them’.52 Graham went further; at the recent meeting of their association, ‘the work of the Training Colleges themselves was criticised in no uncertain way’.53 ‘There was too much Theory in certain Colleges and the staffs needed to be strengthened on the practical side.’54 In recognition of this, the


retention of student teaching was urged for some categories of recruit, if not for all. After this overture, Graham moved to the second case for retention. This was the instrumental ground which had become a familiar one for local authorities since the reforms of 1903 and 1907. In short, ‘they were afraid that it would… cut down the supply of teachers’.55 Salter Davies endorsed these arguments, though in following the suggestion that the student-teacher scheme might be differentially retained for certain categories of student, he was aware that this was a point upon which the training colleges had already declared themselves to be amenable. ‘There are a certain number of teachers’, he considered, ‘who reach the limit of their academic possibilities rather early and for them the student teacher arrangement is better than a long stay at the Secondary School.’56 It was on this last point that the meeting, despite its many other disagreements, was able to build a limited consensus, which Mayor agreed to take forward with his senior officials. In effect, the value of the continuation of the student-teacher scheme for a certain category of intending teachers was accepted. This group was identified as the least intellectually able of a tripartite classification—a configuration not unknown in educational policy making, both before and since. The three categories were: ‘those capable of following Advanced Courses’; ‘those who now become Student-Teachers but could profitably remain at Secondary Schools until 18’; and ‘those who would profit most by becoming Student-Teachers and coming into direct contact with children at an early age’.57 Whatever the regard in which student-teacher schemes continued to be held in some local authorities—and in a number, such regard was genuinely high and not merely a function of the exigencies of teacher supply—after the October meeting at the Board of Education, student teaching became a devalued currency for the makers of central educational policy. Student teachers and those working alongside them in the schools knew nothing of this. Most of our sample of student teachers embarked upon their training after 1920. As they did so, they had every reason to suppose that the courses upon which they were enrolling were not only approved, but were also well-regarded by those, however remote, who were responsible for shaping the educational policy of the nation. But this was not the case. On one other point there was something approaching general agreement between most of those present at the meeting at the Board in October 1920. The representatives of the training colleges and the secondary schools were able to achieve an accord that ‘the financial question is a serious matter in dealing with the student-teachership as it is the prospect of earning that induces people to become student-teachers’.58 The meeting had heard several powerful assertions on this point and had for the most part accepted them. There was, however, no systematic evidence brought forward in support of these. And though financial exigency was unquestionably a significant consideration for some members of our interview sample, it is fair to say that most of them would have been both surprised and disappointed to find that contemporary policy makers perceived


57

their primary motivation for seeking to become student teachers to be a pecuniary one. Having sounded out HMI and the associations, Mayor and his officials set to work in the final months of 1920 on a draft circular setting out the Board’s revised policy position on student teaching. The broad objectives were to limit the number of entrants, particularly the more able, from opting for this route, and to obviate any financial advantage it was seen to hold for intending teachers. Drafting, however, proved more difficult than anticipated. Whilst the issue of maintenance allowances for a second year was largely unproblematical, the configuration and sequencing of academic, professional and practical elements of training, following any phasing out of the student-teacher year, was not so straightforward. The loss of student teaching would have a number of direct consequences for these matters. In the first place, it would effectively bring to an end the notion of preliminary training, passing the entire weight of professional preparation to the training colleges. This would finally allow movement away from the premature binding of recruits to teaching before they had completed a full secondary education to the age of 18. For the most visionary of educationists, such as those who were later to put their signatures to the Memorandum of Dissent from the 1925 Report of the Departmental Committee, it opened the way to a far more dramatic prospect. Here, the fulfilment of a full academic course in advance of professional training—in advance, indeed, of any decision to enter the profession—was taken ideally to mean a degree and not merely a sixth-form course. Such a proposal was anathema to the local authorities, for whom the securing of a guaranteed local supply of practised recruits was ever the prime consideration. It was scarcely less attractive to the Board, whose ambitions for improving the quality of elementary teachers had limits, as did the size of the bill it was prepared to foot in realising them. Within its more modest plans, the disappearance of the student-teacher year implied a greater role for practical work in the training college and, perhaps, a reduced academic role in view of the enhanced attention which could be allotted to this aspect in the sixth form. Such a revision of the traditional balance of their functions was not at all welcome to the colleges, who saw it as a threat to their own struggle to achieve recognition as institutions of higher education. In an odd way, the practical, school-based element of teacher training, for all its logical claim to be at the heart of the process of professional formation and development, had come to stand as an embarrassment to the colleges rather than an asset. Policy makers and many educationists supported the process of wrenching it from the hands of classroom teachers but, with this goal in sight, there was no clear view of how it might be embraced elsewhere in the training process. Tainted for so long by its association with the tradition of apprenticeship and mechanical approaches to teaching, school-based training seemed to have little to offer to the re-making of the profession. There were many positive reasons for a critique of the student-teacher year as it was configured in the early 1920s; most of them had been persuasively


rehearsed at the meeting at the Board in October 1920. What would prove to be an enduringly damaging legacy across the remainder of the century, however, was the failure to recognise that student teaching represented more than just the residual survival of an outmoded institutional form which had to be transcended. It was also a practical and symbolic manifestation of a genuinely autonomous professional expertise founded upon the classroom itself. Its loss, with no alternative outlet offered for its continued expression and subsequent development, was essentially a process of alienation for the teaching profession. In whatever other respects teaching could be seen to have advanced across the century—and there were many—in this one critical regard the profession was left stranded from itself and from its own history. For decades, teaching was consigned to a long and frustrating detour through successive waves of institutional reform in the search to reunite its professional identity, status and expertise with the institutional site of its true expression—the school classroom. The prospect for the future certainly did not present itself in any such way to the policy makers of the 1920s. The imminent loss of student teaching appeared to most as an unquestioned benefit for education and for the teaching profession alike, and though work on the draft circular floundered, this was not a consequence of any strategic reservations. Rather, it was the result of tactical difficulties in restructuring the interface between the secondary school and the training college —including the possibility of a one-year college course—as well as the relation between certificated and uncertificated teaching statuses.59 Mayor wrote to Ward in March 1921 intimating that more detailed work needed to be done on these points, adding that ‘I do not think however, that the delay will do much harm.’60 Mayor was well aware that the temporary retention of the student-teacher year presented a number of short-term transitional benefits, not least on the supply issue which so taxed the LEAs, and he reasoned that a brief stay would do little damage ‘before we pronounce definitely against Student Teachership as is done in the draft Circular. The recommendation of a further year at a Secondary School is one thing, the condemnation of Student-Teachership is another.’61 In the event, the convoluted state of affairs which emerged from the Board’s consultations was resolved by collapsing it into a wider investigation of elementary teacher training in the form of the departmental committee appointed in 1923.62 The report of that committee, as we have noted, deprecated studentteachership and called for the provision of maintenance allowances for a second year of sixth-form education for intending teachers at a rate equivalent to the student-teacher salary.63 Upon this unequivocal recommendation, the Board felt able to issue Circular 1377 in June 1926 announcing that central funding in support of local student-teacher schemes would cease at the end of the academic year 1926–27.64 Exceptions to this rule would be made only in cases where local authorities could defend a temporary continuation of a scheme.65 A number of local education authorities, affronted by such a pointed rejection of the position that they had kept consistently before the Board’s notice since 1920, made representations for an amendment. The following month, the Board acceded to


59

such requests and issued Circular 1383 which renewed the invitation to LEAs ‘to make application for the continued recognition of their arrangements for the preliminary education and training of candidates for the teaching profession’ but omitted any reference to such recognition being temporary.66 Despite this concession, many authorities noted that the steer they were being given from the centre was a sharp one and recognised that the surrender of their schemes was the course most likely to elicit approval from Whitehall.67 This was a relief to the Board, for there had been those who had anticipated that the extent of support for student teaching in the localities might have resulted in a major confrontation. Such was the assessment of the journal Education which, in July 1931, offered under the heading ‘The Passing of the Student Teacher’, a piece that was effectively an institutional obituary for the student-teacher scheme. Many readers will remember the diversity of view expressed by educationists some five or six years ago when the Report of the Departmental Committee…recommended that the student teachership system, having fulfilled its work under old and worn-out conditions, should give place to the scheme of extended scholarship… After a heated controversy in which prominent national figures in the educational world took part on opposite sides, the question was settled in accordance with the dictates of the genius of the British race. In other words, there was compromise, and Authorities were allowed to follow either or indeed both courses.68 On this account, the steady decline in student teaching from the late 1920s could be interpreted as the consequence of just such a benevolent compromise in which each authority was given the opportunity to find its way to the most appropriate solution in its own time, rather than being forced to it. As a result, ‘time is solving the problem that seemed so difficult five years ago…the solution of time is the sound one, and all the sounder in this case because it has been comparatively silent’.69 In a further five years, the article predicted, student teaching would be extinct. This was a misreading both of events and of the nature of the compromise that was offered. The residual tenacity of student teaching was greater, and the terms of the compromise less generous, than the article supposed. The Board’s figures on student-teacher recruitment showed a very sharp fall—something approaching 60 per cent—in the year following its circulars decrying the scheme. But thereafter, the decline levelled off. In 1928–29, there were 1,408 new studentteacher appointments nationally; in 1929–30, there were 1,301.70 This ‘rate of decrease’, an official noted, was one which troubled the Board.71 The prospect of a stubborn rump of local authorities not only retaining the scheme but, as in a number of cases, actively strengthening it, was an unwelcome one.72 The Board’s policy from this point, therefore, was to exert discreet local pressure upon recalcitrant authorities. The central strategy in this approach was particularly to target authorities where numbers appeared to be increasing.


The question of issuing some general warning to L.E.A.s was considered in June [1932]; no general statement was issued to L.E.A.s, but where we have learnt, generally through H.M.I., that an Authority were appointing a larger number in 1932 than in previous years, we have tried to keep the number down.73 Such a combination of transparent displeasure—‘we certainly don’t like the system’74—informal surveillance and targeted rather than general warnings proved effective in bearing down on local schemes. More aggressive general measures were not needed. The question of taking repressive action was considered…[but] the Secretary decided…that it was not necessary to do more than follow the previous instructions to question any case showing a material increase.’75 By such means the student-teacher scheme, though by no means expunged, was confined within tolerable limits. For the secondary schools, the training colleges and a realigned NUT, this development represented a significant advance, albeit for distinctive reasons in each case. Many local education authorities, driven by a yet different set of concerns, interpreted this change in less positive terms. Spurley Hey’s contemporary commentary gives some indication of this feeling; his words also stand as a summation of the practice, promise and problems of the student-teacher scheme at its height. The student-teacher scheme, or its equivalent, offered an opportunity of real co-operation between the Secondary School and the Elementary School, gave intending teachers some idea of actual conditions in the Schools, made it possible for the Training College student to interpret more easily Training College work, and minimised many of the difficulties attendant upon the first years of teaching life. The Training College must share with the Secondary School the responsibility for breaking one of the few remaining links between Elementary Schools and the higher educational institutions in which intending teachers receive education and training.76 NOTES 1. Graveson was also Vice-President of Goldsmiths’ College and in this role was personally remembered by one of our respondents (see Chapter 10). Crossreferences that we found between our documentary and our oral data demonstrate the ways in which local administrators were in touch with daily experience of the student teachers themselves, and remind us that such figures themselves need to be understood in their multiple roles. 2. PRO ED 86/26, letter to Fisher, 11 July 1921. 3. Some of the major points related in the summary are as follows. ‘The Student Teacher’s intellectual education is curtailed… Her occasional attendance at the


4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

61

Secondary School during the Student-Teacher year is of little value. The StudentTeachers are an inconvenient body for the Head Mistress of a Secondary School to arrange for… Just at the time when a girl is beginning to be an important, responsible member of a Secondary School she leaves to become the humblest person in another institution. There she is shy, ignorant and passively under orders. Her growing sense of personality and dignity is checked and a certain childishness is re-acquired… There is no security that the Elementary School to which the Student-Teacher is attached is sufficiently good… She often gets an impression, exceedingly hard to uproot, that the only valuable work of a teacher is that of keeping a class in order and that fullness and correctness of matter and background are of very minor importance… The Student-Teacher system has not proved itself effective as a means of sifting out the girl who is unsuited to be a teacher… ‘The Student-Teacher system differentiates unduly between the Elementary and Secondary branches of teaching.’ The Student-Teaching System, PRO ED 86/26. Ibid. See accounts in Part III, notably the Shipley family (Chapter 12) and Barbara Mill (Chapter 13). PRO ED 86/26, ‘Board of Education, Inspectors’ § No. 587, 10 June 1920. Niblett et al., The University Connection, pp.33–4; Mayor (1869–1947) was an interesting example of that extraordinary political class—with Morant its leading representative—which administered national education in the early years of the century. Mayor’s obituary in the Alpine Journal—he was a great climber as well as a minor philosopher—records that ‘the love of scholarship and of the things of the mind was in his blood’. See Lord Schuster ‘Robert John Grote Mayor’ Alpine Journal, 1947–1948, 56, pp. 169–72. After Cambridge, Mayor entered the Education Department in 1896 as a Junior Examiner when it ‘was still a place suitable for a scholar and a gentleman’. He was much affected by ‘the immense and vivifying presence of Robert Morant [and] was one of those who caught the new spirit and flung himself with zest at the new task’. In retirement, Mayor wrote Reason and Common Sense: An Inquiry Into Some Problems of Philosophy (London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1951), a work which includes the following (pp.428–9): ‘Memory then, we must say, rests on a sense of personal identity, and this again rests on a feeling for which the best name we can find is perhaps “self-love”… [O]nly its presence seems able to explain how in the confusion of thoughts and images present to awareness at any moment memory can find a way to single out those past events which it recognizes as its own.’ Mayor would have been far more interested in an oral history of the student-teacher scheme than he was in the scheme itself. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.1. PRO ED 86/26, ‘The Student-Teacher System’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from A.T.Kerslake, 23 June 1920, p.3. Ibid. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.4; also PRO ED 86/26, ‘The Student-Teacher System’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from A.T. Kerslake, 23 June 1920, p.1. Also see PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.6. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.4. Ibid., p.5. Ibid., p.4.


15. See, for example, various references to the significance of hair style in Chapter 7, and references to hair and dress in the personal testimonies in Part III. 16. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.1. 17. P.Cunningham, ‘Primary Education’, in R.Aldrich (ed.), A Century of Education (Lewes, Falmer Press, 2002), pp.9–30; Gardner, Teacher Training and Changing Professional Identity in Early Twentieth Century England’, p.213. 18. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Reply to Insp. Section 587’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from H.Murray, 26 June 1920, p.1. 19. Ibid., p.2. 20. Ibid., p.4. For similar poor opinions of the colleges leading up to the McNair Report, see David Crook, ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education and Training 1941–54’, (Ph.D., University of Wales, Swansea, 1997), pp.43, 47; also Board of Education (1943) Educational Reconstruction (London, HMSO), p.27. 21. PRO ED 86/26, ‘The Student-Teacher System’ response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from A.T.Kerslake, 23 June 1920, p.1. Kerslake reinforced his approbation by a further addition: ‘So much so that under good conditions I should prefer two years Student-Teachership to the present one year.’ Mayor’s marginal response on the minute paper comprised four heavy exclamation marks. 22. Ibid. Also see HMI Dunn, who complained that the resolutions of the training colleges ‘fail to help in that there is no proposal to substitute for the year’s apprenticeship any real training in the art of teaching. If it is presumed that the training as given at present in the T.C. will suffice, I have no confidence in the training as being sufficient. Adequate practice and training in the art of teaching must be provided.’ PRO ED 86/26 ‘Student Teacher System’ response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from A.Dunn, 20 June 1920, p.2; also see HMI Young who argued that without the student-teacher year, training college lectures on Method would be ‘in the air to one who has had little experience of the actual difficulties of getting dull children to attend to her’. PRO ED 86/26 ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.8. 23. Ibid., p.7. 24. Ibid., p.8. Also see the assessment of Sir Ronald Gould, later to become a distinguished President of the NUT, who remembered the student-teacher scheme as a ‘catch ‘em young’ device. Gould had been a bursar but not himself a student teacher, going direct to training college from secondary school. See Ronald Gould, Chalk Up the Memory (Birmingham, George Philip Alexander, 1976), p.19. 25. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Inspectors’ Views on the S.T. System’, p.8. 26. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teachers’ Year’ response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from C.J. Phillips, 24 June 1920, p.1. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., pp.1–2. 29. Sanderson, Educational Opportunity. 30. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Inspectors § 587’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from F.B.Stead, 28 June 1920, p.4. 31. Ibid., pp.3–4. Spurley Hey noted the importance of the student-teacher scheme as the only existing structure which alleviated ‘the almost complete separation between the Secondary School and the Elementary School’, Hey, Some Influences, p.4. The two institutions ‘do not combine and very seldom confer. For many years, the student-teacher system has provided one student common to both Schools, and


32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

63

in this respect has given the opportunity of intimate cooperation between the two Schools in the immediate interest of the individual student-teacher, and for the ultimate welfare of the teaching profession…the student-teacher year could be made a most valuable opportunity for development in the sense of responsibility which is so large a factor in the life of any teacher.’ Ibid., p.5. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.2. For a different and unusual view from a contemporary training college principal, see the statement of Mary Morton of Kenton Lodge, solicited by the local Director of Education: ‘The Student Teacher Year gives the indispensable minimum of experience and practice which alone makes the theory of education, the study of psychology and hygiene, and the discussion of method intelligible and helpful to the average student.’ PRO ED 67/ 99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix D. ‘Memorandum from the Principal of the Kenton Lodge Training College’, May 1927, p.1. The AHM representatives, had they known of it, would have been disappointed by a subsequent exchange on this point between HMI Urwick and Chief Inspector Richards. Richards had advanced a case for the importance of the secondary school experience on the lines of the AHM’s argument. Urwick replied ‘In some Secondary Schools your plea is just and true, those of the higher social type. I rather think that the atmosphere in these Schools, which makes the corporate life of the School so educative, owes a great deal to the home influences due to the social stratum from which a good proportion of the girls come. Anyhow, I fear it is true that in a large number of Secondary Schools of a rather different social grade the educational atmosphere on which you rely does not exist, or exists only in a very diminished form… If the girls did stay I doubt if they would gain very much.’ A marginal note from Richards responded ‘Yes—much must…depend on the quality of the S.School.’ PRO ED 86/26, ‘Extract from Letter dated 9th April, 1921, addressed by HMI Mr Urwick to CI Mr Richards’, p.1. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, pp.3–4. Also see PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix C. ‘Memorandum from the Head Teachers of the Municipal Secondary Schools’, May 1927, p.1. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.4. Ibid., pp.4–5. For the view that, even with augmented time at its disposal, the unreformed training college would be unable to absorb an expanded function for practical training, see Hey, Some Influences, p.7. ‘Students would require 12 weeks instead of the present 6’, PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, pp.5, 19. Classroom teachers were always likely to put this point more strongly: ‘We are at one in the conviction that “teaching practice” arranged for college students is insufficient. The conditions surrounding the student when engaged in lesson-giving are artificial, and bear little resemblance to those he will find when confronted with an ordinary class of elementary school children.’ PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix E. ‘Memorandum from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association’, May 1927, p.2. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.6. Also see the views of Miss J.F.Wood of the NUT. ‘Sometimes this (student-teacher) money is vital to the parents and to


39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

the child and it is the deciding factor in the necessary decision, but this should not happen.’ Ibid., p.8. Ibid.; also see PRO ED 67/99, letter from Ministry of Education to Newcastleupon-Tyne LEA, 10 June 1947. ‘The Ministry’s advice that candidates for the teaching profession should remain at school until the age of 18 is based on the assumption that courses can and will be provided in secondary schools for girls who have passed the School Certificate examination and are likely to take up teaching, which will not be unduly restricted by an examination syllabus and which will enable girls who contemplate taking up teaching or similar work to continue the study of such subjects as music, art and crafts which will be useful to them.’ PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, pp.8, 13. Ibid. PRO ED 86/26, Memorandum from Ward to Mayor, 18 March 1921. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.7; also see Crook, ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education’, p.54. Miss Wood became President of the NUT in 1920, a good example of potential paths for women into high level policy making, when such opportunities were few and far between. At her installation during the annual conference at Margate, Spurley Hey, Director of Education for Manchester, was present and addressed the Union with a ‘splendid tribute’, on behalf of the Lord Mayor of Manchester and the Manchester Education Committee, to Miss Wood’s high reputation as ‘a real force in education’. (He also commended her for thinking ‘like a man’.) This active participation of an administrator at the teachers’ union underlines the claims of Spurley Hey to knowing his teachers (see Chapter 2, note 79) and The Schoolmaster aptly commented that his speech ‘made for that mutual appreciation between teacher and administrator which is so necessary for the progress of education’. The Schoolmaster, 10 April 1920, p.696. It is important, of course, to note that the surrender of the scheme by their formal representatives was not a direct reflection of the thinking of all of the teachers at work in the schools. In Walsall, for example, ‘it may be of interest to the Board to know that in view of the statement on page 71 of the Departmental Committee’s Report on the supply and training of teachers that “teachers concerned in Elementary Schools…are, as a whole against it [the Student-Teacher year]”, the Authority asked the head teachers of elementary schools in their area whether or not they considered that arrangement should continue to be made for the employment of Student Teachers, and that the head teachers, without a single dissentient, were in favour of the employment of Student Teachers.’ PRO ED 67/123, Letter to Board of Education, 1 February 1927, p.1. Jones noted in 1923 that the view of ‘the organized body of Elementary Teachers’ was turning against student teaching. ‘It is not surprising, however’, he continued, ‘to find that many who themselves passed through a period of apprenticeship…regard the practical experience gained during the year of Student Teachership as a necessary and valuable preparation for a training course.’ Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.55. NUT, The Training of Teachers, pp.19–21, 256–61. Also see Michael Barber, Education and the Teacher Unions (London, Cassell, 1992). Powell was returned as Vice-President of the NUT at the Margate Conference in 1920. According to The Schoolmaster he was very popular and able, having made a deep impression with his work on the salaries committee. Both he and Miss Wood (see note 43 above) were teacher representatives on the new Burnham standing joint


47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

65

committee on teachers’ salaries, where they sat alongside local authority representatives Spurley Hey for Manchester (see Chapter 2) and Percival Sharp (see Chapter 5), indicating the close liaison that was already established between teachers’ leaders and LEA administrators. The Schoolmaster, 10 April 1920, p.696. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.8. Ibid., p.9. Ibid., p.8; also see Tropp, The School Teachers, p.194. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.9. Ibid. Ibid., pp.9–10; also see PRO ED 67/19, County Council of the Isle of Ely. Education Committee. ‘Regulations relating to the Preliminary Education and Training of Teachers’, p.2. In this respect, local education authorities could find themselves closer to the views of the teachers than were the training colleges. One group of elementary school heads later averred that, when in training college, the former student teacher ‘sits at the feet of his lecturers on “Education”, he, because of his stock of ideas gained during his Student-teacher year in school, is easily able to follow the topics under discussion and profit by them; and the chances are that he looks forward with quiet confidence to the time when he will take his place in front of a class’. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix E. ‘Memorandum from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association’, May 1927, p.1. Also see Hey, Some Influences, p.6: ‘For reasons best known to themselves, the Training Colleges have tended “to dwell in a place apart”… Whilst their eyes should be turned, above all, towards the Elementary Schools, there is, in fact, little contact: in spirit, not contact at all.’ PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.10. Ibid., p.11. Ibid., p.10; for local cases see, for example, Cornwall (PRO ED 67/6), Huntingdonshire (PRO ED 67/18), Flintshire (PRO ED 67/136) and Merthyr Tydfil (PRO ED 67/144). PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, pp. 10–11. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Conclusions’, para. 4; also see PRO ED 67/123, Letter from Walsall C.B. to Board of Education, 1 February 1927, p.1; PRO ED 67/ 99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Osmond to Rhodes, 29/4/47. This alludes —at a point very close to the demise of student teaching—to ‘a recommendation by Dr. Alexander at the meeting of the Interim Ctte. for Teachers on 24th April that student teacher schemes should be allowed to continue as a short term policy as a means of recruiting teachers for infants’. Also see Crook, ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education’, p.46. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Summary of Conclusions’, para. 5. Niblett et al., The University Connection, pp.19, 23. PRO ED 86/26, Board of Education memorandum, 31 March 1921. Ibid. Tropp, The School Teachers, pp.244–5. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee. Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.35. Board of Education (1926) Revision of the Regulations for the Training of Teachers: 1926 (Circular 1377).


66. PRO ED 67/19, County Council of the Isle of Ely. Education Committee. ‘Memorandum on the Student Teacher Year’, 11 February 1927. For other grounds of opposition to the original circular, see Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.36. 67. PRO ED 67/70, letter from A.J.Finny to M.O.McAulisse, 23 February 1935, p.1. 68. Education, 10 July 1931, ‘The Passing of the Student Teacher’. 69. Ibid. 70. PRO ED 86/42, Board of Education memorandum, 15 July 1931. 71. Ibid. A complete national return of student teacher numbers, dated 4 April 1933, is also recorded in this file. 72. See PRO ED 67/123. Walsall offers a good example of an authority that was anxious to maintain its scheme, writing to the Board on 1 February 1927 in order for approval to continue, though at a reduced level, on the grounds that ‘in this area…it has been noteworthy that young teachers fresh from Training College who have had a year’s training as Student Teachers are definitely and surprisingly superior in teaching capacity to young teachers who have proceeded direct from the Secondary School to the Training College’. Walsall was among the last finally to give up student teaching, seeking approval for the last time in June 1946. This was granted, along with a notification that the Minister would not be prepared ‘to continue this approval after the Session 1946–47’. Correspondence and memoranda on Walsall’s student-teacher scheme. 73. PRO ED 86/42, Board of Education Memorandum on ‘the practice of the Middlesborough Authority’, 9 February 1933, p.1. As the years went by, ‘learning through HMI’ became less reliable. In Walsall in 1936, one HMI wrote as follows: ‘Incidentally, I have found in Walsall schools people called “Student Teachers” who are doing continuous work before going to College, and this seems to me against the spirit of the Regns. for the Training of Teachers… ‘The abolition of the Student Tr. year was decided, I take it, for the benefit of the p.e.s. [public elementary school] system, but this Ay. [Authority] prefers to go its own way.’ PRO ED 67/123, ‘Extract from papers registered E. 120 B(1). Walsall. Staffing’, p. 1. A Board official noted: ‘You will see that H.M.I. may be under some misapprehension about “Student Teachers”. We have not prohibited their appointment—we simply raise no objection if the Ay. conform to certain conditions.’ Ibid., p.2. 74. Ibid., p.2. 75. PRO ED 86/42, National return of student teacher numbers, dated 4 April 1933, p. 8. 76. Hey, Some Influences, pp.5–6.

4 POLICY CONCLUDED: DEMISE AND LEGACY OF STUDENT TEACHING

At the end of the inter-war period, the residual elements of the student-teacher scheme were the subject of renewed criticism from two independent enquiries investigating the wider question of the training of teachers. The first, which we have noted earlier, was a report by the Committee of Investigation appointed by the Executive of the National Union of Teachers, the second a memorandum drawn up by the Joint Standing Committee of the Training College Association and Council of Principals.1 The NUT report regarded the current system of training as a ‘patch-work affair’ whose reform was long overdue.2 The principal concern of the NUT in relation to the student-teacher scheme remained much as adumbrated by Miss Wood nearly 20 years before, that ‘all applicants for places in Training Colleges or University Training Departments should have completed a course of secondary education’.3 The colleges, too, maintained their long-standing position on student teaching. Experience shows that its disadvantages outweigh its advantages, and there is no doubt what these disadvantages are. The loss of the last year in school is a serious deprivation, not only in respect of the actual loss in intellectual and cultural development and such opportunities as eligibility for prefectship, but also because as a result students find it more difficult to study when they enter college.4 Despite the weight of educational opinion and the attritional attentions of central government, the extraordinarily resilient appeal of student teaching in a small number of localities—the most prominent examples were Newcastle, Gateshead, the Isle of Wight and Gloucestershire—actually saw it surviving into the postwar years, fully four decades after its inception.5 This meant that preliminary training still demanded a mention, if a terse one, in Circular 85, issued in February 1946, which detailed revised training regulations. This direction was a terminal one. The Minister does not think it desirable that the special arrangements for student-teachers and pupil-teachers should be indefinitely continued, and


provision is made for them in the regulations only so that time may be given for the working out of the best possible alternative provision for those few areas in which these arrangements are still in operation.6 After 1946, an annual return of student-teacher numbers from authorities still running the scheme was discontinued.7 In April 1948, the Ministry offered its best estimate for the entire national cohort of student teachers: ‘we seem unlikely’, wrote an official, ‘to have more than about fifty of the species still with us next session’.8 Student teaching and the important professional and practical issues upon which it had turned were about to drop off the policy agenda for decades to come. It was an important moment. It represented the severing of a strand in teacher training—far more enduring than we have imagined in the past—which, whatever its practical failings, continued to acknowledge among its principles the centrality of the classroom, a positive role for the practicing teacher, and the maintenance of a traditional sympathy between schools provided for the working class and teachers who came from the working class. In the manner of social practices deeply rooted in popular culture, student teaching lingered far longer than governments bargained for. Its cultural significance, as well as its professional importance, is attested by its longevity in a policy climate which was cool at its inception and icy at its end. Where should we turn for an epitaph to this immensely significant but altogether unregarded experiment in educational policy? The answer is to Newcastle. Newcastle has a strong claim to be the last locality ever to offer a student-teacher programme, with its final cohort enrolling for the year 1949–50.9 The Newcastle experience is important for three reasons. First, because it gives a vivid indication of how strenuously some local authorities were prepared to resist central policy over student teaching. Secondly, because it epitomises the key characteristics and practices of a form of professional preparation which had been an important feature of the national educational landscape for four decades. And thirdly, because it shows how central policy was ultimately driven by the desire simply to extinguish student teaching because of its outmoded form, rather than to try to understand it as, above all else, an authentic expression of a pedagogy grounded in the life of the classroom. Under the latter aspect, government might have discovered, had it been minded, that there was much in the record of the scheme that was worthy of positive investigation for the contribution it might hold out for reform in the future. The degree to which government was not so minded is exemplified in the McNair Report of 1944 and the Roseveare Report of 1949, sources contemporary with the Newcastle data and which repay simultaneous consideration.10 As the testimony of our respondents often showed, the figure of the local Director of Education was a key one.11 For teachers and student teachers alike, the Director was the personification of policy in education. In Thomas Walling, Newcastle possessed perhaps the most ardent defender of the student-teacher

BECOMING TEACHERS: TEXTS AND TESTIMONIES 1907–1950 69

scheme.12 In 1927, following the release of the Board of Education’s permissive circulars of the previous year, Walling submitted a request for continued recognition in respect of his authority’s scheme.13 A bundle of supporting documentation accompanied the appeal, including statements of approbation from local elementary teachers and, perhaps more disconcertingly for the Board, from the principal of Kenton Lodge Training College. Recognition was duly given, and the scheme went on. In 1946, with the government intent on tidying away the last vestiges of student teaching, Newcastle sent in a new appeal for continued approval. The letter, on this occasion signed by Peter Thornton, the Deputy Director of Education, was passionate, declaring the Education Committee to be ‘unanimously resolved most earnestly to request the Ministry to reconsider their decision and to allow the Authority to continue their arrangements for Student Teachers’.14 As before, the letter was supported by attachments from other parties. The most impressive of these was a copy of a printed report of a meeting of the Newcastle Head Teachers’ Association, held in October 1946 on the issue of the ‘desirability of retaining student teachers’.15 The document argued that student teaching afforded an opportunity in which ‘intending teachers can discover whether they have a liking and aptitude for the profession’.16 More importantly, the experience of student teaching was seen to offer a point of purchase for the student’s subsequent engagement with educational theory at the training college. Children are then not text book people or labelled types, but real children. Training College lectures on child psychology are not theoretical discourses when students can relate them to real children they have seen and known in school; the lectures on school method have a reality that otherwise cannot be acquired.17 In these words, we see the pre-figuring of a kind of thinking about the significance and organisational implications of a closely planned relation between college-based and school-based work which would dominate the closing years of the twentieth century. In 1946, however, this was an approach which was out of kilter with the direction of policy. Two years earlier, the McNair Report had acknowledged that school practice as an element of the training college programme ‘has been criticised, perhaps with justice, as too brief, confused in objective and somewhat artificial’.18 But despite this, the report was dismissive of the fact that there remained —just—an alternative model of schoolbased training to which it might have looked to inform its thinking on this point. The accumulated experience which might have been sought from the operation, over many years, of the student-teacher scheme was ignored, largely because of its associations with the immaturity of youth, its tendency to isolate teachers early on from other professional groups, and because it was substantially in the hands of classroom teachers themselves. As such, it was a threat to the process, to which we alluded earlier, of re-making the classroom as a strange place to


which students needed to be introduced—through the agency of the training college—with careful preparation. This problematising of the classroom rendered the straightforward claim of the Newcastle teachers—‘the year in school gives students a knowledge of real children in their school environment’19—as pedagogically naive and intellectually dangerous. Ministry of Education officials, though they rejected the arguments put forward by Newcastle, nevertheless acknowledged their force: ‘they seem to have made a fair case’;20 ‘this is the most considered and powerful argument in favour of the continuation of a student teacher scheme which I have yet seen’.21 The latter comment came from the Assistant Secretary, S.P.Osmond. Osmond was one of the few who was able to see a connection between the Newcastle case and the recently published McNair Report which had advocated an extension of teacher-training courses from two to three years. In a sense, it could be said that most student teachers had long followed a de facto three-year course, with one year as a student teacher followed by two years as a college student.22 ‘Many of the arguments’ put forward in the Newcastle case, wrote Osmond, ‘are, in effect, not so much arguments in favour of student-teacher schemes as such, but rather in favour of implementing the 3–yr. course of training recommended in the McNair Report and accepted in principle by the Ministry.’23 This was a striking and perceptive interpretation, which was neither developed nor supported. Its central insight lay in recognising that a school-based element of initial training, though then made disreputable by its association with practice at an immature age, might be repositioned at some later point in a three-year envelope of training. ‘When we are in a position to do this it will be possible for students to gain some extra practical experience in the schools without the sacrifice of a corresponding amount of time spent as a pupil in schools before training begins.’24 McNair felt able to dismiss student teaching in terms which Morant would have recognised and endorsed; for its failure to elevate the profession culturally and professionally, for its prolongation of a self-propagating and inward-looking cadre of teachers, for its disruption of personal education and for its adherence to a mechanical model of apprenticeship.25 The rectifying of such weaknesses was consistently at the root of policy objectives in teacher training for the first half of the twentieth century. In themselves, these were laudable goals and ones which, over the years, were increasingly adopted by the teachers themselves. But in striving to achieve them, policy makers failed sufficiently to understand the importance to teachers of one additional objective, and that was some formal recognition of the traditional mastery of the teacher in his or her classroom. That this was so is perhaps not surprising. Policy makers did not respect the profession sufficiently to appreciate the constellation of complex professional skills its members routinely deployed day in and day out. Teachers, on the other hand, found no representative voice to make this positive case on their behalf. Though their professional associations followed, as far as they could, a progressive agenda, it was one which was essentially driven by the concerns of


policy makers and not classroom teachers. In this respect, the document prepared by the Newcastle Head Teachers in 1946 can be seen as an authentic residual expression of the traditional classroom teacher’s voice. Its fundamental message was embedded in the classroom as the true site of the teacher’s skill and professional purpose. ‘Students who have had the school experience before the College Course, enter upon their career with greater confidence, poise, and knowledge of what lies ahead. They know what they must give to the children and to the school in service and skill.’26 Perhaps because of the rarity of its formal expression in such a fashion, the voice of the classroom teacher has seldom been able to claim the sustained or sympathetic understanding of the makers of policy. Having read the Head Teachers’ memorandum, Osmond noted that, ‘persuasive though Newcastle’s arguments are, I am not myself convinced that they should lead us to change this policy’.27 He invited a number of others to look at the documents. Staff Inspector Mee wrote a brief rebuttal of the major points set out by the Head Teachers. She noted that teaching ability needed time to develop and deprecated the type of teacher produced through student teaching. ‘The cock-sure imitative type who gets a premature success on a fairly obvious level doesn’t rise to the highest levels; whereas a sensitive thoughtful girl who may have considerable difficulty to begin with, often does very well indeed later.’28 At the point in the memorandum where the head teachers maintained that some intending teachers ‘are best employed in acquiring actual school experience’, Staff Inspector Mee simply underscored the passage and added a question mark in the margin.29 HMI Falconer noted on the basis of her local knowledge of Newcastle that ‘the Student Teacher system was playing havoc with the development of really distinguished Sixth Form work’.30 She concluded I think the real danger in the Student-teacher system is that the clever girl becoming a Student-teacher…generally achieves ‘good method’ fairly quickly. And too often, because real intellectual curiosity has not been sufficiently aroused in her, it remains at that. In preparing her lessons she thinks almost exclusively of method, and gives little or no thought or preparation to content.31 Informed by these judgments, the Board wrote to Newcastle in May 1947 declining to continue recognition of the local student-teacher scheme.32 In November, Walling came back once more, requesting a renewal of recognition.33 This was declined on two occasions.34 In April 1948, he tried once again, this time in a very long, insistent and notably bad-tempered letter claiming a basis for its legitimacy ‘not [in] vague theory but actual experience’.35 On this occasion, though his notes convey his irritation, Osmond was disposed to be more generous. This was principally because a working party, chaired by the Senior Chief Inspector, Sir Martin Roseveare, had recently been appointed to seek ways of stimulating the post-war flow of young women into training colleges. As such


an enquiry was expected to consider ‘recruitment from those who would not normally stop on at school after 16, they can hardly fail to glance at the student teacher method’.36 The intention behind this strategy was to investigate the possibility of recruiting to teaching young women who had left school at 16 for other forms of employment. The fact that a longstanding arrangement—the student-teacher scheme—for intending teachers at the higher age of 17 was still in existence created an administrative embarrassment but led to no re-thinking of policy. The student-teacher scheme had for so long been so out of favour at the centre that not even the exigency of post-war teacher shortages could stimulate any will to investigate if there were ways in which it might directly inform policy at this point. I think, however, that we should consider at once how to reply to Newcastle. I have no doubt that we must let them go on for another year at any rate, but it is rather a pity that they have put up such a detailed case on grounds of principle, so that it is rather difficult to do this without countering their arguments.37 One of the chief criticisms brought against student teaching had been the unacceptably early point that it had occupied in a teacher’s career development. In seeking to find recruits who had left full-time schooling at 16, Roseveare’s working party threatened to compromise the principles upon which that criticism rested. As Roseveare himself commented, ‘it is a little difficult for us to lay too much stress on the frightfulness of looking for teachers among those who have left school before 18’.38 He was, however, quick to remind less assertive officials that the demise of student teaching had involved a re-making of the profession in which the notion of ‘teacher’ had been effectively defined in terms not only of age, but also in terms of the nature of professional preparation through the training college. In this respect, the notion of a ‘student teacher’ simply had no validity any more. The other side of the picture doesn’t seem to have come into these recent discussions at all—namely, the unsuitability of regarding these youngsters as teachers in any sense at all… I should have thought that it was at least one of our planks that they had no business to be in school and handling children in any sort of capacity other than that of helps, or baby-minders or whatnot. We seem to be letting Walling get away with the idea that they really are quite useful as teachers. I guess that when the Working Party gets down to the part-time education source of recruitment for teachers we shall be looking among the girls who are doing all sorts of other interesting things but not masquerading as teachers in the schools.39 Premature employment, in other words, was not the real bar to the teaching profession. Such a recruit might be transformed, through appropriate training,


into a teacher. Those who could not be so transformed were those who had been damaged in their capacity to respond to training because, in their case, their own experience of premature employment had taken place in a school and under the guidance of classroom teachers. In April 1948, the Ministry informed Newcastle that, ‘reluctantly’, it would permit the authority’s scheme to run for a further year.40 The following year, Walling applied for recognition for 1949–50 adding, in what had clearly become an effective strategy, a succession of points in support of his scheme. There are at present 32 student teachers employed by the Education Committee… Enquiries which have been made amongst these students have revealed that had it not been for the student teacher scheme the majority of them would not have remained at school until the age of 18 and until the date of their entry to a training college.41 The Ministry replied with a holding letter, pending the report of Roseveare’s working party. This was published in June 1949 and almost immediately Newcastle wrote to press the Ministry once again, citing the report in just the way that Roseveare had anticipated. ‘Now that this has been issued’, wrote the Authority, ‘we draw attention to the implications in Section 14 and 16 of the Report that suitable girls who have left school before the age of 18 should be encouraged to consider entry to the teaching profession.’42 The Ministry responded to assert that ‘it cannot agree with the Authority’s interpretation of paragraphs 14–16 of that Report’.43 These passages, the letter went on, dealt with ‘a different category of school leavers’, namely, ‘those who have already taken up employment outside the schools, and not those encouraged to take up student teacherships instead of continuing their full time education’.44 Nonetheless, the Ministry permitted a further, and final, year of the Newcastle scheme on the grounds that the Roseveare report had appeared too late for local planning, already put in place, to be unpicked.45 As a strategy, the Newcastle Authority’s citation of Roseveare had been an astute one, for it pointed up the inconsistencies to which policy makers had been led by the terminal hostility which had come to characterise official thinking on student teaching. The roots of this hostility go back, of course, to the original regulations of 1907. But they had grown much deeper and stronger with the events which followed the Board of Education’s endorsement of the deprecation of student teaching by the 1925 departmental committee. Had all the LEAs fallen in line with government policy from that point, acquiescing in the surrender of their local student-teacher schemes, it is by no means impossible that some recognition of the involvement of classroom teachers in professional training might have found its way into official thinking, if only as a compensatory device. A concessionary moment of this sort, after all, is what happened in the process of the transition from pupil teaching to student teaching under Morant. The local strength of pupil teaching had been such that the influence of the


practice could not simply be dispensed with overnight. Some of the features of the pupil-teacher system were perforce incorporated into its successor, the student-teacher scheme, which maintained, in a form that was commonly agreed to be more appropriate for new times, a continuing role for classroom teachers in recruitment and training. The possibility of any similar development was ruled out after 1926 because from that point, student teaching survived locally against the express will of central government. As such, it could be portrayed as a symbol of all that might be perceived as outdated and restrictive about schools and their teachers. Student teaching became an emblem of a narrow past rather than a hope for a better future. It had become a symbol rather than a resource; an issue around which wider educational opinion could polarise and atavistic suspicions gather. This helps to explain why, in both McNair and Roseveare, student teaching was flatly and insistently rejected, both as current practice and as a legacy from which the future might build something better. Yet, even at the time, this rejection rested upon an analysis which was deeply anomalous. Both reports alluded to a positive role for the classroom teacher in training and recruitment, sometimes in ways which bore strong and direct resemblances to the practical operation of the student-teacher scheme.46 Few explicitly recognised this and none saw the scheme as a resource for developing a systematic teacher-training role for classroom teachers in the future. In contrast to the situation in 1907, policy makers could find neither the will nor the way to develop this opportunity in any practical sense. On this question, they showed no wish to make the past speak with the future. Roseveare did not disguise his contempt for the formalised training relationship between practising teacher and trainee that was at the heart of the student-teacher year. But he well understood the implication for teacher supply of the perceptions of teaching that were generated informally in the minds of school pupils through their close daily contact with their teachers. He stressed, in particular, the inescapable influence which, willy-nilly, classroom teachers exerted over any ambitions their pupils might have to follow their professional example. ‘Teachers should always remember’, he wrote, ‘that there is no other form of employment of which the adolescent can get so clear a picture in advance as teaching.’47 The influence of ‘practising teachers’ on their pupils in this way ‘must always be immense’.48 Acknowledging to this degree the recruiting potential of serving teachers, Roseveare was, however, unambiguous about any formal training role for classroom teachers. ‘We do not favour a continuance or a revival of either a “pupil-teacher” or a “student-teacher” system as it has been understood in the past.’49 This was, perhaps, just the point. Any systematic involvement of teachers in school-based training was comprehended only ‘as it had been understood in the past’ and not as it might be in the future. As an alternative approach to dealing with the supply problem, Roseveare’s report suggested that young women who had left school at 16 for clerical employment with local education authorities might offer a useful pool of new recruits. In the nature of their work, it was argued, such individuals ‘have a good


opportunity of learning something about the business of education’.50 They might, the report continued, ‘be given opportunities of mixing with the children and of seeing whether teaching …is likely to appeal to them’.51 Moreover, in the secondary schools, where the involvement of classroom teachers in training was seen, by contrast with the primary sector, to carry promise rather than penalty, a form of training clearly related to student teaching was sanctioned without difficulty. It has been suggested that as an alternative to the training year some form of apprenticeship in the schools should be devised so as to secure the services of promising students who would otherwise be lost to the profession. We agree that the possibility of such a scheme should be explored.52 One further passage from the Roseveare report is intriguing and piquant. As we have seen, in April 1948 Roseveare had received for comment, a copy of the Newcastle teachers’ ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’. He offered a scathing critique of its claims. At one point, the memorandum celebrated the efficacy of student teaching for evincing in recruits a ‘greater confidence’ and— evoking an image that was singular even for its time —‘poise’.53 Roseveare’s own report, a year later, spoke in similarly effusive terms of the social life of the secondary school as the best preparation for teaching, declaring in a striking phrase that it should develop in students ‘a sense of poise and confidence’.54 His reading of the Newcastle teachers’ memorandum may perhaps have had a larger influence upon him than he would have liked to acknowledge. In the case of McNair we can detect similar anomalies. Much of the thinking underlying the report’s proposals came from the work contributed by S.H.Wood, Principal Assistant Secretary to the Teacher Training Branch, in preparing the Board’s unpublished blueprint of 1941, Education After the War—the ‘Green Book’.55 In the ‘Green Book’, Wood proposed that in the second year of an extended three-year programme of training—that is, at the age of 19 or 20— students should spend at least six months in schools under supervision as a salaried ‘untrained teacher in training’.56 In Wood’s judgment, ‘training will never be what it ought to be until the schools themselves play a significant part in the training’.57 This was a sincere statement but an odd one nonetheless. However poorly they might be seen to have done so, it was a fact that schools had played a significant part in training from 1846 to 1926 and, in localities which had chosen to resist the Board’s advice, up to and beyond the point when Wood was writing. The fact that the Board deprecated the particular form of this contribution seems a poor ground on which, in the course of an objective survey of the existing system, entirely to ignore its historical legacy and its continuing, if slight, presence, as for example in Newcastle. Indeed, it seems perverse that given the letters with which Thomas Walling was to bombard the Board after the


War, Wood could write in 1941 that his proposals might trouble local education authorities because they ‘might complain at being compelled to employ for six months or a year half-baked teachers in training’.58 The novelty that Wood claimed for his proposals was best served by ignoring that which had gone before. For Wood conceived his ideal of school-based training on the prior achievement of a reconstructed figuration of the classroom teacher. This rested on a familiar cultural critique: teachers were ‘committed to the teaching profession at too early an age’; they suffered from having no ‘experience of life other than that of a pupil…or a student’; they benefited from ‘insufficient opportunity to mature as individuals’; they exhibited a ‘narrowness of outlook’.59 Wood was alive to the fact that the traditional training college was itself a major contributor to these negative characteristics.60 In recognising that the colleges would dislike his proposals for the ‘untrained teacher in training’, he believed that a school-based experience would encourage a degree of personal independence and maturity which would help students to stand against the pinched and confined atmosphere of the college.61 This was indirectly to recognise the cost which the post-1926 surrender of school-based training to the hegemony of the colleges had incurred; the generality of students now arrived at college cowed rather than cocksure. It was, however, for Wood as for the Board in general, an entirely acceptable cost. From 1926 on, the norm was for the colleges rather than the schools to lay the first hand on new entrants to the profession and to take the leading role in shaping and directing their professional development. On this fact rested every official hope for the advance of the profession and its classroom proficiency.62 The McNair Report congratulated itself on the fact that it got very nearly to its end before it felt any need to refer directly to student teaching.63 Following Wood’s lead, McNair was anxious that students in training should receive ‘extensive’ experience of schools. This anxiety was cited as one of the reasons for the report’s recommendation that the normal period of training should be extended from two years to three.64 The existing regime of school practice, McNair argued, was insufficient, both in duration—a minimum of 12 weeks— and in character; ‘It is very seldom that arrangements are such that the student during this time is able to become a temporary member of staff, undertaking responsible work in that capacity and sharing in the full life of the school.’65 The report recommended a strategy to achieve ‘additional practical experience’ which it characterised as ‘a somewhat drastic proposal’.66 Traditional school practice would continue as before, occupying 12 weeks of the first two years of the course, primarily under the direction of training college staff. An innovatory new period of school experience, occupying a full term in the proposed third year, was designed to achieve an object which, to many contemporary teachers, would have sounded very close to the old rationale for student teaching. Its purpose was ‘to provide a situation in which the student can experience what it is to be a teacher, that is, to become as far as possible a member of a school staff’.67 Moreover, the primacy of the school in the provision of this new period of


‘continuous teaching practice’ was clearly spelled out. ‘It should not be under the direct supervision of the staff of the training institution. It should normally be taken in a school at some distance away.’68 This would, the report announced as if such a thing had never been known before, ‘involve the local education authorities and the schools in a real responsibility for training’.69 Apart from the fact that this new category of trainee would be 2 or 3 years older than the student teachers of the past, the report stressed the distinction between the two by rejecting Wood’s case for salaried remuneration in place of a maintenance grant.70 But the structural resemblance between student teaching and ‘continuous teaching practice’ nevertheless remained a very strong one. At one point the report disclosed this by slipping into the old and discredited language, referring to the new period of practice as a ‘term of apprenticeship’.71 Yet in failing to make an explicit connection to the past experience of student teaching, McNair followed Wood in missing an opportunity to ground its proposal in demonstrated professional practice rather than in abstract reform. McNair did not go into great organisational detail at this point on the ground that ‘difficulties may arise which we cannot foresee’.72 This was a sound judgment. In the event, the greatest unforeseen difficulty was that the third year of training did not arrive until 1960.73 The proposed period of ‘continuous teaching practice’ was rendered nugatory. Even had this not been the case, it seems extremely unlikely that the outcome might have been the achievement of a genuine partnership between school-based and college-based training, the search for which was now effectively postponed until the closing years of the century. This was because McNair’s central impulse remained concentrated upon the hegemony of the training college, an institution for which, as we have seen, the tradition of student teaching had always been profoundly unsettling and deeply threatening.74 Despite the intense and persistent criticisms which had been levelled against the traditional training colleges in the inter-war period, McNair credited them as the principal agents in the improvement of elementary teaching in these years.75 Future improvement depended upon raising the status and the prestige of the colleges themselves, lifting them to ‘a higher plane’ where they could stand alongside the universities.76 This was, of course, a noble, worthy and necessary goal. The long story of the efforts to achieve it from the mid-1920s onwards has been related by Niblett, Humphreys and Fairhurst in a narrative they tellingly dubbed ‘the university connection’.77 From this point, the Board of Education ‘desired increasingly to enable training colleges to take their proper place in the general educational provisions of the country in co-operation with the universities’.78 But in committing themselves to this goal, policy makers also saw it necessary to deprecate those features by which the colleges might be associated with low educational status, in other words, with the elementary school classroom itself.79 This was the fulfilment of the trend which Spurley Hey had noted nearly two decades before. ‘There is’, he had warned those concerned with the supply and training of teachers, ‘too great a readiness to fly to the University where there is no guarantee that help can be given, and too little


readiness to be identified with the Elementary Schools.’80 By the time of McNair, not only was the long tradition of school-based training itself ignored, but its most important practical products were recommended for absorption into the orbit of the training college. The finest classroom practitioners, McNair averred, would achieve their optimum utility for training by moving, on secondment, from classroom to college.81 The classroom was to be made strange not only to those about to enter it but, in a different way, to those who were already there. It is to a consideration of these men and women and to their understandings of the ways in which their profession was being reconstructed in the first half of the twentieth century that our attention should now turn. One of the most important and tantalising issues facing educational historians is the degree to which historical research will be able to open for us the world of the classroom in past time. In this process, one of the most significant areas is likely to be the elucidation of the professional perceptions and practices of classroom teachers in light of the relation between professional training and practical pedagogy. To address such a question will actually require us, as researchers, to undertake—in reverse —a transformation similar in magnitude to that experienced by classroom teachers in the inter-war years. For them, a significant reconstruction of their collective professional identity was a consequence of the classroom made strange. As for us, we will only begin to understand the classroom teacher in the period before this reconstruction if we too go through a process of making the classroom strange, that is, strange to research. From such a process, just as a reformed profession and pedagogy emerged in the post-war years, we might hope for a reformed and newly informative field of historical research in education for the future. NOTES 1. NUT, The Training of Teachers and Grants to Intending Teachers; Joint Standing Committee of the Training College Association and Council of Principals, The Training of Teachers (London, University of London Press, 1939). 2. The Schoolmaster, 27 April 1939, p.81. 3. NUT, The Training of Teachers, p.228, Recommendation 7. 4. Joint Standing Committee, The Training of Teachers, pp. 14–15. 5. The youngest of our respondents, Mrs Greta Conway (pseud.) (A024) was employed as a student teacher in Gravesend, Kent, in 1947. There were also many in the post-war decade who did a year of unqualified teaching between sixth form and college or university. 6. Ministry of Education Circular 85, ‘Revised Regulations for the Training of Teachers’, 12 February 1946. 7. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, ‘Pupil Teachers and Student Teachers’, 2 May 1949. Nevinson, the author of this brief document, presents a useful statistical summary of the scheme’s decline from 1926. ‘The subject’, he wrote, ‘is obviously very nearly dead but as the Sections have sent me a quantity of


8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

files to remedy the lack of policy papers, I have been reading them with some interest.’ Nevinson was the kind of official whom historians appreciate; he prefaced his statistical account with the hope that ‘this brief note…may save some-one time and trouble in the future’. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Osmond to Flemming, 19 April 1948. PRO ED 67/99, R. 94A/58, letter from Ministry of Education to Newcastle LEA, 18 August 1949. Board of Education, Teachers and Youth Leaders: Report of the Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Consider the Supply, Recruitment and Training of Teachers and Youth Leaders (McNair Report) (London, HMSO, 1944); Ministry of Education, Report of the Working Party on the Supply of Women Teachers (London, HMSO, 1949). An important insight from the oral testimony that we have gathered is the close relationship which student teachers felt with their LEA, often exemplified by personal contact with the Director of Education. See for example Chapters 7 and 12; also Hey, Some Influences, p.14: ‘I myself, every year, meet the 200 or more newly-qualified teachers.’ Walling was clearly a supporter of the ‘heroic’ method in its most unreconstructed form. See Crook, The Reconstruction of Teacher Education’, p.97. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Walling to Board, 18 June 1927. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Thornton to Ministry, 31 March 1947. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, p.1. Ibid. Ibid. McNair Report, para 258; also see Ministry of Education, Three Year Training for Teachers’ Fifth Report of the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply of Teachers (London, HMSO, 1956), p.5. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, p.1. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, F.E.W., 10 April 1947. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, S.P.Osmond, 16 April 1947. Hey, Some Influences, pp. 13–14. Ibid. Ibid. McNair Report, para 485; also see PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Mee to Bligh, 21 April 1947. The McNair evidence was strongly in favour of dropping the student-teacher year, though some of the older teachers spoke strongly in its favour.’ Also see Hey, Some Influences, p.14: ‘Training in the widest sense includes continued education outside as well as inside the school. The young teachers are, in the main, intensely desirous of continuing their own personal education. They seek for the means of continued self-culture, and one of the greatest difficulties is the conflict between the admitted need for self-culture and the absolute necessity of devoting considerable time, during earlier years, to the daily and nightly tasks associated with practical teaching.’ PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, p.2.


27. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, S.P.Osmond, 16 April 1947. 28. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Mee to Bligh, 21 April 1947. 29. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, p.3. 30. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Falconer to Mee, 24 April 1947. 31. Ibid. 32. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Osmond to Newcastle, 6 May 1947. 33. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Walling to Ministry, 10 November, 1947. 34. PRO ED 67/99, letters from Osmond to Newcastle, 20 November 1947, 13 March 1948. 35. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Walling to Ministry, 9 April 1948. 36. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Flemming to Williams, 21 April 1948. 37. Ibid. Such a temporary recognition was eased by the Ministry’s knowledge of the impending departure of Walling from his post; see PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, GM to Flemming, 27 April 1948. Flemming also requested of Osmond, ‘let me know how many LEA’s in fact get away with it for 1948–49; see PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Flemming to Osmond, 28 April 1948. 38. PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, Roseveare to Williams, 24 April 1948. 39. Ibid. 40. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Osmond to Newcastle, 30 April 1948. 41. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Walling to Ministry, 2 March 1949. 42. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Turton to Ministry, 18 July 1949. Turton signed as ‘Acting’ rather than ‘Deputy’ Director signalling, doubtless to the Ministry’s relief, that Walling had retired. 43. PRO ED 67/99, letter from Kennedy-Fraser to Newcastle, 18 August 1949. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Crook, ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education’, p.55. 47. Ministry of Education (1949), Report of the Working Party, p.4. Also see Philip Gardner, ‘Deciding to Teach: The Making of Elementary School Teachers in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C.Harrison (London, Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 236–51. For the impact of teachers upon pupils in terms of the construction of gender, see Alison Oram (1987a), ‘Inequalities in the Teaching Profession: The Effects on Teachers and Pupils, 1910–39', in Felicity Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950 (London, Blackwell, 1987), pp.101– 23. 48. Ministry of Education (1949), Report of the Working Party, p.9. 49. Ibid., p.5. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p.8. 53. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, p.2.


54. Ministry of Education (1949), Report of the Working Party, p.6. 55. For links between the McNair proposals and the ‘Green Book’ see Niblett et al., The University Connection, pp.81–3; B.H.J.H.Gosden, Education in the Second World War (London, Methuen, 1976), pp.253–4. 56. Board of Education (1941), Education After the War, para. 100 (b). 57. Ibid., para. 106 (b). 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., para. 98 (a), (c). 60. Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.89; ‘some of them are despised as educational institutions’. 61. McNair Report, para. 106 (a); Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.83. Wood thought it ‘undesirable to launch a student on the schools as a fully trained teacher at the age of 20 or 21 without ever having been anything but a student and without any real experience of teaching except while on school practice’. 62. Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.119. 63. McNair Report, para. 485. 64. Ibid., para. 223. 65. Ibid., para. 258. 66. Ibid., para. 223. 67. Ibid., para. 261, also para. 266. 68. Ibid., para. 261. 69. Ibid., para. 264, also para. 271. Nearly 20 years before, Spurley Hey had observed that, ‘As in most other types of service, the employing authority, in this case the Local Education Authority, must accept the responsibility for actual training, and should institute a systematic scheme for carrying out such training in the Schools.’ Hey, Some Influences, p.17. 70. McNair Report, para. 267 (a). 71. Ibid., para. 267 (b). 72. Ibid., para. 267. 73. Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.135; also Ministry of Education (1956), Three Year Training for Teachers’ Fifth Report of the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply of Teachers (London, HMSO), p.2. 74. As Lance Jones points out, the argument against student teaching on the grounds of the relative immaturity of students was also brought against the training colleges in their relation to the universities. ‘Many of the criticisms to which the Training College is subjected are due to the isolation and immaturity of its students.’ Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.376. It was a point upon which the colleges were extremely sensitive. For women’s experiences of training for the secondary sector, see Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870– 1939 (London, University College of London Press, 1995). 75. McNair Report, para. 240. Also see Gosden, Education in the Second World War, pp.392–3, 396–401. 76. McNair Report, para. 239. Also see Hey, Some Influences, p.6: ‘If Training Colleges are to be judged by many of the speeches made on their behalf during the last two years, they appear to have decided that their spiritual home, if not, indeed their salvation, lies in the Universities. These speeches have pleaded with eloquence and feeling for what the speakers have usually designated “the cultured touch”.’ Hey’s ambition for the training college—that it ‘ought to be the research


77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

department of the whole system’ —pre-figures the influential criticisms that, towards the end of the twentieth century, were to be levelled at the teacher-training system by David Hargreaves. See David Hargreaves, Teaching as a ResearchBased Profession: Possibilities and Prospects (London, Teacher Training Association, 1996). For some striking comparisons, see Frank Roscoe, ‘The Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 16 May 1908, p.979. Niblett et al., The University Connection. Also see John Furlong and Richard Smith (eds), The Role of Higher Education in Initial Teacher Training (London, Kogan Page, 1996). Niblett et al., The University Connection, p.37. Ibid., p.17. Hey, Some Influences, p.6. McNair Report, para. 271; also see Ministry of Education (1949), Report of the Working Party, para. 40.

5 A STOLEN PROFESSION? SOCIAL CLASS AND TEACHER SUPPLY

‘ A Stolen Profession’: this was the arresting title of a piece in the Manchester Sunday Chronicle which commented upon the ending of the pupil-teacher system and its replacement by the student-teacher scheme in the reform of 1907.1 The burden of the article celebrated the old training arrangements as much for their cultural values as for their educational characteristics.2 For the author, the established system of pupil teaching had particularly proved its worth by maintaining a close cultural fit between the working class and the schools designed and provided for their use.3 Pupil teachers traditionally originated, for the most part, from the working class itself and were therefore familiar with a system of training which, if ‘rather rough’, had the advantage of producing ‘a class of teachers who were in close touch with the children throughout the whole of their apprenticeship’.4 This was made possible in the first place because the entire system had always rested upon the principle of early remuneration for trainees and the avoidance of serious financial opportunity costs for their parents.5 This, in turn, had made it feasible for a working man with bright sons and daughters to place some of them, without any undue strain or sacrifice, in a position to earn a fairly comfortable living in a dignified profession, which offered some satisfaction to those of his children possessed of ideals and ambitions.6 But, the argument continued, all of this had been disrupted by the accumulated reforms in preliminary—that is, pre-college—training of the first decade of the twentieth century. In this chapter, we look at changing attitudes to the teaching profession, from both without and within, over the years from 1907. Throughout, the notion of a ‘stolen profession’ will provide the key organising concept for the discussion. As we have seen, the Board of Education was unequivocal about the direction and purpose of the reform agenda in teacher training in the first decade of the twentieth century. It sought, above all, to bring trainee teachers ‘under the influence of a wider outlook and a more humane ideal of Education’.7 The strategy for achieving this turned on both the elevation of existing recruits and


the introduction of ‘fresh blood’ into the teaching profession ‘by the drawing of candidates from Secondary Schools and by the utilisation of Secondary Schools, to the fullest extent possible, for the purposes of their training’.8 For the author of ‘A Stolen Profession’, the architects of such a policy were characterised as Those pests of the educational system, the university-bred experts, with airs of superiority, and as much real knowledge of the needs and capabilities of the working classes as an African native has of Chinese, whose distinguishing outward marks are a conversational ‘Haw, haw,’ and an eyeglass, stepped in to say, ‘Oh, this will never do. The teacher’s standard of knowledge is too low. How can he teach the children English unless he knows Latin?’ So now the future teacher must go, first of all, to a secondary school for four years. Though scholarships and bursaries had been made available to cover this extended secondary education, they had, in the judgement of the writer, already been largely filched ‘by the children of parents who could afford to pay’ and could not, in any event, compensate for the loss of juvenile earnings which were so important to the domestic economy of the working family.9 From such families and from their clever but poor children, ‘the teaching profession has been stolen… The ruling could hardly be more efficiently accomplished if it were done by actual statute.’ Beneath its outraged tone, the central argument of the article rested on a clear understanding that the teaching profession, along with the education system itself, was indeed poised at a moment of major transformation. Michael Sadler, Morant’s illustrious contemporary, would make a similar recognition, if in less breathless prose, a few years later. ‘English educational ideals’, he judged, ‘and consequently English administrative regulations, for the training of teachers are now passing through a stormy time of change.’10 The reform of teacher training signalled not only new patterns of professional preparation, but a more profound rupture in official thinking about the composition, character and public image of the nation’s teaching force. The teacher of the twentieth century, both in practice and in representation, would not be that of the nineteenth. The pedagogical figure standing at the centre of the early vision of James Kay-Shuttleworth—the originator, 60 years before, of a systematically trained teaching force—did not at all resemble the idealised model in the mind of Robert Morant.11 The former belonged to the very different social landscape of early Victorian Britain and was marked by that adherence to formulaic narrowness and disciplinary rigour which public schooling was then seen to demand. Teachers produced for such a world, according to the contemporary educationist Frank Roscoe, possessed ‘remarkable skill in class control, highly successful in the mechanical part of their work… But for the most part…were sorely handicapped in the matter of personal culture.’12 A Board of Education report described them as practitioners ‘whose academic training was scanty but who possessed a certain fierce skill in


the handling of large masses of children’.13 The contemplation of such figures was particularly distasteful to Morant’s cultivated mind, and very far removed from that elevated guiding influence which he intended school teachers should exercise upon the children of the working class in the new century. The profession’s claims that ‘the Elementary teacher was the finest instrument on earth for the imparting of knowledge’14 struck no chord with the Permanent Secretary. As the foundation stone for the more general reform of education he had ‘set his heart [upon] the improvement of the quality of the teachers in elementary schools’.15 Morant would doubtless have seen the notion of ‘a stolen profession’ as tendentious, backward looking and maudlin. For long-serving teachers, as for the author of the original article, Morant’s initiatives could be understood as a strike at their special craft and at the skill and cunning—that which one contemporary observer noted as the ‘capacity to deal with all the little difficulties of school work’16—at its core. At the 1909 annual conference of the National Union of Teachers, a special meeting to consider the supply and training of teachers heard that with the demise of the pupil-teacher system, ‘we may obtain a number of excellent students, but…run the very serious risks of securing but poor teachers’.17 As inscribed in the 1907 training regulations, the new bursar/student teacher couplet could be seen to carry a considerable symbolic significance.18 Though the terms themselves were new, the relation between them served to dramatise in a particularly stark form many of the old controversies about the most appropriate form which the preliminary training of teachers should take.19 For some, the two aspects of the couplet held out a novel opportunity to combine the supposed strengths of each in the experience of individual trainees, thereby to produce a sum that was significantly greater than its parts.20 For others, the very different political, social and cultural traditions associated with each element— with secondary scholarship on the one hand, and pupil teaching on the other— resulted in markedly different valuations being placed upon each. We have already noted the iconic status of classroom apprenticeship for the ‘stolen profession argument. Something of that same tone, if in a more controlled form, can be heard in The Schoolmaster’s commentary on the Board of Education’s critical historical sketch, published in 1907, of the development of the pupilteacher system. The journal concluded that ‘the whole document is an interesting collection of facts, as it is also an undesigned witness to the unwisdom that sits in high places’.21 The dismissal of the pupil-teacher centres and the rejection of apprenticeship in teaching flowed, for The Schoolmaster, from an ignorant and gratuitous under-estimate of the ability and functions of the elementary teacher, and…this, again, in its turn, is begotten of that despicable caste prejudice, which in all spheres of national activity has cost, and is costing, us so dear.22


One dimension of the dilemma facing working-class education at the start of the twentieth century is encapsulated in such words. What was at stake was the loss of an educational form or tradition—the parallels with the fate of the highergrade schools are very close here—which either achieved or asserted some degree of working-class autonomy and independent educational advance.23 Any such benefits, however, were vastly diminished because their characteristic forms represented an educational currency that was chronically undervalued against the gold standard of the grammar school. Morant’s reforms held out the prospect of joining that stronger currency on what could look to some like equal terms.24 In this regard, the Board of Education took the sanguine view that the old educational divisions of the nineteenth century were effectively over and done. The ‘disposition to maintain the educational barriers between class and class no longer existed at the beginning of the twentieth century’.25 Such policy blandishments, despite their obvious disjunction with social and educational realities, were beguiling. At this moment, the calculation for the working-class interest lay—as it ever has done—in the balancing of potential gains and losses. Investment in the proffered extension of educational opportunity had to be weighed against the inevitable loss of traditional cultural stocks which, if structurally weak and poorly regarded by educational elites, at least maintained some semblance of cultural independence. The difficulty of this calculation was experienced by none more than the teachers themselves. But it was also one which was sympathetically understood by some of those who were close to the teachers in their working lives. A number of representatives from the inspectorate, in particular, found it hard to accept the simplistic assertions of Morant’s position for the straightforward verities he took them to be. This led some to a position in which the traditional characteristics of the elementary teaching profession, as symbolised in the student-teacher scheme, were seen to represent significant and genuine strengths, developed under trying conditions and which were not to be discounted lightly by any passing reform agenda. By the early 1920s, with the student-teacher scheme well established in the localities but under hostile pressure from the training colleges and increasingly from the Board itself, a number of HMIs came forward with sympathetic, if measured, expressions of concern about what might be lost in any further movement away from student teaching. Such perceptions recognised that if Morant’s original ambitions for the elevation of the profession had achieved a deserved currency, then so should the traditions which they were originally intended to subvert. Nowhere is this clash more neatly epitomised than in a letter written by HMI Urwick to Chief Inspector Richards in April 1921. The letter was an attempt by Urwick to rehearse his position in the growing debate on the student-teacher scheme, a position which he felt he had insufficiently clarified during an earlier meeting with Richards. Urwick therefore drew attention to those ‘points of difference between your line of thought and mine…which it may be useful to clear up’.26 If he recognised the manifest advantages of a more extensive liberal


education for future elementary school teachers, Urwick also understood that its price was a diminution of an important tradition of early independence. The Secondary School’, he wrote is at its best an institution which keeps girls young and prevents them maturing. On the other hand contact with real life with its work and earning matures them rapidly and the maturing brings with it a more serious attitude towards the duties of life and its work. This change—a real one— takes place rapidly during the Student Teacher stage. I do not think any one who has had close knowledge of Student Teachers as contrasted with girls of the same age in Secondary Schools could fail to notice it. The Training College is another sheltered institution which, whatever else it does, puts off and retards the maturing process. Training College staffs like their girls young and ‘biddable’ and hence it does not surprise me that many would prefer their students straight from Secondary Schools.27 These words were written at the moment when many of our respondents were themselves thinking about teaching as a career.28 At that time, Urwick’s allusion to the ‘real life’ character of student teaching would have meant something more than simply the opportunity for personal maturation. It would also have said something about the increasing economic strictures bearing upon those seeking to enter teaching, and about the importance—real as well as symbolic—of the salaried status of student teaching. One of the most common themes in respondents’ memories of this time highlights the intense financial strain which the choice of teaching as a career brought for the family economy. The same recognition also crops up repeatedly in the policy record: ‘the Board believe that in many cases the salary paid to a Student Teacher is a very important, if not a determining consideration, in deciding whether the cost of education and training for the profession can be met’;29 ‘the finan cial question is a serious matter in dealing with the student-teachership as it is the prospect of earning that induces people to become student-teachers’;30 if a girl wishes to take an Advanced Course she may stay for an extra year at the Secondary School but she forfeits the money for the student-teacher year. Sometimes this money is vital to the parents and to the child and it is the deciding factor in the necessary decision.31 Even where a second year at secondary school might attract a maintenance allowance, the status differential between this and a salary loomed large in the minds of prospective teachers and their families. To the I[ntending] T[eacher] the E[lementary] S[chool] is the world of work, the S[econdary] S[chool] that she has left is the schoolgirl world. If she goes out into the world of work she earns a wage, if she remains on at


the S.S. she may receive a Maintenance Allowance—equal in amount to the wage; but it is not a wage but a dole. The wage-earner looks down on the dole dependent.32 The Board’s decision in 1926 to commend the termination of local studentteacher schemes must have borne very hard upon working families who had managed to absorb the economic ramifications of the reforms of 1907. Where the scheme was abandoned, intending teachers now faced a further substantial postponement before they could see the inside of an elementary classroom and before they could earn a salary. In consequence, a new wave of working families gave up the prospect of teaching, seeing it no longer as a realistic option for them. The incremental closure of the profession to the working class went on, with the differential pattern of recruitment by social class continuing to change far faster than any general shifts in the overall class structure itself. If we were to fall in with the lurid image at the heart of the Manchester Sunday Chronicle article, we might say that, following the original theft of 1907, the crime was perpetrated once more in 1926. A rare and striking set of insights into the local and personal impact of this attrition upon teaching’s traditional recruitment base is disclosed in the records of the Sheffield Education Committee. Responding to the injunctions of Circulars 1377 and 1383, the Committee wrote to the Board in October 1926, seeking leave to continue its preliminary training scheme.33 The surrender of the scheme, wrote Percival Sharp, Sheffield’s Director of Education, would result in an acute shortfall in the supply of new recruits to the profession. And if the local authority would have to make contingency plans for the consequences of this eventuality, then the same would be true for many of those local families who aspired to send one or more of their children into teaching. Inasmuch, Sharp wrote, ‘as the great majority of the Elementary School Teachers drawn from this area come from the homes of artisans and from other homes of limited means, it is essential that these parents of limited means should know…whether their boys or girls should be received into the teaching profession’.34 In September, the local Education Office had therefore taken the very unusual step of writing to all parents of those who were currently on the authority’s books as a student teacher or pupil teacher. The letter asked whether, under a revised scheme in which a second year of full-time sixth-form study replaced the student-teacher year, ‘you would feel able to present your son or daughter as a prospective teacher’.35 More interestingly, recipients were also requested to ‘give any reasons in supplement to your answer’.36 Unsurprisingly, 90 per cent of parents responded by expressing very great doubt that they would be able to consider teaching for their children under a regime amended in this way.37 But thanks to the singular endeavour of the Sheffield authority, we can explore the reasoning of some of the parents a little further. As we do so, we should bear two points in mind. First, though these voices are part of a small and localised sample, they can fairly be seen as representative of the broader social groupings from which the majority of


elementary teachers were still emerging in the early 1920s.38 Secondly, these are voices from that same generation of parents responsible for raising the student teachers whom we have interviewed in the course of this study.39 In the memories of our interviewees, we sometimes catch occasional glimpses—remembered through the eyes of a child—of that generation and of their aspirations for their children. Here, we have a rare opportunity to listen to them directly.40 All of the parents perceived teaching to be an important and well-respected career. Such high status derived principally from a growing respect for education, not only on its own terms, but also as the best hope for individual social advancement. In the words of one eloquent respondent, The result of the past few years has justified the vision of the pioneers of education by the fact that thousands of children from working class homes have risen to some of the most important positions in every walk of life.’41 The prospect of the loss of the student-teacher year was for most, however, the point at which any personal anticipation of this vision threatened to evaporate. I have tried to give my children every advantage of the educational system, and as a result I am today a poor man… while I have managed to get my children to certain stages of education, the present proposals will cause me to abandon the idea of any child of mine becoming a teacher.42 Only a few felt that the tenacity of their ambitions for their children would be able to survive the further inflation of opportunity costs. You asked me if I should be able to to present my son under the new scheme. I dont like being beat. I should try with a little help to put my son if possible in the position we have been trying to get him in; that is to be a school teacher. It does not give much encouragement for parents who are not blest with over much of the necessaries to put their children to the Teaching Profession.43 The tightening economic difficulties involved in steering a child into teaching was by far the most notable and persistent feature of parents’ responses. In their replies, the force of the ‘stolen profession’ charge is raised from an abstract slogan to a contemplation of the real struggles faced by working families in balancing the pressure of economic exigency against the promise of educational opportunity. A coal dealer believed that ‘under the new scheme I think the working man’s child, though it may possess the necessary ability and talent to become a teacher would be absolutely cut out from the Teaching profession, as no parent…would be able to afford it’.44 A turner wrote that ‘as an ordinary artisan I must say the proposed alteration is entirely unfair both to the student and parents of the artisan class. No working man could afford to let his children go into the teaching profession.’45 And whilst he recognised ‘the value of the continued education in a Secondary School until 18½ and further training in a


Training College’, an engineer judged that ‘the financial sacrifice to be made is not justified when the risk is considered’.46 Where a family contained more than a single intending teacher, the constraints weighed even more heavily. A woman—herself a teacher— who was raising two of her nieces declared I had not budgeted for such a thing happening and it would make it a very difficult thing to send her to College, but I shall endeavour to do it whatever the cost. In the case of my second niece who is younger and for whom I had also intended the teaching profession, I shall be obliged to change my plans.47 A builder offered a longer and more graphic illustration of the degree of financial uncertainty which teaching had increasingly come to represent. My Daughter…age 19½ finishes a years Student teaching this week; proceeds to… Training College 3 weeks to day, I have supported this Girl unaided for 18½ years. This year she has drawn a salary of 40/-/- which has been extremely useful. now about College… Last night I arranged to Borrow [deleted] which I hope will get her through this year I may have to borrow more next year. this to be repaid during the first 2 years of employment which is a serious item taking ordinary risks without the possibility of Employment lapsing. Now about the Boy a more serious Case I think. He commenced Student teaching last week; age 17½ my present Problem is how to get him through College I shall certainly have to Borrow for him as I have done for the Girl which will amount to a serious Debt for a Working Man and something I should not care to face if there is to be any risks beyond ordinary risks. The effort already has been Great, with a Family of 5.48 The story of national educational advance across the twentieth century has drawn its most influential and enduring narratives from the image of the enlightened and committed policy maker or administrator. Such deserve their places in history. But the above words from an unnamed working man should serve as a striking reminder that national educational improvement has never been a matter simply of wise government and efficient administration. It has also been the collective product of personal sacrifice and hope for a better future for their children on the part of countless working parents who, even when governments seemed to make it harder rather than easier for them, continued their own small struggles in the name of education as they understood it.49 The endeavours of government and of ordinary parents, as in the Sheffield group, were each oriented towards educational improvement and wider opportunity. But the two parties understood these objectives in subtly different ways and these generated fundamental mutual misunderstandings rooted in


differences of cultural expectation. A good example, to which we briefly alluded earlier, concerned the question of maintenance allowances.50 From the point of view of government, the negative financial consequences of the removal of the student-teacher year could be obviated by the simple substitution of a discretionary maintenance allowance in place of salary. This assumption entirely failed to comprehend the abhorrence of the ‘respectable’ working class for payments that could be construed as charitable rather than as remunerative.51 ‘Earned money’, in the words of one parent, ‘is always better than a Grant.'52 For another,’ [maintenance] allowances flavour too much of charity which I do not like’.53 For a third, such allowances ‘even if equal in amount being based on a charity basis, would not be as satisfying to a student’s self respect as money earned by him or herself, which they receive as a right’.54 And for a fourth, ‘as regards the maintenance allowances, well no man likes to ask for them, if he can possibly avoid it, and if compelled to ask for assistance, does so with very great reluctance so in my opinion the payment for 12 months is the best method’.55 Though the parents who made these statements supported educational progress and took pride in the achievements of their children as they strove towards the teaching profession, they were also bemused by the apparently deleterious consequences of reform in teacher training. In this, we see a further cultural expression of the same ambivalence that we have noted amongst the teachers themselves. Parents were pleased to see their children taking places in a profession with a social standing which governments assiduously sought to improve. But at the same time they were aware that this was a process in which the figure of the teacher was being re-made in ways which rendered the profession more distant from its local and classroom constituencies than it had been before. This was a difficult process to understand, though all contemporary opinion was, in one way or another, aware of it. In educational commentaries from the period it finds perhaps its most evocative expression in the term ‘sympathy’, as exemplified by the author of A Stolen Profession’. As a consequence of college training, argued that writer, teachers would ‘have less capability of bringing their minds down to the level of the class of little minds before them, and the result, after all the expense, is not greater, but less, efficiency, and less sympathy between teacher and child’.56 The ‘proposed new type of teacher’ would have been transferred ‘at eleven years of age …from the elementary to the secondary school; thence, after a few more years, into a training college or university’.57 Part of the traditional skills and sensibilities of the elementary teacher were seen to reside precisely in his or her own origin within the closed and ordered world of the elementary classroom. In this sense, teachers intimately understood the pupil’s world, for it was also entirely their own.58 From this paramount fact derived teachers’ professional mastery of classroom craft, hand in hand with their perceived personal inadequacies in culture, style and comportment. Both characteristics were regarded with official displeasure, for it was clear that the ‘sympathy’ which anchored teachers within the classroom was the very quality which precluded them from transforming what went on there.


In declaring that they might no longer be able to fulfil the ambitions of their children to become teachers, some parents went on to reflect upon the new type of teacher, drawn from a higher social class, who might be expected to come forward instead. Ultimately, the likely characteristics of such replacements were seen as fundamentally out of sympathy with the working-class experience of education. For one parent, they ‘might not be too eager or have the necessary incentive to take up a calling which necessitates a great deal of hard work and self-denial’.59 And in the more direct view of another, ‘I doubt that the best persons to teach the working class are those who have not an experience in a working class home.’60 Yet another, although acutely aware of the advantages of a more extensive personal education, sought to find expression for an appreciation of those traditional qualities which had marked elementary teaching, and for a realisation that these would now disappear. Surely, those teachers who have had to fight through difficulties and make, and have made for them, innumerable sacrifices, will be of a finer type and have a nobler influence as well as a greater sense of responsibility than those whose way has been paved for them. Surely too, having come originally from elementary schools they will be more able to supply the needs of elementary school children since they better understand them.61 And a few parents speculated as to the negative characteristics that they believed a more socially elevated type of teacher might bring. In the words of one, ‘the vital contact and experience necessary for the future teacher would be missing, and this would tend to produce a type of theorist teachers devoid of any class controlling experience’.62 The loss of student teaching, considered another, would mean that new teachers would emerge from college full of theory but without the balance of practice and coming suddenly up against the hard facts of antiquated and obsolete school buildings in many cases, and sometimes equally antiquated head teachers, would become disillusioned and by the time they had found their feet, would be forced into a policy of drift and become mere teaching hacks, looking on their profession only as a means of bread and butter, instead of the greatest force for the uplifting of the manhood of the coming generations.63 With the concluding aspiration of this statement, policy makers from Morant onwards would have entirely concurred. The remainder they would have seen as muddle, misconception and unwarranted pessimism. There is much in the accumulated observations of the Sheffield parents which might fairly be described in just such terms. But beneath their confusions and misunderstandings about the details and direction of policy lay elemental normative expressions of ‘the teacher’ and his or her place within local learning communities as well as within the general advance of national education.


In the re-making of the figure of the teacher through the re-formation of training policy from the centre, such popular expressions were easy to overlook because they appeared to offer little more than an appeal to an outmoded educational past. But in failing to attend to them, policy makers pursued a path which promised to distance teaching from its traditional local constituency in much the same way that teaching was also being detached from its own useable professional past. The re-making of elementary teaching in the early years of the century was one of the earliest, and for the working class, perhaps the most immediately painful phase of a more general trend towards the extension of educational opportunity. In its way, the ‘stolen profession’ argument had been as much a prediction as an observation. And if its prediction turned out to be correct in important respects, fulfilment did not take quite the form of expectation. Ultimately, the logic of educational reform undoubt edly rendered a career in teaching as increasingly attractive to the lower-middle and middle classes.64 But the contraction of teaching as the acme of traditional working-class career expectation did not serve to eliminate ambition from working-class youth. In one sense, it stimulated it. As scholarship routes into secondary education grew, new career possibilities presented themselves where once there had only been teaching. And many of these opportunities demanded the onerous requirement neither of a ‘pledge’, nor of two years’ further study at college before earning could begin. Nearly half a century after the Manchester Sunday Chronicle article appeared, a substantial piece of research carried out by Jean Floud at the London Institute of Education shed considerable light on the fate of the long-established and tenacious nineteenth-century link between elementary school teaching and the most able sons and daughters of the traditional working class. Floud found that, in the period ‘before 1919 to after 1945’, the proportion of entrants to the teaching profession by social class remained relatively stable. For men, the ratio of recruits from the professional, intermediate and manual classes held, respectively, at about 1:5:4. For women, the corresponding ratio was approximately 1:5.5:3.5.65 But beneath this static surface, there lay deeper ‘evidence of a remarkable change’.66 Floud went on to calculate the proportion of boys and girls from different social classes who left school at 17 and over and who had then progressed to teaching. A broader calculation of this sort was able to take account of the increasing numbers of fortunate young working-class people who, for one reason or another, were able to follow a full-time education through to the age of 17 and beyond. In the case of girls, Floud estimated this increase to be a threefold one between the years 1927–51 and, in the case of boys, a sevenfold one over the longer period 1917–51. These figures pointed to a striking change in the way that school teaching was perceived within this steadily expanding cohort of highly able, well-educated and increasingly ambitious working-class children for, as Floud, goes on


of boys of working class origin the percentage entering the [teaching] profession has declined from nearly 70 in 1917–26 to under 20 in 1947– 51; of girls of the same origin it has declined from over 70 to little more than 40 between 1927–36 and 1947–51. And yet, in this later period, as high a proportion of boys of other than working class origin entered the profession as had done so in 1917–26, while girls of this origin entered in 1947–51 in a larger proportion than in 1927–36.67 In other words, as the pool of well-educated working-class scholars grew, the traditional attraction of teaching declined steeply whilst, among the professional and intermediate classes, the same—if far more recent attraction was maintained. Floud was puzzled by this, expecting that the increase in the number of potential working-class recruits for teaching— ‘scholarship’ boys and girls—would have led to their numerical domination of it. Driven by the anticipation that ‘the tradition of teaching as a career would have been so strong among them’, they would, in her words, ‘have gone far to oust applicants of other origins from the profession’.68 That this had not happened pointed to a deep and historic change in social class perceptions of teaching. The notion of an enduring link between teaching and social class had now become more strongly marked in the middleclass experience than in that of the working class.69 And, in the meantime, for increasing numbers of working-class school leavers there was a burgeoning awareness that there were now ‘more attractive openings than the profession which by tradition a large proportion of them would seek to enter’.70 There is an understandable sense in which the policy changes of the early twentieth century can be seen as conspiring towards the ‘theft’ of the traditional teaching profession. But change in history is never straightforward and Floud’s study shows us that at a very fundamental level, teaching was wittingly abandoned by the working class as much as stolen from it. In this way, teaching in the early twentieth century was not what it was in the late nineteenth.71 In holding out new academic opportunities for a minority of working-class children, the bursar scheme was an essentially forward-looking development, presaging the subsequent and more general expansion of educational opportunity charted by Jean Floud. The other element of the bursar/student teacher couplet faced, by contrast, in the opposite direction. The one led towards an understanding of education as a means, as the portal which, for the first time, was starting to open a whole range of professional careers and opportunities to the worthy many in place of the favoured few. The other celebrated education as an end, as its own justification, and as the personification of the process of learning in the figure of the facilitator of learning, the professional teacher himself or herself. The first moved through and beyond schooling; the other returned to it over and over again. However much they might savour the prospect of better personal opportunities in education—along with its associated higher status—most classroom teachers saw in the student-teacher scheme a residual opportunity to hold on to, and


perhaps to develop, those professional principles and practices which were tried, familiar and valued. At the inception of the scheme, the 1908 conference of the National Federation of Assistant Teachers, for example, continued to extol the traditional benefits of early classroom contact and went so far as to advocate the universalisation of student teaching. There is a very simple method to secure an extension of practical training. Instead of offering the ex-bursar the alternative of immediately proceeding to a Training College or of remaining as a student teacher for a year, the Board should insist, as a preliminary condition of bursarship, that the holder must become a student teacher. Such a scheme would destroy a great deal of the criticism which has been levelled against the bursar system, and student teachers would enter Training Colleges well prepared to profit by the more advanced instruction in the theoretical subjects bearing upon their future work. Their practical experience would enable them to estimate the true values of theories of class management and discipline.72 The Federation’s recommendation had no hope of finding favour at the Board of Education. The ‘heroic’ character of premature teaching experience was there regarded with horror. It was, however, just this characteristic—perhaps more than any other—which symbolised that which most classroom teachers took to be the bedrock of their claim to a certain professional expertise. Teachers valued their own acumen for classroom management and disciplined pedagogy very highly. It was precisely this traditional and restricted conception which the government sought to transcend by transferring professional training to the college in the same way that preliminary academic preparation had been shifted to the secondary school. Such a strategy simultaneously elevated the status of abstract professional training yet diminished teachers’ traditional practical mastery over this established aspect of their work.73 Morant’s hope had been that, henceforth, ex-bursars would proceed directly to a college place where they might ‘receive their earliest experience in the difficult art of teaching under the skilled supervision of a Master of Method’.74 Such a major postponement of practical training amounted to the final severing of the professional principles which had governed the supply and preliminary training of teachers since KayShuttleworth’s Minutes of 1846. If the 1907 regulations seemed to filch the teaching profession from the working class, then the surrender of all professional training to the colleges seemed, to many teachers, to steal the heart of the profession itself. It was a theft twice over. The writer of a letter to The Schoolmaster voiced a frustration which would rumble away, in one form or another, throughout the twentieth century. There is the incalculable advantage enunciated that, although they issue from college certificated, ‘trained’ teachers, with not a single day’s actual


experience, they will have met classes for a few weeks under the skilled supervision of a master of method. We all know what that means—how much, and how little! Note the implied degrading inference as to the value of experience in the elementary schools. Are there no masters or mistresses of method there? Are even the best in the colleges?75 The regulations of 1907 signalled changes that would bring profound and irrevocable losses in the traditional forms of professional practice. A generalised awareness of such losses gradually spread throughout the profession, continuing to strike a powerful chord for many years to come. This was certainly true of those—including many of our own respondents —who enrolled on the studentteacher scheme during its increasingly embattled existence from the late-1920s and beyond. The scheme— sometimes still colloquially referred to by more than a few of its former members as ‘pupil teaching’—represented a space where teachers could continue to celebrate many of the traditional principles associated with pupil teaching along with all its presumed strengths for the development of classroom proficiency. In this respect, the notion of a ‘stolen profession is best understood as a memorial—again sometimes echoed in the recollections of our respondents—for the disappearance of the fabled pupil teacher as well as for the compromising of a time-honoured improving route for clever, working-class children. This helps to explain why the student-teacher scheme remained so important for so many for so long. It acted as a bridge which connected the promise of a better future for education with deep cultural and professional remembrances of an older and still respected conception of teaching rooted in the cultural intimacy and traditional craft of the elementary school rather than in the abstract learning of the secondary school. We hear this clearly articulated in the words of a statement written in May 1927 by J.E.Greaves, President of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Teachers’ Association. Acknowledging the ‘splendid opportunities for the gaining of intellectual distinctions’ which were now coming before intending teachers in the form of a further year as a bursar at secondary school, Greaves nevertheless feared ‘that these intellectual achievements will be gained at too high a price to the community’.76 But, whilst it was both truly authentic and deeply representative of its time, the story told by the author of ‘A Stolen Profession’ was flawed in a different regard. It was incomplete. The new challenges of the training reforms held out promise for the profession in the same degree as they demanded sacrifice— though this was not perhaps always immediately apparent. The lure of the former would prove to be as strong as was teachers’ fear of the latter. For young entrants to teaching, each of these emotional responses was associated with the very different models of teaching that were placed before them in rapid succession. During their student-teacher year, they came under the influence of teachers who stood upon their authority as masters and mistresses of a traditional craft. In the preceding year, they had been in the hands of teachers who understood their


professional status more in terms of career advancement and personal recognition and who held that to ‘send an able boy along the Bursar-Studentteacher path, is to handicap him, nowadays, in the race for promotion’.77 Many teachers, as a leading member of the NUT had noted 20 years before, could not help but be entranced by the prospect of the general elevation of the profession and by its concrete expression through individual career advance.78 The traditional occupational mastery celebrated by elementary teachers was, after all, played out on the tiny stage of the classroom, before a juvenile audience which, on any register of social recognition, was insignificant.79 The status which they increasingly craved—and felt they justly deserved—called for a different type of presentation. On the bigger stage of public opinion, the sophisticated props which seemed merely to clutter the performances given for the classroom promised to lend a new depth and gravity to their profession’s public face. This made it impossible simply to turn away from the allure of high-status academic preparation in place of low-status technical apprenticeship. As best it might, the profession had to find ways of looking outwards, of presenting an assured collective face to the world, without relinquishing the centrality of its traditional inward orientation, where its individualised face turned to the hidden space of the classroom. Even the National Federation of Assistant Teachers, despite its traditionalist instincts, conveyed some sense of the conflicting dimensions of this complex professional response. The 1908 presidential address directed particular attention to the issues of the supply and training of teachers. On this occasion we relegate other problems to the background. We leave the so-called Education Bills to the tender mercies of the militant clerics and the pseudo-educational politicians, and we concentrate all our efforts on a truly educational problem… The education of intending teachers has been greatly liberalised during recent years… But amid the strenuous efforts to place the teachers’ education on a higher plane, what has become of the other essential to their complete equipment—the professional efficiency? The new type of training may foster students, but it cannot create teachers… We welcome the liberal education—it is what we have persistently advocated—but we cannot welcome…the change which postpones the technical training to such a late stage.80 The residual claim to mastery of esoteric classroom skills, the burgeoning desire for enhanced professional status through the reform of teacher training and the institution of closer links with further and higher education, the continuing distrust or dismissal of the machinations of Whitehall; in the words of the NFAT’s president we see in play all of the key elements which would swirl around the difficult and sometimes contradictory reconstruction of teachers’ professional identities across the twentieth century.


NOTES 1. The article was reprinted in The Schoolmaster under the less dramatic heading, ‘Candidates for the Teaching Profession. Is the Working-class Child Penalised?’ The Schoolmaster, 5 September 1908, p.358; also see The Schoolmaster, 20 June 1908, p.1210. Also Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.204–5; Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.55; Meriel Vlaeminke, The English Higher Grade Schools, p.121; ‘Higher Education of the Working Man’s Child’, Educational Times, 1 July 1907, pp.290–1. ‘Mr Marshall Jackson, Past President of the National Union of Teachers and member of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education… called attention to the new bursary system for pupil-teachers, and said that he saw in this another means of preventing the working man’s child from entering the teaching profession.’ Jackson is a likely candidate for authorship of the original article. For a more measured critique, though one which similarly notes the ‘ignorant and gratuitous under-estimate of the ability and functions of the elementary teacher’ see ‘The Instruction and Training of Pupil Teachers: Vacillating Policy of the Board: Where the Secondary School Fails’, The Schoolmaster, 13 July 1907, pp.93–5; also see ‘Preliminary Certificate Examination Successes. Interesting Notes by “Distinction” Candidates’, The Schoolmaster, 20 July 1907, p.142. 2. ‘Old Guard’ polemics of this sort were not confined to the pupil-teacher system. The liberalisation of the regime of school inspection could also excite similar feelings. ‘I do not think I shall be far wrong when I say that there are many London teachers today who hold the opinion that they would rather work under those old conditions than under the present system…the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme; and now, having no exam. to work for, we have gradually arrived at a state where fads are rife; where show is aimed at rather than good, solid, useful work.’ ‘Inspection v. Examination’, The Schoolmaster, 22 June 1907, p.1234; also ibid., 13 July 1907, p.114; also ‘Educational Fads and Faddists’, ibid., 7 December 1907, p.1008. 3. The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909. 4- ‘Interesting Sectional Meetings. The Supply and Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909, p.670. 5. Frances Widdowson, Going Up Into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training 1840–1914 (London, Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications, 1980), pp.68, 77. 6. ‘Candidates for the Teaching Profession. Is the Working-Class Child Penalised?’, The Schoolmaster, 5 September 1908, p.358. 7. Board of Education (1903), Circular 494, quoted in PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.17. 8. Ibid. 9. The number of bursars and pupil teachers in their first year fell from 11,018 in 1906–07, to 7,191 in 1909–10, and to 4,325 in 1912–13. PP 1913, 1, Regulations for the Preliminary Education of Elementary School Teachers, p.vi. 10. M.E.Sadler, ‘Introduction’, in Sandiford, The Training of Teachers, p.xii. Also see HMI Herbert Ward writing in 1914: ‘the Elementary school has been passing and is still passing through a revolution, the extent of which is hardly realised even by those


11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

who are most deeply concerned.’ Quoted in Leese, Personalities, p.252; also Tropp, The School Teachers, p.189. Leese, Personalities, p.252. Frank Roscoe, ‘The Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 16 May 1908, p.979. Also see The Professional Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 22 August 1908, p.284; also the assessment of Miss Cleghorn—who went on to become the first woman president of the NUT—on the qualities of pupil teachers based on her memories of her own apprenticeship in the early 1870s: ‘possibly deficient in knowledge, lacking in culture, theoretically ignorant of the science of teaching, but —and herein lies the only recommendation of the old system—but we could teach! With a power and grip of the work before us, with a knowledge of child nature only obtained by intimate and early acquaintance with it in all its phases, with an enthusiasm for our profession seldom seen and rarely equalled by the pupil teacher of today, we were, with all our drawbacks, the pioneers.’ ‘When I Was a Pupil Teacher’, The Schoolmaster, 30 April 1904, p.989. See also PP 1924–25, xii, Report; ‘whatever their academic attainments, it might be said that what they knew they could teach’, p.12. Also see letter from Mr Ellis Chadwick, ‘The Training of Teachers’, Bournemouth Times, 11 December 1925; ‘There was no doubt that the old type of teacher could control a class.’ Quoted in PRO ED 67/99, Ministry of Education memorandum, ‘Pupil Teachers and Student Teachers’, 2 May 1949. The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909, p.671. Bernard Allen, Sir Robert Morant, p.208; Leese, Personalities, pp.225–57. Daniel Canon, principal of Battersea Training College, cited in PP 1888, xxxv, Final Report, p.87. ‘Interesting Sectional Meetings’, The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909, p.670. For an example of the formulation ‘Bursar Student Teacher System’ in use, see PRO ED 86/26, ‘Draft Circular. Suggested Modification of the Bursar Student Teacher System’, p.1. See, for example, Frank Roscoe ‘The Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 16 May 1908, p.979. See Sandiford, The Training of Teachers, p.147: ‘The bursar and student-teacher method of giving the preliminary training to teachers would seem to be a compromise between the American and the older English pupil-teacher system of training.’ The Schoolmaster, 13 July 1907, p.95. Ibid.; also The Schoolmaster, 3 August 1907, p.223. See also Wendy Robinson, The Pupil-Teacher Centre in England and Wales’, Ph.D. thesis. See Graham Wallas, ‘English Teachers’ Organisations’, New Statesman, 25 September 1915, p.587. ‘Class feeling may actually be produced in a purely working-class district by the introduction of the outside tradition connoted by a “secondary” school, where a “higher grade” school would have represented a much more healthy and efficient intellectual stimulus.’ For a recent treatment offering a similar emphasis see Vlaeminke, The English Higher Grade Schools. The notion of ‘legitimated professionalism’ as developed by Gerald Grace is useful here. This formulation rests upon the proposition that policy in relation to the teaching profession was fundamentally driven by fears at the centre that teachers and the organised working class might achieve a political accommodation which


25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

would threaten the state. ‘Legitimated professionalism’ attaches to a policy strategy oriented towards the isolation of teachers within an educational sphere which afforded them relative professional autonomy but which also sequestered them from political adventures in the wider world. This thesis is powerful and undoubtedly has something to say about the drive to re-make teaching in the early twentieth century. The case is not, however, very strongly supported in the existing oral testimony of classroom teachers which suggests that the political sensibilities of rank-and-file union members cannot be read off from the formal political positions taken by the NUT leadership. Certainly the NUT’s turn against student teaching after 1926 did not find any significant echo in the professional concerns of most classroom teachers. The ‘legitimated professionalism’ offered by the state from this date in respect of the regime of professional training depended more upon the formal legitimation conferred by the hegemony of the training college than upon the autonomous involvement of classroom practitioners in the teacher-training process. The thesis also takes insufficient note of the changing social class composition of the elementary teaching profession. Robert Morant’s reforms were certainly designed to strengthen the barriers between different sectors of educational provision; whether the reforms were designed to restrict mobility across these barriers is less clear. See Gerald Grace, Teachers and the State in Britain’, p.208; also Jenny Ozga, Policy Research in Educational Settings: Contested Terrain (Buckingham, Open University Press, 2000), pp.16–17. PP 1907, lxiv, General Report, p.14; also ibid., pp.20, 23. The Board’s claim that class barriers in education were being substantially overcome was qualified by the caveat— presaging the future divisions of secondary schooling—that ‘it is the Secondary Schools of the less advanced type which must be looked to for the main supply of Elementary School Teachers’. The closer association of preliminary teacher training with the secondary schools from 1903 onwards was the point at which ‘barriers between class and class’ were keenly felt by individual trainees. The Schoolmaster alluded to this point on a number of occasions, noting that courses given in a secondary school in place of the pupil-teacher centre would need to be manifestly free from any distinctions based on social class. ‘What we strongly object to anywhere and at any time is any pandering to that class prejudice which is costing England so dear, and which would bring needless unpleasantness into the life of any self-respecting boy or girl.’ 13 July 1903, p. 124. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Extract from a Letter dated 9th April, 1921, addressed by HMI Mr W.E. Urwick to CI Mr Richards’, p.1. Ibid., p.2. For training college life, see Dina M. Copelman, London’s Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism 1870–1930 (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 136–49. The youngest of our respondents, the only one to follow a student-teachership after the war, enrolled on the scheme for 1947–48, at Gravesend. Our oldest respondent was a student teacher in 1913–14. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Draft Circular. Suggested Modification of the Bursar Student Teacher System’, p.7; also p.3. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Student Teacher Year’, p.2. Ibid., p.8. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Reply to Inspectors’ Section No. 587’, response to Inspectors’ § No. 587 from W.E.N., 24.vi.20, p.4. ‘In the majority of boys and girls the outward


33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

urge towards life is strong at the age of 17.’ Also see PRO ED 67/99, Newcastleupon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix B. ‘The Parents of Intending Teachers’, May 1927: They prefer a salary which is definite and uniform to a maintenance grant that is variable.’ PRO ED 67/112, letter to the Board of Education, 2 October 1926. Ibid. Thomas Walling, the long-standing Director of Education for Newcastle, was still making a similar point more than 20 years later. ‘It is of the greatest importance that boys and girls from the humbler homes should make no mistake in entering upon a career which involves the sacrifice of earnings and the passing of years… The son of well-to-do parents may be able to change at any age from schoolmastering to another vocation, but this does not apply to those in less fortunate financial circumstances in which the large majority of intending teachers find themselves.’ Letter from Walling to Ministry of Education, 9 April 1948. PRO ED 67/112, letter to parents, 1 September 1926. Ibid. PRO ED 67/112, Sheffield Education Committee Training of Teacher Regulations, 1926. Memorandum’, September, 1926. From 118 parents contacted, there were 116 replies, of which 106 showed parents to be ‘unwilling to present children as prospective teachers under the new scheme’. Ten replies declared a willingness to do so. The Committee had anticipated ‘that the proposals will determine [sic] very large numbers of working class parents from embarking upon a policy extending over so long a period with uncertainty as to the result’. The consolidated list of parents’ stated occupations is as follows: 16 engineers; 15 steel workers; 14 retailers; 12 clerks; 7 turners; 6 builders; 6 household duties; 4 teachers; 3 miners; 2 electricians; 2 pattern makers; 2 policemen; 2 print workers; 2 labourers; 2 ministers of religion; 2 warehousemen; and one each of the following— farmer, commercial manager, bank manager, manager, professor of music, architect, postman, signalman, gardener, a caretaker, secretary, saddler, bus conductor, railway guard, cook, porter, spinner and cleaner. Daisy and Arthur Shipley, whose accounts are given in Chapter 12, were indeed student teachers in Sheffield at the time of Percival’s survey. As children of a reasonably prosperous artisan father, their evidence nevertheless testifies to the critical consideration of the family economy influencing their progress into the teaching profession. A similar but far less detailed survey was carried out by the Newcastle authority a few months later. To 73 questionnaires sent to parents, there were 64 replies, with an overwhelming majority favouring the retention of the existing arrangements. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix B. The Parents of Intending Teachers’, May 1927. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 83. Occupation of Parent-Railway Guard’. As an example of education as a route to ‘the most important positions’, may be cited the number of teachers who had by this time been elected Members of Parliament. See Tropp, The School Teachers, pp. 141–3 and passim. PRO ED 67/112. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 47. Occupation of Parent-Joiner’; original spelling retained.


44. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 22. Occupation of Parent-Coal Dealer’; also see reply numbers 6—‘would limit the recruiting of future teachers largely to the ranks of the well-to-do’; 17—‘will preclude many of the working class from the profession’; 65 — ‘will create class distinction and sons and daughters of parents in humble circumstances will have to drop out’; 70—‘would absolutely debar any child of the labouring classes or even the skilled artisan class’; 80—‘will cut out from the teaching profession the children of the working class’; 98—‘would affect the ordinary working class, and possibly to the extent of excluding their children from the profession’. 45. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 34. Occupation of Parent-Turner’. 46. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 35. Occupation of Parent-Engineer’. Parents commonly saw the student-teacher year as an opportunity for their child’s classroom proficiency to be attested in advance of a final commitment to the long and costly process of college training. The expense…of sending prospective teachers to Training Colleges should not be lightly incurred by anybody, without first finding out whether they are “cut out” for the job.’ PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 9. Occupation of Parent-Pattern-maker’; ‘I would not willingly be a party to exposing the children in my care to such future insecurity after having arranged every moment of their lives to hard work and study for such a number of years.’ PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 38. Occupation of Parent—Teacher’. 47. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 38. Occupation of Parent-Teacher’. 48. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 59. Occupation of Parent-Foreman Builder’; original grammar and punctuation. 49. One parent observed that the sacrifice would be borne directly by some children and not just their parents: ‘the best of our boys and girls realising the position of their parents, will elect to go into other walks of life solely to relieve the financial position of their parents, although their sole ambition may have been to become teachers’. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 83. Occupation of Parent-Railway Guard’. Also see Oram, Women Teachers, pp.31–2. 50. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year, May 1927, p.1. 51. See Jose Harris, ‘“Contract” and “Citizenship”’, in David Marquand and Anthony Seldon, The Ideas that Shaped Post-War Britain (London, Fontana, 1996), pp. 12– 38; Cheryl Parsons, Schools in an Urban Community: A Study of Carbrook, 1870– 1965 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class 1890–1914 (London, Thames & Hudson, 1977); Philip Gardner, ‘Our Schools or Theirs? The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson’, History of Education, 20:3, (1991), pp.63–86. 52. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 66. Occupation of Parent—Wiredrawer’. 53. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 14. Occupation of Parent—Teacher’. 54. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 46. Occupation of Parent—Mechanical Engineer’. 55. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 60. Occupation of Parent—Engineer’. 56. The Schoolmaster, 5 September 1908, p.358. 57. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix E. ‘Memorandum from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association’, May 1927, p.1: ‘Returning to the elementary school after an absence of about ten years,


58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

he will find himself, to a great extent, out of touch with, and somewhat unfitted for, the kind of work for which, presumably, he has been trained.’ ‘They get, in their schools as student teachers, a wealth of help and guidance such as they cannot get while on short visits for school practice from College. They can closely observe experts in their craft; they get advice and helpful criticism in the preparation and presentation of their lessons, and as they are in school for a continuous period of months, they can see the development of the schemes and mark the reactions and progress of pupils. They have seen a whole school at work.’ PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association, ‘Memorandum on the Desirability of Retaining Student Teachers’, October 1946, p.2. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 6. Occupation of Parent—Commercial Manager’. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 17. Occupation of Parent—Clerk’. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 98. Occupation of Parent—Woodworker’. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 9. Occupation of Parent—Pattern maker’. PRO ED 67/112, ‘Reply No. 46. Occupation of Parent—Mechanical Engineer’. PP 1907, lxiv, pp. 14–15. A.M.Carr-Saunders, D.Caradog Jones and C.A.Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales as Illustrated by Statistics (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1958), pp.121–5, especially 122. Ibid., p.123. Ibid. Amongst our own group of respondents, of those who came into the profession over the years 1915 to 1939, approximately 35 per cent of both men and women came from white-collar backgrounds, with a significantly higher proportion of men (60 per cent) than of women (50 per cent) having fathers in (mostly skilled) working-class occupations. In our sample the proportion of working-class entrants amongst males and females increased marginally over time from the First to the Second World War. Ibid. The possibility of such a development had been recognised much earlier, as a likely consequence of the logic of the 1907 reforms. ‘It was inevitable that the tentative steps in the direction of using the buildings and staffs of Secondary Schools for the instruction of Pupil-Teachers…should lead to the wider conception of making a Secondary Education the natural avenue even for the sons and daughters of the labouring classes to the teaching profession in all its branches. This could not, of course, but carry with it a contrary process by which teachers in Public Elementary Schools would be recruited much more freely from the middle classes.’ PP 1907, lxiv, p.14. Also see Banks, Parity and Prestige, p.46. A.M.Carr-Saunders, D.Caradog Jones and C.A.Moser, A Survey of Social Conditions, p.125; also Sanderson, Educational Opportunity. Also see PP 1907, ixiv, p.22 ‘The need for giving a liberal education to boys and girls who were destined to become teachers in Elementary Schools established itself before the general need for the wider extension of Secondary Education was fully realised.’ Also see The Schoolmaster, 1 February 1908, p.223; also Ministry of Education (1949), Report of the Working Party, p.2. Frances Widdowson is right to stress that the entry of the lower-middle class into elementary teaching has its origins in the late nineteenth century. In this respect, her argument principally comprehends the 1907 reforms as another step in a long historical trend away from working-class domination of teaching. This is


72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

manifestly true but it certainly understates the extent of the practical and, particularly, the symbolic impact of these changes upon the traditional teaching constituencies. The pattern of long-term change in teacher supply, she suggests, means that the ‘stolen profession’ argument represented—for the time at which it was made—a particularly exaggerated response. But another dimension of her analysis does in fact go close to an appreciation of the deeper potential significance of 1907. The real importance of the bursar system was firstly in making it more normal for recruits to begin their pre-college teaching at 17, not earlier; and secondly, in breaking the old “working-class” image of elementary teaching, so closely tied to the pupil teacher system.’ Widdowson, Going Up Into the Next Class, pp.77, 39. A telling illustration—drawn from an oral testimony—of this is cited by Widdowson herself: ‘One schoolmistress trained in the 1920s remembered that the headmistress of the private school she attended as a pupil saw nothing infra dig about sitting for a bursary, although to have been a pupil-teacher would have been different.’ Ibid., p.77. The Schoolmaster, 3 October 1908, p.549. A special meeting of the NUT executive at the Conference of 1909 used terms which perceived the failure to observe the student-teacher year as a form of professional dereliction: ‘the practice by which the bursar evades the year of studentteachership and proceeds direct to college is open to the most serious objection’. The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909, p.670. Ibid. The Schoolmaster, 10 October 1908, p.604. PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix E. ‘Memorandum from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Head Teachers’ Association’, May 1927, p.1; ‘With the student-in-training who has missed that valuable StudentTeacher year, the case is quite different. It may be assumed that his main concern lies in the achieving of academic honours, and that to this object he bends his will and energies. This, however, entails loss in practice teaching, which is not given the importance it deserves.’ PRO ED 67/99, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Education Committee. Report of the Director of Education relative to the Student-Teacher Year. Appendix C. ‘Memorandum from the Head Teachers of the Municipal Secondary Schools’, May 1927. Also see Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, pp.210–11. Allen Croft, ‘Concerning “A Code of Professional Honour”’, The Schoolmaster, 5 October 1907, pp.549–50; see also 3 October 1903, pp.597–8; 25 January 1908, p. 190; 20 June 1908, p.1210; 17 April 1909, p.670. For a beautiful evocation of the world of the early-twentieth century elementary school, see Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London, Rivers Oram Press, 1996), ch.7. The Schoolmaster, ‘National Federation of Assistant Teachers. Conference at Manchester’, 10 October 1908, p.548; Daglish, Educational Policy-Making, p.211.

6 A NARROW LIFE? TEACHERS AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

Politically, teachers’ collective ambitions were focused principally through the agency of the NUT which, from its inception, had directed its efforts ‘towards “professional status” and “professional self-government”’.1 Most elementary teachers were NUT members and characteristically looked to the organisation with pride and expectation. But, at the same time, the union was often regarded pragmatically, as a powerful institutional defence in the event of individual problems or hardship. For the rest of the time, the union, like the politicians, could sometimes seem distant from the everyday concerns of classroom teachers, whose professional lives were typically framed by relentlessly local concerns. And it was within the context of their immediate local communities that teachers’ comparative perceptions of their status were most keenly felt.2 Some sense of this is conveyed in the lines of an article of 1908 entitled, ‘The Teacher in Social Life’: A good deal has been written of late years about the status of the teacher in the social machine. Whilst it is generally admitted that he is gradually winning his way in public and social life to the position which his education and culture entitles him, there is without doubt huge barriers of prejudice and snobbery to be overcome in many quarters before he is appreciated at his real worth… ‘Last summer I stayed at a boarding-house at the seaside. The other boarders were a very pleasant set, and we all jogged along together nicely until… I happened to mention that I was a teacher in an elementary school. Immediately a constraint fell upon the company. One lady remembered that a “grievous” hurt had been inflicted on her boy by his teacher, and she launched forth such a diatribe against teachers in general, wrathfully glaring at me the while, that I felt most uncomfortable, and was glad when the dinner gong sounded. For the rest of my stay there was a marked difference in their attitude towards me… I do not know how to account for the fact that the teacher is too often unappreciated and, as politely as possible, shunned… Very few can credit how the teacher desires for a better understanding between himself and the rest of the world.’3


The last sentence is a revealing one. As the training reforms of the early twentieth century moved the elementary teaching profession further and further away from its lowly nineteenth-century enclave, welcome new prospects were opened to its members. But every new prospect also meant that there were new constituencies to be addressed and satisfied; or, if we follow the argument of the ‘stolen profession’, it meant that there were additional predators to break in and despoil. In any event, if the ambitions of the profession were to take wing, it was clear that its members could no longer rest upon their traditional classroom strongholds. They would have actively to win those spaces in public esteem which they felt the service and sacrifice of their labours deserved. Asher Tropp argues that, particularly through the agency of the NUT, just such a positive orientation did increasingly materialise. ‘To analyse’, he writes, ‘the social position of the teacher at the turn of the century solely in terms of isolation, anxiety and hostility is to ignore a secular trend of much greater significance.’4 Drawing upon the influential writings of C.F.G.Masterman, Tropp offers a picture of teachers as ‘rising in status and influence in the social structure’.5 Masterman had evidenced the teachers as exemplars of those ‘suburban and professional people’ who, in the early years of the twentieth century, were ‘exhibiting a continuous rise of standard, keen ambitions, a respect for intellectual things which is often absent in the population amongst which it resides’.6 So much was undoubtedly true, but each of these features made up just one part of a far more complex whole. Alongside these observations, and unquoted by Tropp, Masterman also put forward the critical insight that these same suburban and professional groups were ‘sufficiently vulnerable to criticism…finding no one who will be proud of them because they are not proud of themselves’.7 Masterman’s telling claim perhaps understood something of the deep insecurities and ambivalences which afflicted teachers both collectively and individually across this period. This was a recognition, of course, which was later to be noted with particular critical concern by the McNair Report of 1944.8 Teachers might expect to remain physically distanced and intellectually isolated from the academic and cultural milieux to which they aspired; they might anticipate the continuing poor regard of their cousins in secondary and higher education;9 they could look to further deprecation by government as ‘uncultured and imperfectly educated’;10 and they had to struggle against persistent misunderstanding within their local communities as ‘a race apart’ leading ‘a narrow life’.11 This last perception achieved a particularly widespread currency throughout the inter-war years. When HMI Urwick wrote in 1921 to Richards, his chief, defending the student-teacher scheme for its capacity to put students in ‘contact with real life’, the marginal counter-note from Richards would have summarised the thought of many, and not only at the Board of Education, that real life was ‘rather diluted in a School classroom’.12 These few words betray a view—formally confined, of course, to the confidential memorandum and not the public address—of the traditional classroom teacher as the worthy but clumsy

A NARROW LIFE? TEACHERS AND PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

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provincial ‘other’ in a narrative of educational advance whose true authors were metropolitan visionaries driven by larger and nobler objectives, simultaneously sophisicated and benevolent. Looking back across the inter-war period, Maurice Harrison could muse, in more general terms, that One type of criticism against the education system, often mild but occasionally very forcible, stands out and is very common. It is directed against teachers as a class… The impression exists that teachers as a body are ‘different’ and that they are difficult for the ordinary man to get on with. Such a difficult personality could arise from narrowness of outlook or interests, intolerance of the unusual, undue readiness to argue or to split hairs instead of getting on with the job, an unreadiness to compromise, suspicion of official action (not perhaps without cause), sense of exposure to improper and unjust treatment by employing bodies…or of being thwarted or unjustly treated in respect of remuneration or social status. I think that there are grounds for believing that there is among teachers a feeling that they suffer under such injustices and that they cannot escape them, that there are aspects of their training that limit their views and their interests, and that they, whether openly or subconsciously, tend to regard themselves and to act as a group apart.13 ‘Perhaps’, wondered an article in The Schoolmaster of 1908 which attests to the depth and persistence of the professional characteristics in which Harrison’s observations were rooted, ‘the teachers themselves are to blame for some of this misunderstanding that arises.’14 Here is the voice of a traditional if always defensive occupational group struggling to understand the re-formation of its professional role and its own re-making.15 Suspended between opposing poles— local against worldly; practice against profession; wisdom against theory—the nature of their professional identity was, for the elementary school teachers in the early years of the twentieth century, a constant puzzle which seemed to worry away at them endlessly.16 For those seeking to celebrate a new and more elevated identity for teachers, the re-formation of professional training was itself a key element in the complex equation of change. Though within teachers’ everyday discourse the designation ‘pupil teacher’ lingered on as an omnibus description covering any variety of precollege school experience, the new formal nomenclature—student teacher— carried a distinction which made it far from a merely technical term. It carried connotations of a considerably more elevated kind. ‘Student teacher’ had, in fact, long been the title conventionally associated with the informal local arrangements through which many secondary schools sought to initiate new potential members of staff. A decade before the training reforms of 1907, the report of the Bryce Commission had explicitly drawn the distinction between this construction of ‘student teacher’ and the more lowly ‘pupil teacher’.


The primitive form of apprenticeship is the student-teacher system, still much used in some girls’ [secondary] schools, and affording at least a partial training to many girls who afterwards become teachers. It resembles the pupil-teacher system of the elementary schools, differing, however, in the superior age and attainment of the student teacher in the secondary school who is an ex-schoolgirl combining a continuance of some portion of her school studies with a certain amount of teaching.17 For professional preparation to teach in the elementary sector, the appropriation of a term traditionally reserved for those being inducted into secondary-school teaching was a small but significant indication of the enhanced status attaching to the new arrangements. But beneath the change of label, other, more substantial structural factors were operating towards the same end, towards the bolstering of the status and prestige of the mass of the nation’s teachers. We have noted the accelerating trend of middle-class recruitment into teaching across the early decades of the twentieth century—an expression of the general expansion of middle-class occupations in this period.18 Salary levels after the 1919 Burnham settlement certainly put most certificated teachers within reach of the £250 per annum which Ross McKibbin notes as the contemporary minimum expectation for a middle-class income in the post-war years.19 The period of the introduction of the student-teacher scheme was also marked by a continuation of that process of feminisation in the profession which had characterised the closing years of the nineteenth century. In 1870 elementary teaching had comprised men and women in roughly equal proportions; by 1900 approximately 72 per cent were made up of women (31,600 men to 81,800 women) and though the total size of the elementary teaching force expanded by one-third over the years up to the First World War, this gender distribution held steady.20 A far greater proportion of women, however, were uncertificated, and it was the issue of uncertificated and untrained teachers— rather than the gender issues to which it was closely related—which bore particularly heavily upon reformist thinking within both government and the NUT.21 Frances Widdowson has effectively challenged any notion that feminisation negatively impacted upon the public status of the profession; indeed, the growing influx of well-educated girls from lower-middle and middle-class backgrounds served, if anything, rather to drive up its social status.22 Alison Oram has assembled a similarly persuasive argument to show that relatively high levels of politicisation among women teachers may, in part, be explained by a relatively low level of occupational segregation by sex —despite the operation of the marriage bar and an unequal salary structure— within the teaching profession.23 Women undoubtedly faced profound equity concerns which divided them from male teachers and which were a source of enduring discontent and a stimulus to action. But in terms of the maintenance of professional status, there was much that held women together with men under the common label of ‘teacher’. ‘They were women, but in important ways they were not like other women.’24


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The changing status of teachers was also closely tied to the increasing prominence of education both as a significant vehicle of more extensive social intervention by the state and as a leading area of electoral interest. The politically contentious 1902 Education Act was passed against a backdrop of sharply contested economic and social issues which dominated the turn of the century and which were further addressed by the Liberal reforms of 1906–11.25 Following the First World War, another significant Education Act and the economic pressures that then hindered its implementation further raised the public profile of national education, as Lance Jones observed at the time. Probably at no time has this interest [in education] been been so widespread as it is today. Critics, whether propagandists or reactionaries, there have always been, but the change whereby the proverbial indifference of the mass of the people is rapidly being converted into active interest is a phenomenon hitherto unknown. The signs of it are everywhere —the demand for admission to Secondary Schools, publicity in the press and on the platform, questions in the House of Commons, the interest of ratepayers in the proceedings of Local Education Authorities and even of villagers in village schools, alike are indicative of the larger place that problems of education, national and local, are gradually filling in men’s minds.26 Growing public interest of this kind stimulated the production of a number of published commentaries on the school system which further augmented the public profile of education in the years when many of our respondents were contemplating the prospects of teaching as a career. One such work was published in 1919 by A.W.Newton, a former inspector at the Board of Education.27 In a chapter on ‘Elementary School Teaching as a Profession’ Newton explored some of the more quantifiable factors by which the occupational status of teaching might be assessed. Salaries, be noted, had risen considerably, with elementary teachers now, in most cases, employees of Education Committees and, in consequence, much better paid in 1913 than they had been in 1902 or 1870. Nevertheless, the differential between teaching and the more senior professions remained a considerable one. And for most teachers, the differential also applied to the prospects of promotion which were, particularly in the case of women, relatively limited in elementary education. But there were, for Newton, other attractions in the teaching profession, including relatively short working hours and, above all, the long-term security of a generous superannuation scheme subsidised by the state.28 Such benefits had, however, to be balanced against the expanding employment opportunities open to an increasingly educated workforce in Edwardian Britain; Newton also noted the declining attractiveness of teaching relative to other occupations in the years before the First World War—the beginning of that trend which Jean Floud was later to quantify and explain. By 1914 the elementary schools of England and


Wales were staffed by 165,500 adult teachers (of whom 109,000 were fully certificated) giving an overall ratio of one teacher to 37 children, although in practice many classes contained 60 pupils—the maximum class size allowed under the Board of Education Regulations.29 The cultural and political pressures which were generated by the domestic war effort had much to do with the appointment of a strong president at the Board of Education in the person of the university academic H.A.L.Fisher. Fisher exploited his position of strategic advantage by extending a strongly conciliatory response to teachers’ professional hopes and fears.30 In this regard, Fisher described teaching as ‘a profession which is far too important to be left to the dull-witted, the ill-tempered or the depressed’.31 The Stephen Committee on elementary teachers’ salaries, which led to the establishment of the Burnham Committee, followed this lead in introducing its report with the assertion that ‘teaching is by common consent a profession’.32 If the committee’s report also alluded to the inherent weaknesses of wide-ranging and ill-defined professional membership, the consequent lack of public regard and the need for professional registration, it was also in no doubt that fully qualified teachers in elementary schools were ‘men and women engaged in a liberal calling’. As such the committee believed that teachers should enjoy ‘every reasonable opportunity of maturing their knowledge and widening their horizons through study, through social intercourse with educated men and women of their own and other callings, and through travel’.33 The temper of the report was strongly in favour of achieving a salary structure for teachers that was commensurate with these desiderata.34 The committee particularly noted the growing attractiveness of competing white-collar opportunities for men, and also for women, and sought to encourage a recognition of teachers as key professionals within a national service, despite the organisation of their employment at a local level. This critical admission of the political and social significance of national education and, by extension, of its personnel, was carried forward and further defined by the Departmental Committee on the Training of Teachers—whose profound significance for the student-teacher scheme we have already noted— appointed in March 1923.35 The committee observed that whereas the primary aim of national education a century before had been the ‘relief of the worst evils of mental and moral indigence’, it was now conceived both more ambitiously and more generously as fulfilling the social duty of ‘providing adequate opportunities for the fullest development of those who have not yet begun to render service to the community in their capacity as individual members of society’.36 The committee perceived that there was still some way to go in the need for adequate and stable salaries to make teaching professionally attractive, in countering the deterrent effect of unsatisfactory school conditions, and in the need for optimum freedom from administrative control. But given the will to address these questions, it was hoped that


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teaching may come to take an even higher place in public regard than it now occupies and to suggest that service to the community in the capacity of a teacher deserves more frequent public recognition than it usually obtains at present in the award of public honours and distinctions.37 The spirit of such an assertion drew not only upon the elevation of elementary education in terms of policy, but also upon the growing representations of academic educationists on behalf of the teaching profession. The insistence upon the link between the study of education as an academic discipline and the professionalisation of teaching was explicit, for example, as early as 1876 when S.S.Laurie, first occupant of a Chair of Education in a British university, gave his inaugural lecture, insisting that ‘the occupation of teacher has been finally raised into a profession by requiring, as the condition of entering it, a professional discipline’.38 According to Laurie it was, moreover, the elementary sector which, in terms of educational advance, had led the secondary. His definition of a liberal and humanistic curriculum for what he deliberately called the ‘primary’ school offered an alternative to the old, more mechanistic and limited constructions of elementary education, with significant implications for the role and status of the elementary school teacher. ‘We work’, he continued,’ in the hope that the number of those outside the pale of a true civilization may grow less and less as the generations pass.’39 As Laurie had asserted the lead of the elementary sector over the secondary in respect of professional training, so the political scientist Donna F.Thompson was able to make a similar claim for the professional organisation of elementary teachers. In her doctoral study of the National Union of Teachers written in the early 1920s, Thompson documented the growth of the NUT, its significant parliamentary influence and the strength of its salary campaigns, concluding that ‘the solidarity of the elementary teachers of England and Wales has been made manifest and there is shown…the tendency of this solidarity to result in a selfgoverning profession’.40 For Thompson, the central significance of the NUT for classroom teachers was that it encouraged practitioners to conceive their work nationally and not merely in local terms. A key element in the development of this perception was the recognition that any form of professional selfgovernment would demand the unity of the profession. The slightly later work of Alexander Carr-Saunders—influential at the time of its appearance in the inter-war period, if now seen as representing a narrow and conceptually undeveloped theorisation of the professions,41 was important in crediting the NUT with a degree of idealism and detachment from partisanship in entering fields of educational controversy and in campaigning for reforms which came ultimately to be seen as incontestably beneficial for the nation. Among these were listed the abolition of half-time attendance, the raising of the school leaving age and reduction in size of classes, medical inspection and treatment of schoolchildren, and the principle of equal opportunity regardless of social origin.42


Many of these positive constructions of teaching as a profession were reflected in an associated contemporary literature of careers guidance which began to proliferate from the early years of the century.43 As an example of this genre, we might take the writings of T.W.Berry, Director of Education in the Rhondda and former Assistant Director of Education in the City of Manchester.44 Berry was the author of How to Become a Teacher in 1907 and, two years later, Professions for Girls.45 ‘Profession’ was a key term for Berry and his list of ‘organised professions open to girls’ was dominated by those comprehended under Educational, Medical, Nursing and Clerical headings. The Teaching Profession’ was, in his judgment, ‘facile princeps as a profession for women’, and in outlining its attractions he alluded to long holidays, short (but stressful) hours, job security, and, less instrumentally, to the fact that ‘the work is noble work, offering immense opportunities for good on the rising generation’.46 Another distinctive usage in Berry’s survey is his reference to the ‘primary’ teacher, a term well established by more progressive educationists, such as Laurie, but not widely used by contemporary writers, nor indeed by our respondents, for whom the term ‘elementary’ still retrospectively characterises their recollections of the schools in which they taught.47 In describing improved working conditions for teachers, Berry speaks of bright and healthy schools with classes smaller than formerly, the disappearance of irritations such as payment by results and the inauguration of a state superannuation scheme. Though he conceded that elementary school work might be more exhausting and in some respects less congenial than that in the secondary, it was, nonetheless ‘not at all irksome, and if the teacher’s interest is in her pupils and she is enthusiastic in her task, teaching becomes a pleasant occupation, providing satisfaction in the knowledge that one has done a national service in moulding the characters and in training the intellects of the rising generation’.48 The group of former teachers who contributed their memories to our study were growing up, going to school and entering teacher training in a period when teaching was being subjected to unprecedented practical reform, intellectual revision, public re-evaluation and commentary. How then, did the idea of teaching as a profession register in their recollections? ‘Profession’ is, in fact, a term that did not readily cross the lips of our respondents. Some spontaneously used the term, but only a few. Indeed, direct questions relating to ‘profession’ or ‘professional identity’ were more likely to provoke thoughtful silences, even confusion or embarrassment. Nonetheless, it was clearly important to illuminate, against a background of considerable change in official thinking about the professional characteristics of elementary teachers, the characteristic perceptions of ‘profession’ held by new recruits themselves. This directed us towards a consideration of the issue of individual career choice as a window upon the ways in which teacher identity was commonly perceived or understood at the time that our respondents were contemplating or actively entering teaching. Perceptions of the meaning of professionalism in teaching are, of course, subject to much reworking over the course of an individual career, becoming overlaid with the


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residues of successive developments relating to pay, unemployment, conditions of service and so on, and also with the results of changes in more general political, economic and personal circumstances over time. In this way, the idea of professionalism is best understood not as a fixture established by propositional definition, but as a dynamic historical formulation subject to normative drift through time.49 In this respect, we should look to find evidence for such changes, and for their characteristic patterns, embedded in the unfolding life narratives which make up Part III. Two points are immediately apparent in looking at respondents’ testimony on career choice. In the first place, although we may be able to perceive important connections between individual remembrance and the extant documentary record, it is evident that direct causal linkages between the two are hard to establish. The connection is almost always more diffuse. The majority of respondents had no familiarity with the range of contemporary documentary sources which we have considered above and which, in one way or another, impinged directly upon questions of the professional status of teaching. None of our former teachers remembers consulting, for example, the careers guides produced by the likes of Berry and none alluded directly to debates about the nature of teacher professionalism in either the professional or the academic literature. In the second place, relatively few respondents seem to have absorbed their memories about career choice—with one important exception which we will consider shortly—within an enduring narrative identity. These were memories, in other words, which appeared not to have been regularly rehearsed or repeated as central or unifying elements of our respondents’ life narratives. As such, recalling the circumstances of their career choice was often a relatively difficult exercise in which the settled narrative flow of interviews called for some degree of disruption in order to chase out memories drawing more upon singular recollection rather than serial repetition, upon the almost forgotten rather than the oft-remembered. Though remembering in this mode was often onerous, it was clear that for the majority of respondents, structural changes in the status of teaching as a profession seldom seem to have been of much direct importance in determining their career choice as young men and women. The decision was rarely contingent upon the consideration of an external or idealised model of the professional teacher rationally selected from a competing range of other potential career alternatives. The process of professionalisation inherent in contemporary educational literature had not yet resulted, at least for our respondents as they were about to enter the profession, in the projection of a clear public image of the ‘teacher as professional’. Popular stereotypes of teachers there undoubtedly were— ‘men among boys’;50 ‘looks upon every one he meets as on a scholar at lessons’;51 ‘stuffed with fads and notions’.52 But such notions were founded upon popular experience of the local and the particular and not yet upon a general category based upon the recognition of idealised professional attributes. They also continued to rest upon a surprising residual closeness between local communities and the idea of teaching as a fundamentally


accessible and relatively unspecialised activity. The roots of such an understanding perhaps reach back to the nineteenth-century tradition of workingclass private schooling in which the keeping of a school was often regarded not as requiring special skills, but as the province of the deserving, the incompetent and the desperate. The professionalisation of teaching—of which the training reforms of the early twentieth century were such an important element—could not fully achieve the goals set for it until popular perceptions of teaching, famously caricatured by the Newcastle Commission half a century earlier, had been transcended: ‘None are too old, too ignorant, too feeble, too sickly, too unqualified in every way, to regard themselves, and to be regarded by others, as fit for school-keeping.’53 The persistence of this widespread popular view was noted ruefully by The Schoolmaster in 1908 in its criticisms of the old regime of teacher training: From those to whom we commit the formation and due furnishing of children’s minds we are content, in too many cases, to demand little or no special training for that most important work. The reasons for this inconsistency lie partly in our traditional indifference to education, which the increased educational activity of the past half century has not yet dispelled; partly in the notion, arising out of that same indifference, that teaching is a work that any man or woman who is not an absolute fool can do well enough for all practical purposes.54 If the reconstruction of teacher training in the early twentieth century had ‘stolen’ the profession then it was a theft which also included the remnants of the popular view of teaching as a straightforward, comprehensible and unexceptional occupation. Both elements had to be secured, for each was contingent upon the other. In this way, the decline of the traditional popular view of teaching would, of course, precisely signal the success of the drive towards the professional recognition of teachers—an objective shared alike, if for different reasons, by government and by teachers’ representative organisations. For many of those seeking to enter teaching during this important transitional period, the configuration of change could present a peculiarly conducive prospect. Here was a point at which a popular residual conception of elementary teaching as still within the purview of ‘any man or woman who is not an absolute fool’ briefly paralleled the emergent new professionalism signalled in the reform of teacher training. Teaching could appear an attractive career prospect on each ground, with each aspect, moreover, serving to assuage the anxiety to which the dominance of one or the other might give rise. On the one hand, new recruits were likely to be aware that events, rooted in policy change from on high, were somehow conspiring to drive up the professional status of their chosen career. On the other, such changes might be rendered inviting rather than threatening precisely because of the prosaic and unaffected regard in which teaching was still held locally. This, indeed, seems to have been a common experience for


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many of our respondents. The prime impetus propelling them towards teaching came from a secure and familiar image of the profession, rooted in a profound closeness to local practice—often concentrated in the figure of a single exemplary teacher—together with the transforming prospect of a prolonged personal odyssey into the academic world. In this respect, a career in teaching could appear as elevated without being distant, as exotic whilst still local, as an exploration of the unknown without taking full leave of the familiar. In the testimony of one of our respondents, Margaret Lane (A804), we can discern something of these complex currents as she reflects on her early decision to teach. Margaret’s choice was made at about the age of eight, as she related in her initial questionnaire, because ‘teaching was a profession highly thought of by ambitious working class parents. It enabled a bright child to get an education beyond the usual 5 to 15 years span and offered security for the future.’ During interview, Margaret was able to say more about the origins of her career choice. Born in 1904, she was the elder of two children of a dressmaker and a skilled labourer. Her parents were very anxious for their children to have the benefits of what they themselves had missed. Her mother had had to leave school at the age of 11 when her own father had died, and it was her consequent employment as a dressmaker which eventually provided the additional income which helped both Margaret and her brother to take up scholarship places at the local grammar school. There were not many books at home but her parents’ ambition for her was such that when she expressed great enjoyment in reading David Copperfield at elementary school, they duly presented her with a copy of Edwin Drood in order to further her interest. Margaret ‘loved school’— expressions of feeling for school and for teachers in terms of love, sometimes of adoration, were not uncommon among (chiefly women) respondents—and enjoyed her time at Craven Street Municipal Secondary School in Hull, where she recalled some particularly influential teachers.55 ‘I loved school, you see, and adored my teachers and it would be so grand if you could be a teacher too, you know. And my parents supported it and that’s how it came about.’ Had she ever thought of any other occupation? Yes, you see I played the piano rather well for my years at that time, and there was a suggestion of becoming a cinema pianist. You know, the silent films, and I didn’t dislike the idea but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He said it was not sufficiently stable for a young woman, and they supported the teaching career, you see. What were the particular aspects of teaching which made it seem such an inviting career? Oh, school generally, I think, yes, and of course in our working-class life teachers were highly respected. It was a good thing to be a teacher and compared with the wages that shop people and office people and other


contemporaries were earning, teaching was good in those days. It doesn’t compare with other professions, it never has, but it compared with the other opportunities that girls had in those days quite well. This was a perception of teaching which accentuated a special claim to recognised professional status without entirely losing the comfort of a traditional and well-understood cultural identity. It was an appreciation of teaching as standing above other comparable white-collar work, but also as falling short of the elite status of ‘other professions’. And, as Margaret indicates, the ambivalences inhering in such an accommodation could particularly commend themselves to the domestic and social circumstances of girls and young women from humble backgrounds for whom a professional career fell entirely within their intellectual compass but who were repelled by the traditional male domination which characterised the established professions.56 Conscious aspiration to professional status as a leading impetus for entering teaching appears only remotely in the oral testimony of the majority of our teachers, though where it did appear, it notably figured in the testimony of men rather than women. For most women, and for significant numbers of men, whatever the strength of the impulse to teach might be, it was not finally driven by the glittering prize of an exclusive professional status. More than threequarters of our respondents were women, and one of the most sharply marked features of the memories of their motivation to teach was the very early age at which it occurred. Here is the great exception, to which we alluded above, in patterns of remembrance of career choice. Most memories of career orientation turn out to be recollective rather than repetitive in character. That is to say, they have not been routinely sedimented within the form of narrative identity as a defining element. The precocious decision to enter teaching—which appears over and over again in women’s testimony—is of a different order. In many cases, the commitment of such women to teaching was a lifelong one based on a desire that went much deeper simply than an instrumental ambition for professional status. This was a desire rooted not in the calculated association of teaching with an abstract concept but in the intense personal attraction of practical pedagogical activity as directly witnessed in the classroom.57 Observation of this sort often turned upon the example set by charismatic or inspiring individual teachers. Nearly 40 per cent of our female respondents located the origin of their decision to teach in their infant years. A striking and remarkably consistent feature— and a particularly fruitful site for investigation of the links between individual and collective memory—are the numerous memories of ‘playing school’ and the narrative significance with which these incidents were endowed. Our female respondents in their infancy variously taught their younger siblings, neighbours’ children, dolls, plants in the greenhouse or even flowers on the wallpaper. One infant girl ordered chessmen into neat rows and filed them out into an imaginary playground.


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For those who explained their choice through such memories, teaching was a goal to which they felt impelled. Its attraction was vocational in the sense that teaching seemed to select them, rather than the reverse. ‘I think these feelings were inside me from a very early age’; As years passed it seemed natural to aim at teaching’; ‘In my day one was a “born” teacher or not’; and the attraction was always at its strongest when it could be personified in the form of a model figure.58 At Wath, I would be five actually, and we had the most endearing delightful teacher, I can see her walking through this tiny village now, with all the kids round her. And her name was Miss Entwhistle and I think it was she who made me want to teach because she was such a nice personality.’ Such memories often evoked a general sense of security and great personal happiness in schooldays. Though it might also carry its own kinds of opportunity costs, teaching seemed fundamentally to offer the best opportunity to prolong the gifts of childhood security and happiness. In reflecting upon her decision to come to teaching, one respondent wrote that Probably from age 5 yrs [I] never thought of any other role. Most likely admiration from watching infant teachers. Later happy encouragement in every classroom experience [Junior Girls]. Class teachers interested in our progress academically and our families. In other words—these spinster teachers were happy people to live and learn by as pupils. I can’t remember any child being punished. We listened, we believed in those class teachers, but rather revered the Headmistress, and to be like her! About 10 per cent of female respondents identified their parents, rather than teachers, as the dominant influences in their career choice and in these cases the professional status and prospects of a teaching career tended to come more notably to the fore. A skilled manual worker, a coachbuilder and wheelwright, saw teaching for his daughter as the ‘natural progression’ from a grammar school education. Another father, a policeman, saw the salary and security of a teaching career as the best means of ensuring a life of independence for his daughter. Sometimes, school and parents conspired without the child initially being aware of the fact.59 Enid Marven (B012), who was born in 1901 and then lived in Inkpen, Berkshire recalls I had never even imagined that I could be a teacher! One day in early summer of 1915, I was away from school with some slight indisposition, and my mother asked me (unexpectedly!) ‘How would you like to be a teacher?’ She explained that the schoolmaster had been to see her and my father, asking permission to enter me for the Pupil Teachers’ Entrance Examination. And they had agreed—I was never consulted! But I was more than willing. The only other available work for girls leaving school was domestic service. There was not transport to local towns where other work


could be found. I duly took the Exam later that summer and passed; and just after my fourteenth birthday, I was ‘articled’ as a P.T. for four years. Only about 5 per cent of women respondents explicitly included the perceived high status of the teaching profession as a significant factor in their career choice. Cynthia Greyton, whose father was a linotype operator, and with two older sisters already teachers, decided at the age of 15 to join what she characterised as a ‘very respected and well-paid profession’. Felicity Brookes reflected that ‘you had achieved a lot to get into the grammar school and to get to the top, and to become a teacher was the great achievement’. A further 10 per cent recalled that they had considered teaching as a career because it was the most attractive and prestigious option of a very limited potential range, which included nursing, librarianship, office work and shop work. Such accounts were seldom, however, negative in tone and only one woman had ‘drifted into teaching’—an expression which was more characteristic of a small minority of male respondents. In choosing to teach, about one-third of the men were in one sense or another consciously avoiding unwanted alternatives rather than being driven by the directly positive impulses which were so common among the women. As one put it, ‘there’s no other way you could…get out of overalls’. For another, born in 1905 and brought up in a village in the Northamptonshire countryside: There wasn’t much opportunity to all the bright lads and lasses from the village. The only escape was teaching. My reasons were, I suppose, largely negative. There was a shoe factory which I was terrified of entering. There was grinding machinery, and the dust, leather dust. The other thing was the hand-sewn industry and, well, I wasn’t talented with my hands to undertake that. Then the other option was farming. Yet another saw teacher training as an escape route from the family business in which he feared his father would continue to dominate him. One country boy exposed to rural poverty saw, above all else, the positive attraction of an old-age pension. One or two others embraced teaching in the face of failure to secure Oxbridge scholarships. But if the motivations of male recruits were more likely to be influenced by perceptions of teaching in terms of its growing professional status than was the case for women, instrumental considerations were seldom the only impulse. Almost all were also attracted by the same love of continued learning which was such a prevalent factor among female entrants. Ernest Watson, for example, saw teaching primarily as an opportunity of keeping up his interest in science which he had so much enjoyed at grammar school. Conscious aspiration to achieve the status associated with professionalism in its various aspects was the single most salient factor for about one-quarter of our male interviewees when they reflected on their original career decision. A good position with above average salary particularly attracted one man, whose father was an entertainments manager, and another, the son of a printer, thought of


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teaching as ‘almost a middle-class career’. Even when they did not consult them directly, men notably conformed more closely to the rational model of planning and decision making set out in contemporary books of career advice. Most of the men, by contrast with the women, located the point of their decision to teach very much later in their youth, characteristically at the school-leaving age, and here their secondary school was frequently influential, perhaps through active recruitment by the head teacher or through the offer of some informal experiences in taking responsibility for younger boys. In such cases, even though the individuals concerned were destined for teaching in the elementary sector, there was an evident sense that they were joining a clearly defined profession of which their secondary school-masters were also—if in a more elevated and distanced way—representatives. What, then, do these fragmentary snatches from the memories of our former teachers have to tell us about their perceptions of teaching as a profession in the moment that they stood poised to join its ranks? First, in the way of all work drawing upon life-history narratives, they serve to remind us that each individual case was always the product of a unique constellation of influences, experiences and contingencies and that though generalisation is a prominent and unavoidable feature of the historian’s craft, it must always wear a humble expression. Secondly, that the circumstances of career choice intimated by our respondents do not imply the makings of a self-conscious cadre of ambitious or determined, let alone politically motivated, activists or functionaries knowingly either ‘challenging the state’ or ‘serving’ it.60 Thirdly, they tell us that the most significant and insistent patterns of variation in relation to understandings of professionalism are related to gender differences, and that these variations might be expressed in different forms over the course of a career. Finally, they remind us that though the forcing up of the status of the profession was a relatively straightforward policy objective for governments, its consequences for real people could be very complex. The confident claims or assertions in relation to professional status to be found in the documentary evidence emanating from policy makers and educational commentators, and often repeated in the secondary literature, were not reflected in any simple or straightforward way in the lives of the men and women upon whom their pronouncements bore. The memories of our one-time student teachers remind us, in other words, that the relation between the writ of the documentary record and that of living memory is never an easy one to untangle. NOTES 1. Tropp, The School Teachers, p.267. Tropp’s work offers the classic liberal account of the progressive advance of the profession through the work of its principal representative body. Also see Beatrice Webb, ‘Special Supplement on English Teachers and their Professional Organisation’, New Statesman, 5:129, 25


2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

September 1915, p.10. For a treatment from a more critical perspective, see Lawn, Servants of the State. Also Clive Griggs, The Trades Union Congress and the Struggle for Education 1868–1925 (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1983); Barber, Education and the Teacher Unions. See, for example, the letter of bitter disappointment from an elementary teacher (The Clever Boy who has Failed at Last’) who, for all his scholarly qualifications, perceives his career, when measured against those of his less clever but more successful peers, as a trap and a fraud: ‘The irony of it makes me laugh bitter tears of mingled grief and mirth… But why all this groaning, some will say? You had your prizes when you were a clever little boy, you cannot expect to have them now as well. No, I am well aware of that, painfully, financially aware of it.’ The Schoolmaster, 25 July 1903, p.177. The Schoolmaster, ‘The Teacher in Social Life’, 15 August 1908, p.264; also see Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred, pp.9, 21; also Oram, Women Teachers, p. 52. Similar accounts of ‘holiday encounters’ of this sort appear quite frequently in the accumulated oral testimonies of former teachers. Tropp, The School Teachers, p.150. Ibid. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, Methuen, 1911), p.76. Ibid., p.75. This extract continues, ‘they yet offer a storehouse of accumulated physical health and clean simplicities of living’. McNair Report, p.25. See The Schoolmaster, 18 July 1903, p.124: ‘What we strongly object to…is any pandering to that class prejudice which would bring needless unpleasantness into the life of any self-respecting boy or girl.’; The Schoolmaster, 26 November 1904, p.1062; ‘Relation Between Primary and Secondary Schools’, The Schoolmaster, 9 May 1908, pp.930–1; Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred, pp.52–3; PP 1907, General Report, lxiv, p.17. This notorious phrase comes from the ‘Holmes-Morant’ circular, reprinted in Tropp, The School Teachers, pp.271–2. McNair Report, p.29. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Extract from a Letter dated 9th April, 1921, addressed by HMI Mr W.E. Urwick to CI Mr Richards’, p.2. Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred, p.13. For an epitome of characteristic patterns of teacher training in the same year, see R.A.C.Oliver, The Training of Teachers in Universities (London, University of London Press, 1943), pp.14–17. The Schoolmaster, 15 August 1908, p.264. The Student-Teacher Bacillus’, The Schoolmaster, 30 May 1908, pp.1081–2. See A.M.Carr-Saunders and P.A.Wilson, The Professions (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1933). Also Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society Since 1880; Eliot Freidson, Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994); Peter Gordon (ed.), Is Teaching a Profession? Bedford Way Papers 25 (London, Institute of Education, University of London, 1983); Eric Hoyle and Peter D.John, Professional Knowledge and Professional Practice (London, Cassell, 1995). PP 1895, xliii, Report of the Commission on Secondary Education, pp.203–4. Bryce’s observation on contemporary perceptions of college training among secondary teachers is also noteworthy: This approval of the student-teacher system


18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

121

was in contradistinction to expressions of doubt or disapproval of training as given in training colleges. The former makes of course no provision for instruction in theory, but there are those who think such instruction of little value.’ Also see ‘The Making of a Teacher’, The Schoolmaster, 18 July 1903, p.124: ‘As the “monitor” of Bell and Lancaster has been superseded by the pupil teacher of the Victorian period, so now the scholastic “child-labourer” of Sir John Gorst is to be gradually replaced by the student-teacher.’ Also see Report of a Conference on the Training of Teachers in Secondary Schools for Boys (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1902). See McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, chs 2 and 3. In the early years of the studentteacher scheme almost 46 per cent of both boys and girls taking up bursaries came from white-collar backgrounds (principally from households headed by teachers, clerks, minor officials and commercial travellers). See Widdowson, Going Up Into the Next Class, pp.45–6. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, pp.44–5. Felicity Hunt, Gender and Policy in English Education 1902–44 (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1991), p.99; Tropp, The School Teachers, p.170. Tropp, The School Teachers, pp.1 17–18, 187–8; The Schoolmaster, 17 April 1909, p.667. One-third of women teachers were uncertificated, by comparison with oneeighth of the men; see Geoffrey Partington, Women Teachers in the Twentieth Century in England and Wales (Windsor, NFER, 1976), p.3. Widdowson, Going Up Into the Next Class; also Daglish, Education PolicyMaking, p.214. Oram, Women Teachers. For contrasting treatments of gender distinctions in teaching in this period, see Kean, Challenging the State? Oram, Women Teachers, pp.221, 37. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory. Britain 1900–1990 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), pp.22–3; Geoffrey Sherington, English Education, Social Change and War, 1911– 20 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1981), pp.1–17. Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.1; also see Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred, pp.7–8. A.W.Newton, The English Elementary School (London, Longmans Green & Co., 1919). Tropp, The School Teachers, p.213. Newton, The English Elementary School, pp.242–3. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.36–7. Cited in D.W.Hughes, Careers for Our Sons (London, A&C Black, 1934, 7th edn), p.324. PP 1917–18, xi, Report of the Departmental Committee…into… Scales of Salaries for Teachers in Elementary Schools, p.4. Ibid.; also see Grace, Teachers, Ideology and Control, p.203. PP 1917–18, xi, Report of the Departmental Committee, pp.4–5. Dent, The Training of Teachers, p.98. PP 1924–25, xii, Report of the Departmental Committee, pp.152–3. Ibid., p.154. S.S. Laurie, The Training of Teachers and Methods of Instruction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1901), p.5. Ibid., p.152.


40. Donna F.Thompson, Professional Solidarity Among the Teachers of England (New York, Columbia University Press, 1927), pp.5–6. Also see Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.40. 41. Eliot Freidson, ‘The Changing Nature of Professional Control’, Annual Review of Sociology, 10 (1984), pp.1–20; Freidson, Professionalism Reborn; Steven Brint, ‘Eliot Freidson’s Contribution to the Sociology of Professions’, Work and Occupations, 20:3 (1993), pp.259–78; David Warren Piper, Are Professors Professional? The Organisation of University Examinations (London, Jessica Kingsley, 1994), pp.2–4. 42. Carr-Saunders and Wilson, The Professions, p.261. 43. Frank Parsons, Choosing a Vocation (London, Gay & Hancock, 1909); George H. Williams, Careers for Our Sons: A Practical Handbook to the Professions and Commercial Life (London, Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1908). Such was the popularity of this volume that it went through seven editions up to 1934, eventually stimulating a sequel, Careers for Our Daughters (London, A & C Black, 1936); T.W. Berry, Professions for Girls (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1909). 44. Berry, Professions for Girls. 45. In 1907 the Board of Education issued a pamphlet, regularly updated thereafter, under the title, How to Become a Teacher in a Public Elementary School (London, HMSO). 46. Berry, Professions for Girls, pp.8–9. 47. Peter Cunningham, ‘Progressivism, Decentralisation and Recentralisation: Local Education Authorities and the Primary Curriculum, 1902–2002’, Oxford Review of Education, 28:2 and 3 (2002), pp.217–33. 48. Berry, Professions for Girls, p.22. 49. Freidson, Professionalism Reborn. 50. Harrison, Teachers Made and Marred, p.8. 51. The Schoolmaster, 15 August 1908, p.264. 52. The Schoolmaster, 5 September 1908, p.358. 53. PP 1861, xxi, Part I, Report, p.93. 54. The Professional Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 22 August 1908, p.284. 55. Gardner, ‘Deciding to Teach’. 56. See Alison Oram (1987b), “‘Sex Antagonism” in the Teaching Profession: Equal Pay and the Marriage Bar 1910–1939’, in M.Arnot and G.Weiner (eds), Gender and the Politics of Schooling (London, Hutchinson, 1987). 57. Jennifer Nias, Primary Teachers Talking: A Study of Teaching as Work (London, Routledge, 1989). 58. Widdowson, Going Up Into the Next Class, p.67; Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, p.127. For a particularly evocative and informative series of pen portraits of his own boyhood teachers by one who went on to train for the profession, see Leonard Clark, Grateful Caliban (London, Dennis Dobson, 1967). 59. See Alice Bond, Life of a Yorkshire Girl (Hull, Bradley Publications, 1981), p.51; ‘One day at school I had been summoned into the presence of the Head who told me that I had been made a Bursar without giving explanation.’ 60. See particularly Lawn, Servants of the State; and Kean, Challenging the State?

7 PRACTICE: EXPERIENCE OF TRAINING FROM CLASSROOM TO COLLEGE

The student-teacher scheme was the subject of educational controversy for many years. As we have noted, this was not only a consequence of the terms of the scheme itself. It was also because, in one way or another, it impinged on many of the central trends of broader educational change in the first half of the twentieth century. In this respect, it was common for contemporary commentators to combine metaphorical and literal elements in their accounts of student teaching, making it hard to discern much about the day-to-day operation of student teaching as it went on in the schools. In previous chapters we heard something of what the parents of student teachers thought about the functioning of the scheme as a means of further education and a career entry. Here, we turn to how it appeared to their sons and daughters, to the student teachers themselves; in other words, how the scheme was constructed as a set of pedagogical practices rather than a set of policy developments. A contemporary source in which anonymous student teachers’ voices are heard fragmentarily is Lance Jones’ report.1 This important descriptive and evaluative account of teacher training sought to gather material for what it described as a ‘review of actual conditions’. Jones’ research, published in 1924, drew on upwards of 80 young people recently completing student-teacherships in a dozen LEAs. Considerable variety in practice was experienced by trainees, and practice was not infrequently divorced from theory. At the more constructive end of the spectrum: For the first few days I observed in each class and then each day took not less than two lessons. I gave one criticism lesson every week. The Head Teacher supervised my notes of lessons and showed me my mistakes and how to correct them. Periodically the Supervisor of the Education Committee heard me teach and reported on my progress.2 Whilst at the destructive end: I gained very little experience in teaching but spent the greater part of my time in doing clerical work… I observed methods of teaching which it would have profited me more not to have seen.3


As for the experience of continuing secondary education, there was less variation, but the evaluations tended with a few exceptions to be negative. We spent one day a week at the Grammar School, where we were not compelled to go to any lessons, but left free to do as we liked. The two half-days we spent at the Secondary School were sheer waste of time. The fact was we belonged to nobody and were nobody’s concern. We had private study and nothing definite to do.4 Accounts of student teaching in published autobiographies, though relatively few and far between, remind us of the variety of ways in which the policy was interpreted but, even more importantly for oral historians, of the different ways in which components of professional training might be retrospectively evaluated and incorporated into a life narrative. Autobiographers whose careers flourished and who rose to positions of influence in education are, it should be noted, inclined to shape their narratives with a teleological slant. Published autobiography also reminds us that a short spell of teaching in an unqualified capacity in one’s teens was not an uncommon event throughout our period and well into the decades following the Second World War. Leah Manning’s autobiography, for example, records that she matriculated in 1903, some four years before the inauguration of the student-teacher scheme.5 The Reverend Stewart Headlam, Christian Socialist, London School Board member and a strong supporter of teachers, recommended her to apply to Homerton College in Cambridge for teacher training, but at the age of 17 she was below the minimum age for college entry so Headlam helped find her a year’s teaching post in a boys’ elementary school. This contingent circumstance of age is not infrequently cited by our respondents as a significant reason for a year’s student teaching. Her teaching experience during this year is recounted by Manning as an integral step in the progress of her ‘life for education’ that led her on to political action as a Member of Parliament. By contrast, for Sir Donald Wolfit, his brief experience of teaching was a mere hiccup in his progress towards the theatre.6 Already stage-struck in his teens and having failed to gain entrance to university, he crossed the portals of Messrs Gabbitas and Thring and was employed as a master in St George’s Preparatory School, Eastbourne, on the basis of the briefest of interviews with its head master conducted under the clock at Victoria Station. At St George’s he stayed barely a year before fleeing to a much more alluring career on stage. But this was the independent sector, socially and educationally a world away from the humble and earnest world of the elementary school. Vicars Bell recorded his own student-teaching experience with a distinct purpose.7 For him the events of wartime evacuation had focused a critique of the education system as a whole. He saw the training of teachers as the foundation of all future reform: to replace a system which, as in his own case, ‘fed the ranks of elementary school teachers with the skimmed milk of the secondary grammar


schools’. Son of a printing works manager, bookseller and stationer, and leading light in the local Presbyterian Church, his mother was a great reader, much attracted to metaphysics. The loss of two elder brothers in the First World War left him the senior surviving son. He attended grammar school, became obsessed with officer cadet training and slacked academically, despite vague ambitions for Cambridge. There was no money at home, and my choice lay between going into an office (to get my hands dirty was unthinkable) and becoming an elementary school teacher. God knows that was a big enough fall in the absurd social snobbism of my outlook.8 So at the age of 17 he became a student teacher, spending four and a half days a week at a village elementary school and two half-days back at the grammar school. Like so many of our respondents he found it difficult to recall what he actually did on those half-days. Three colleagues alongside him continued to work for matriculation which Bell already had. ‘I rather fancy that I was just nobody’s business, and that I sat about and read.’ Bell’s view at that time was of village schoolmasters as the dregs of a very low profession, for those with any ability would surely have become heads of larger schools. But looking back from the height of his own career as village schoolmaster and writer, he marvels at the head teacher’s ‘patience, sense of humour and kindness, combining Guards’ discipline with kind and wellmannered relations with his pupils’.9 Student teacher Bell instinctively reacted against routine teaching from uninspiring materials and introduced real objects into the classroom, as in his criticism lesson with a live mouse. On rainy days when the smell of wet corduroy hung like a miasma, I hated the place. When I was left alone with a class of fifty I was terrified lest they should ‘break out’ and shame the lofty dignity which I had assumed. But as the year went on, and as I began to discover what fascinating creatures I was to live amongst, I soon began to lose some of the qualms which had beset me as to my choice of job. Bell went on after one year to Goldsmiths’, complaining of most lecturers as dull and down-at-heel with one or two significant exceptions. Only on ‘schoolpractice’ training in South London schools did he experience ‘the joy and surprise of gaining the affection of children’.10 Leonard Clark re-told his teaching life and career through the eyes of a successful and influential HMI and with the accomplished poet’s sensitive insight into human nature, his narrative punctuated by characteristically incisive sketches of teachers and colleagues.11 Ultimately, ambition lured him to London, for adventure and for the greater opportunities to advance in his chosen profession, but his student-teachership was undertaken in the Forest of Dean at


his own former school and under the tutelage of his erstwhile ‘gaffer’ the ‘ironhanded’ John Emery. Here he worked mostly with Emery’s wife, teaching the 10year-old boys, but he and his three fellow student teachers (three girls), were given various jobs to do which the head teacher maintained would help them to get on in their profession: cleaning out cupboards; mounting pictures; mixing ink; sharpening pencils; and tidying up the teachers’ rooms. The student teachers were each given an observation book and a criticism book, the first to record opinions of lessons they observed being given by other members of staff, and the latter for notes of their own lessons. They gave four lessons a week, each in a different subject, and criticisms from other teachers could be frank and deflating, but ‘on the whole, my seniors were fair-minded and generous, and their criticisms of my own pedagogic gifts led me to believe that, one day, I might become a passable teacher’.12 John Emery was evidently a wonderful showman, and over the years had collected everything he could lay his hands on for the education of his pupils. The hall at Double View had been turned into a miniature museum, cases and cabinets bulging with birds’ eggs and butterflies, cabinets of strange moths and stranger beetles, snakes in green bottles, pictures, geological specimens, relics from the Boer and First World Wars.13 Lilian Emery taught him that the children, as persons in their own right, must always come first, being more important than the subjects they are taught. So while she challenged the brighter ones, she always encouraged the slower pupils to do the best that they could. Lilian also loved music, encouraging Clark in this and fanning his enthusiasm for literature. I was a student teacher for one year. During that brief time I learned a great deal about the running of Double View School. I watched everything and everyone. I knew what the teachers thought of each other, and of Emery… I helped to look after the bees and the rabbits which Emery had introduced into the curriculum…took the boys and girls on noisy expeditions into the woods to gather pea-sticks, and hazel nuts and sweet chestnuts in season. I played the piano for prayers when there was no one else to do it… And I ‘stood in’ for teachers when they were absent and taught everything from Greek history to music.14 Though two of his fellow student teachers went on to college, Clark could not afford this, so stayed on at the school to prepare for the acting teachers’ certificate (then in its last years). Some years later at the personal exhortation of the local Director of Education and with the support of a county loan and a grant from a charitable trust managed by Albert Mansbridge, he proceeded to Bangor Normal College. Towards the close of his student-teacher year, Clark recalled,


Emery sent for him to review his progress and to offer some valedictory advice.15 ‘I have something to tell you. I know that you have been watching all of us. And I have been watching you. You have a lot to learn but I am convinced that you are a born teacher. But when you are taking your classes, always go at the pace of the slowest pupils, always give the children the best books, let them do the talking and don’t forget the flanks.’ That advice was given many years ago. It was good advice and I have tried not to forget it.16 With the expressiveness of the poet, Leonard Clark the teacher also recalled the impact which the children he had observed and taught during that year had made upon him. I sometimes think about those children I ‘taught’ during my training year. Many of the boys were killed in the last war, most of the girls will be grandmothers. I doubt if any of them who are still living remember anything I ever tried to tell them. But I have remembered them. They will be in their late fifties now but they are still new and fresh to me, with their heavy boots, long pinafores, rich Forest of Dean speech, and expectant faces.17 Like Clark, Robin Tanner was also able to reflect on his student-teacher days through the perspective of his career as an influential HMI.18 Like Clark also he wrote as a creative artist, for whom the student-teacher experience constituted an important stage in his personal and artistic development. But where Clark’s account is dominated by the personalities of his elementary teacher colleagues and of the children he taught, Tanner’s dominant memory was the inspiration derived from his continuing personal education, that minor element of the student-teacher scheme, the continuation for one day per week of his personal education. I became a humble student-teacher in a local school, then called in a derogatory way ‘elementary’. I could not see then that this was to be the resumption of that real life I had lived as an infant, that here was my salvation. Where many of our respondents returned to their sixth forms for personal guided study, Tanner spent one day a week at a centre in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, under the inspirational tuition of Alice Grist, Mistress of Method at Salisbury Training College.19 For Tanner this was a transforming experience: ‘She remains for me the greatest teacher of my life.’ Each term the students embarked on projects of


their own choosing, and Tanner indulged his instinctive interests in nature, art and architecture. I found it all life-enhancing and life-giving… I blossomed and shone and grew, and I worked as never before. The stimulus and refreshment which these Mondays brought throughout the year, their sense of urgency and their intense reality after my grey secondary school days amounted to a major upheaval.20 But Tanner’s teaching experience was also for him an important part of student teaching. He confounds, as so often individual accounts are capable of confounding, the popular stereotype of the rural elementary school teacher as dull and uncultured. The school where I watched others teach and tried my hand at the craft myself…was ruled and dominated by quite the most forceful and distinguished teacher in the area… He was widely read, a penetrating local historian, an able musician, and a good gardener and naturalist; and in a somewhat oblique way as though he was ashamed of it he showed great faith in the arts. I knew instantly that he liked me, and I liked him; and quickly he let me loose on his own precious Standard VII, the cream of his school, now in their last year.21 Tanner’s four fellow students and he were required to give several set-piece ‘criticism lessons’ each week, when the head master and the students sat together in judgement and each wrote at length about the performance. Many of our respondents found this an ordeal but Tanner admits to enjoying an audience and consequently coping well. He went on to Goldsmiths’ where the co-existence of an art college alongside the teachers’ college was a formative factor in his dual career. Humbler narratives can be found in print, bearing less of the crafted reconstruction that characterises the work of Clark and Tanner. There is an accidental quality about some of these simpler accounts, as circumstances apparently beyond the individual’s control impinge haphazardly upon their lives. At the age of 13, for example, Alice Bond was entered by her school for the Intending Teachers’ Scholarship.22 At 16 years old she was summoned into the presence of her grammar school head teacher and simply told that she had been made a bursar, with no explanation given. Nora Hampton, born in 1895 to a Baptist bootmaker in Netherton near Dudley enjoyed her time at Netherton Board School despite having to endure a bad-tempered tartar of a teacher.23 Gaining entrance to a new senior elementary school in Dudley she then took and passed the bursary examination which paid her fees and allowed her £2.10s per term in maintenance. Passing her Senior Oxford exams in 1912, ready for entrance to training college, ‘the powers that be ordained that we had a year’s


practice course…at various schools in case our teaching capacity wasn’t satisfactory’. Meanwhile war broke out in 1914, and the following year, having completed her student-teachership, she became an uncertificated teacher at another local council school, followed by a series of appointments to replace teachers who had been called up. Stella Elliott, daughter of a Dartmoor farming family, was born in 1907, put in by her mother for the scholarship examination at the age of 12, but following five years of secondary education her parents decided she must leave school to earn some wages.24 So in 1924 she began a year’s student teaching, thereafter embarking upon her career as an uncertificated teacher in an infants’ school. What can our own respondents have to add to the impressions of their published peers? Why were they attracted to the teaching profession? How did the student-teaching experience appear to them? And how did they understand the place of the year in the wider pattern of their training and induction into teaching? Drawing on extracts from their recorded interviews we may now follow some of our respondents through the successive stages of their experiences —career choice, the student-teaching year and the college certificate course.25 As we have noted before, students’ perceptions of their student teaching was often at variance with policy as described at the national level. More than one of our teachers thought, like Mrs McMullon (A063) of Doncaster, that the scheme was peculiar to their own local authority, whilst others had the idea that it was more or less compulsory, the normal route into teaching for those who could not follow a degree course. Miss Dennison (B031) recalled that everyone in Ilford in those days, if they were going to teacher training, did this year student teaching —‘you were appointed to one of the schools, and you just knew that you did that’. All her friends destined for training college undertook the scheme. Mrs Harland (A210) became a student teacher in 1927 at the age of 17, and recalled that they had a choice at that time whether or not to take this route, imagining that she was one of the very last ever to be a student teacher in Walsall. After that, she assumed, everybody took the full Higher School Certificate and then went straight to college. However, another of our respondents, also in Walsall but ten years later than Mrs Harland, had found the scheme still in operation and had followed the student-teacher route, very much out of choice.26 Any easy assumptions about a systematically organised pattern of teacher supply in this period need to be challenged in the light not only of local variations in patterns of training and routes into teaching, but also in view of the even more diverse ways in which individuals discovered their own particular route or course. In the narratives of our respondents, schools and local educational authorities feature less frequently than do individual teachers or parents in taking initiatives, making connections and encouraging selected children to undertake a particular course of training, although schools did quite often point candidates towards the student-teacher scheme. Parents were sometimes quite active in the decision making. The young Mrs Harland had two years to spare before she could go to college and confronted the


choice of either taking a full Higher Schools Certificate or taking half the Higher Schools Certificate and then going on to be a student teacher. It was her mother who decided the issue, on the grounds that the practical side of it would be better for her daughter, and would test her suitability. When ‘to her horror’ she was appointed to a junior school for her student-teacher experience her mother took her to see the Director of Education in Walsall, to protest that she did not want to teach big children. She discovered that it was because she had done well in the examinations that they had put her with the juniors, but the Director was delighted to think that anyone with fairly high qualifications still wanted to teach infants. Parents who were themselves teachers were proactive in some cases of opting for the student-teacher scheme. Eileen Hailey (A207) had taken ‘matric.’ at Watford Girls’ Grammar School in 1931. Her father was head master of what became the county’s first secondary modern school. After her first term in the sixth form, he went to see her head mistress to ask if his daughter could do some student teaching, and the head mistress refused. But her father knew many of the other heads in Watford, and fixed her up with two terms at Chater School, ‘a very nice school’, as a ‘monitor-in-training’. Her father had thought she ought to have some experience, which she considered a good thing and never regretted it. A decision to join the scheme was often, however, not a very deliberate one in teachers’ memories. For many the engagement with student teaching seemed to have been simply a consequence of their date of birth. Training colleges set 18 as a minimum age and many had already qualified for entry with time in hand. Others found out about the scheme through friends or relatives. Ruth Venn (B011) at Ilford County High School discovered about the student-teacher scheme because of her elder sister, and ‘I suppose I followed in her footsteps.’ The scheme was interpreted quite variously by different local authorities across the country, as can be traced in contemporary documentation, particularly the published survey undertaken by Lance Jones and the unpublished records of the Board of Education. Oral testimony, however, is able to go much further in vividly conveying the realisation of local arrangements in terms of individuals’ experience and in offering retrospective evaluations, informed by the experience of a whole career, of the local arrangements trainees encountered. Miss Phipson (A238) in Leicestershire had an initial placement to complete before her studentteachership. This was apparently organised by the education authority without much consultation, as she was placed in Desford, despite by that time having moved to Wigston, so she was obliged to travel almost 20 miles daily on the round trip for three weeks to observe in the school. Subsequently she spent two and a half days at the elementary school, and went back to the secondary school for the remaining two and a half days. For this later stage, however, a friend of hers who happened to teach at an infants’ school in South Wigston invited her to work there. She had not intended to teach infants, but decided to try. In this instance an element of opportunism contrasts with those arbitrary decisions made over the heads of candidates, in the way Mrs Harland had experienced.


‘Monitor-in-training’ rather than ‘student teacher’ was the term used in Watford where Mrs Hailey embarked on school experience in 1932 following one term of study in the sixth form. There were no other girls in her sixth form who did the scheme in her year, as the head mistress was not keen on it, though she may have thought better of it by the next year when another girl she knew followed in her footsteps. On the other hand, both Mrs Moore (A047) at Wellington High School for Girls, and Mrs Evers (B018) at Wakefield, encountered a far more organised scheme which included a specially segregated sixth-form group for prospective teachers. Mrs Moore went at the age of 17 to be a student teacher. Those preceding her had been pupil teachers, but she was called a student teacher and perceived a big difference; the pupil teachers were like monitors, and she did not think they had been required to pass any exams before beginning teaching. She herself had taken matriculation in the year that her father died, making it difficult for her and as a result succeeding in only four subjects. Her school encouraged her to enter teaching, and after her last year she was taken out, along with those who were not going on direct to college and they were called the Remove. But looking back now at the training she had had in that year, she thought it more intensive than college and very good. Directors of Education and their close involvement in the scheme emerged very distinctively in oral testimony.27 Some of our respondents as student teachers became well acquainted with their local Director. Here is a highly significant detail, elusive in the written record, about the quality of relationships that could be established within a local administrative structure. Bury, Doncaster and Ilford feature prominently in our oral testimony as examples of this, typical perhaps of the smaller ‘Part III’ authorities, but larger LEAs such as Sheffield were also mentioned in this respect.28 One teacher recalled Henry Morris, the prominent Director of Education in Cambridgeshire, personally recruiting teachers from Goldsmiths’ at the end of the college course and it was evidently a not uncommon practice for Directors to recruit new staff in this way. For Mrs Atherton (A213) in Bury, Lancashire, it was the LEA that chose the elementary school, and she rather thought they put you where they needed some help. The classes were always big. It did not strike her at the time that that was what they were doing, but she was quite sure in retrospect. The Director, she noted, was much closer to his teachers in a place like Bury than in Manchester where she went for her first post. She went to the education office and he used to see the student teachers at least once a term. They took with them their observation books because every day they had to record a teacher’s lesson. Well, you went into all this when you took your books and read through. He did really read quite a bit of them and talked about it. He was more or less nurturing us I suppose for teaching back in Bury, though it was never said. Mrs McMullon had to begin her student-teachership in Doncaster with three months’ observation in an infant school, a girls’ school and a boys’ school. Then


Mr Danby, the Director of Education, required each student teacher individually to write a monthly essay on such topics as ‘the advantages of single-sex schools or co-educational schools’ to be discussed with him at a Saturday morning interview. This interview did not trouble Mrs McMullon, but her friend was very nervous of going, was afraid for some reason or other. Danby was an elderly man with two daughters at the high school, and he discussed with the students their essays but not apparently their own progress as teachers. In fact, she confided, some of the students thought that Mr Danby was putting them into the schools as spies—she did not know because he never quizzed her personally but some of her fellow-students thought that he wanted to find out how the schools were being run. For some, this contact with senior administrators could work to their advantage. Miss Dennison recalls the opening of a new school in the Easter of 1939, and being hand-picked to go on to the staff there, about which she was thrilled. She put this down to knowing the Director and his assistant ‘I suppose through the student teaching then. I can’t think why but we used to see them from time to time.’ Ruth Vose remembered having gone for an interview to the town hall to check her suitability for teaching, and following her acceptance had been given a gentleman’s [sic] agreement that a job would be guaranteed when she came out of college. Completing her course as she did in 1931, when there was unemployment among teachers, she was grateful for this safeguard. One objection that contemporary commentators frequently levelled at the student-teacher scheme was that it was open to abuse on the part of the schools and their staffs, with students being exploited either as menial labour or, at the other extreme, as a spare teacher, plunged ill-prepared into taking responsibility for a whole class. According to the recollections of our interviewees, it seems that there were many experiences which fell somewhere between the two extremes. Both Mr Hanson (B040) and Mr Greeves (A151) chose the term ‘dogsbody’ to describe their own experiences. Mr Hanson took lessons here, there and everywhere, as well as carrying out a succession of odd jobs. He described this aspect of the work as being a ‘super-monitor’, helping with the preparation and distribution of the pens and the inks and everything else. Mr Greeves remembers circulating around the class, marking work ‘and that sort of thing’. Another who used the word ‘dogsbody’ was Miss Appleby (A212), whose memories are a kaleidoscopic representation of the student-teaching experience: I had a timetable. Many of my friends spent a week with a different teacher or a month with a different teacher. But I had a timetable going from teacher to teacher and on the whole it wasn’t to give them a free period. Only the crit. lessons would be, when I really took the class. And just being the odd, you know, the dogsbody in a way. I had to do a lot of things for the head, you see, I did the stock and that I liked. I loved the smell of that stock cupboard, and all those lovely sorts of different coloured wools and


kindergarten squares. I had to count these things out—I unlocked all the cupboards in the morning and I fed the goldfish, I remember that. Getting the stock all counted out ‘cause woe betide me if I counted out 43 and they’d ordered 42 or something… I can see how she did it now but she could judge, you know, who’d made a mistake practically by feeling. Oh, and filling the ink wells, you see, that took up quite a bit of time. Miss Dennison recalled a child habitually referring to her as the ‘ink teacher’. You were the ink teacher because you gave out the ink wells. You went to a little cupboard and you filled all the ink wells up and there were great big trays of about 48 wells then, and you tottered down the stairs to the classroom, and you put all the ink wells round. And then on Friday afternoon, you had to gather them up and take them all up to the cupboard so that they were ready the following Monday to be filled up again. The majority of student-teaching experiences were seen, nonetheless, in a positive and constructive light. For all the menial tasks, many of the teachers who spoke to us could still evoke the sense, for better or for worse, of perceptible transition in the role of student teacher, from ‘student’ to ‘teacher’. One way and another, most of them acquired a substantial teaching experience. Miss Robbins (A225) in Ilford could recall being attached to a class and staying with that same group for a long while. She was required to give two demonstration lessons each week, for which she prepared with great care. She could remember getting a lot of praise, but if she made mistakes the teacher would always be constructive in suggestions for improvement. Miss Dennison recalled that there were ten classes in the school in each of which she spent one month. Every week she had to take a formal demonstration lesson in front of the head mistress, at other times perhaps being asked to help a single child who was having difficulty with a task. The relative youth of these neophytes could be a significant obstacle in making the transition from student to teacher. This could be particularly highlighted where they returned to their own elementary schools for their student teaching, as Leonard Clark had done, there to encounter their former teachers, still in post. Occasionally difficulties of status in school were created in this way, but most interviewees recalled strong support and sound advice from head teachers and others on the question of establishing their authority.29 The agegroup of children with whom a student teacher was called upon to work was often a decisive feature in shaping their own professional self-image. Some felt impassioned about teaching infants despite the fact that their families characteristically regarded this as being at the lower status end of teaching. On the other hand, some could also feel quite intimidated by confronting children barely younger than themselves in the higher classes of elementary schools. Mrs Atherton’s testimony in this respect was characterised by an unusually cool and critical appraisal of her own motivation and early days as a student


teacher. She had wanted to work with older children but was placed initially with the infants. She remembered how amusing and how very likeable they were, but also how intellectually unchallenging they seemed to be and how remote she felt from them. She was not very interested in young children at all; she simply tolerated the experience and could not wait for the time that she would go to the older children. On reflection, she now saw her youthful response as arrogant. ‘I thought it was a bit of a waste of my time babbling the ABC and not doing something, you know.’ When she was moved on to be with the older children, Mrs Atherton was determined to make her mark and to be accepted as a teacher, so she put her hair up as a symbol of maturity and authority. Feeling rather unsure of herself, she was anxious to avoid giving the children the impression that she was a student. Miss Robbins turned up on the first morning (at the school where her younger sister was a pupil) with long plaits still at the age of 17. The head mistress told her that, as a member of the staff, she was expected to put her hair up. She did so, but it was so heavy that in the end she had it cut short instead. Relationships in the immediate neighbourhood could also prove an obstacle to the young student teacher in establishing her authority within the local community. In this regard, Miss Appleby thought Ilford to be a wise authority for the policy they adopted of placing student teachers at schools some way from their home, ‘so you wouldn’t have all the children around you’. Later, as a certificated teacher, she valued living in the neighbourhood of her school, but as a trainee she was relieved not to have to teach her neighbours’ children. In a more rural setting in Ketley, Shropshire, Mrs Moore spent her three terms successively attached to the babies’ class, with the second year, and then with the first year juniors, taught by the head mistress. She found this particularly difficult because the head mistress was habitually called out to attend to other matters and she was left with 50 children in a class of ‘horrible’ boys, aged 7 and 8. On reflection, she now wondered whether the head adopted this strategy deliberately, to give her episodic, brief and therefore relatively safe opportunities to establish her authority. She laughed as she described how the children were like angels when the head was present but, as soon as she had gone, they started throwing paper pellets about. During interview she recalled her strategy at such moments; she sought to frighten the pupils by giving them the appearance that she was about to walk out of the door. This unnerved the class, the children would quieten down, and at that point the head mistress usually returned, so she was quite satisfied. Again laughing, she confessed that on her long walk into school, she sometimes hoped that she might break her leg or be otherwise immobilised on the way, and not have to go in. A male student teacher in Birmingham, Mr Oxley (B026), found right from the very beginning that he could get on with the pupils, and they got on with him. There was no awkwardness, he liked them and thought that counted for a lot. And, sensing that he enjoyed their company, they liked him in return—he was not a snob. He did not pretend to be anything better than they were, and especially in the area of Rea Street, they would not stand for anybody who tried


to be bigger or better than they were themselves. He enjoyed the teaching and being with children, and this was a feeling which stayed with him throughout his whole career. In establishing their authority with children, as well as in the formation of professional identities, the relationships forged between the student teacher and serving classroom practitioners were crucial. Most of the stories related during our interviews were positive ones, of being treated as a responsible member of staff, and of experienced teachers being helpful and supportive. Indeed, the protective sensibilities of some teachers could be carried to extremes. Miss Venn, for example, was treated by the head and the staff alike ‘rather as a pet’. Nevertheless, she recalled her student-teacher year as a very happy time, nerveracking at first but increasingly reassuring as she accumulated good reports and grew in confidence. Mr Greeves, on the other hand, got the impression that student teachers must have been a bit of a nuisance although his own experience did not particularly bear this out; his teacher colleagues did not show it and treated him as a recognised member of staff. Significant contradictions of this sort often appeared in an individual testimony, setting perceptions of general circumstances on the one hand against the nuances of personal experience on the other. For some, the transition to a self-image of ‘teacher’ was made difficult by the relative closeness of their own memories of being a pupil. Miss Appleby remembered the infant school where she was a student teacher as rather a nice little place, attached to a larger junior school in an older building. She particularly recalled her first day there in 1932. All the children were being admitted, masses of them it seemed to her, and some of them were disoriented and upset. Seeing the children leaving their mothers in this way, she was suddenly conscious how much she missed her own mother, who had died six years before. Like the children, she remembers feeling all at once alone. After all that time, you know, being there— sort of alone, after six years that was.’ She did not know what to do, there was no obvious thing to do, everybody was so busy about everything else. ‘You know, I just didn’t like that first day very—I didn’t like my student teaching year very much, anyhow.’ For Miss Appleby, the student-teacher year was a parallel of her own sense of emotional loss; it was a sense of not properly belonging anywhere. She had written down her thoughts on that first day and kept them still into old age. During the remainder of her placement she particularly recalled that unlike the other teachers, she had playground duty every day and so hardly ever found the opportunity to socialise with the other members of staff on equal terms. At lunchtimes she returned to her home, which was nearby. Her colleagues were, nonetheless, a largely pleasant staff in her opinion, but she was emphatic about feeling she would have liked the chance to have got to know them better, and to diminish her own sense of not belonging. She made no lasting friendships with the other teachers. Perhaps her relative isolation had some benefits however. Looking back, she felt it had turned out to be very valuable, that playground duty,


because wandering round twice a day for a quarter of an hour and watching the children playing freely, she felt she had a chance to observe and understand them better. She remembered later getting praise for writing a highly regarded essay in which she had drawn upon those unconscious observations during her many tours of the playground. The school, she recalls, could only accommodate a single student teacher at any one time, but she did have company for one fortnight when the person who was to follow her had arrived. This was a welcome interlude, ‘somebody my own age and somebody in the same position, you know’. A key feature of the student-teacher scheme lay in its continuation of an element of secondary schooling into the sixth form for prospective elementary school teachers. By this means the reformers aimed to address what Morant had identified as the cultural impoverishment of elementary school teachers. We have seen from published autobiography earlier in this chapter, something of the varied experiences that resulted from this element of the scheme. Local arrangements for this part of the scheme were every bit as various as for the school placements, and the former student teachers whom we interviewed were more commonly dismissive of its value. Whereas the elementary schools clearly stood to derive some benefit from the presence of student teachers, and had potentially some interest in their effective induction into teaching, the grammar schools had no such vested interest in the scheme. The bursaries, where they operated, might increase their numbers on roll, and the student-teacher arrangements would swell the size of their sixth forms, but expansion was not then such an imperative for these schools as it might have become in the late twentieth century when funding began to follow students. Indeed the traditional concern of the secondary school in the early twentieth century was with quality rather than quantity, and with preparation for the universities and the established professions. The elementary school was a world away from the grammar school whose clientele was drawn from a different social class, and most grammar school teachers at that time would have had little experience or understanding of the schools in which the student teachers taught part-time, or indeed of the training colleges for which they were destined.30 For these reasons perhaps, the majority of our respondents found minimal connections between their work as apprentice teachers on the one hand and their continuing sixth-form education on the other. As a student teacher in Leicestershire in 1929–30, Miss Phipson used to go two and a half days back to the secondary school, and for her it was a largely practical experience, broadening her curriculum knowledge and skills. Well, they decided I’d better have the games afternoon and they decided— since I wasn’t very good at art, I’d better take that and I made something in pottery, which I never got. But otherwise I think we were a bit of a nuisance. They didn’t know quite what to do with us.


There were only two of them who were student teachers, most in the sixth form going straight to college without doing the student-teacher year, and Miss Phipson had never heard any more of the scheme at all until reading of our research project. In one class they joined it so happened that the group had covered something particularly novel one Tuesday when they were out teaching, and the activity was followed up on the next Thursday, when they were back in school. Because they had not been present at the first session, for the second they were simply given some books instead, shut in a room and told to read. Mrs Harland in Walsall in 1927–28 thought the time spent back at secondary school was more aimed at maintaining habits of private study. She spent four days a week at school as a teacher, and every Friday she went back to her grammar school. She could remember sitting in the library and doing things there but did not really remember that they had any formal lessons as such, and did not think they did a lot. She supposed it was keeping her in touch with her own learning in preparation for going to college where she would have to do quite a lot of independent study. There were other student teachers back at the grammar school, but they were not necessarily her own friends. She did not perhaps have a lot to do with them, and there was not much of a link between what she was doing in the elementary school as a teacher, and what was going on in the secondary school on her one day a week. She did not remember disliking or liking the day at secondary school really, it was just something she had to do. ‘You didn’t question whether you liked things in those days. You did what was appropriate.’ She thought there might have been about half a dozen in her year at the grammar school who went on to become student teachers, but after that the scheme was dropped. According to Miss Appleby (Ilford 1932–33) the idea was to continue ‘your academic side’. She did not remember a lot of what she did except in history which was her favourite subject. She remembered being given quite a lot of choice as to the topics she covered, and did not think she covered a very wide range. This emphasis on academic work, and the guided freedom offered, was also eventually the experience of Mr Greeves. At first he spent one day per week at a centre in Trowbridge attended by all student teachers from that part of the county. He recalled the teacher in charge of the centre was a lady, very keen on language, and they developed their own work in English which he found useful.31 However, he had only been going there a few weeks when the head master of his former secondary school, with whom he had remained in contact, advised him to spend his time doing more science. So having gained permission from the county he went back to his old school doing laboratory work by himself, because it was a subject he had omitted, and he went on to do some Intermediate exams in chemistry, which was his great interest. There were no other student teachers in the school, and the chemistry master kept an eye on him, having no time to do much more than that, but Mr Greeves went to him in the evenings, once or twice a week.


Mr Greeves’ experience indicates the flexibility which was to be found in some LEAs, and also the patronage and encouragement of individual teachers registered in a significant minority of our narrative accounts. Mrs Atherton’s experience in Bury, Lancashire, in 1928–29, contrasts quite markedly with that of Mr Greeves. On her half a day per week back at the high school, she considered that they simply forgot about us. This was very annoying because we’d been top dogs the year before when we were doing High School Certificate, school captain, and so on. And then, they just didn’t even know you were there, you went in and we didn’t even discuss anything, in fact, I just met old friends and wasted their time, those that were doing their exams in the sixth, talked to them, didn’t do anything. That was a great pity, I’d have been better really teaching because I think the idea was to keep you in touch with school but it just divided you up rather. She thought they might have been intending to lay on a programme, but did not do so, and she had a feeling that because each teacher was just concerned with his or her own subject, student teachers were probably just a nuisance to them. At another extreme the sixth forms of some secondary schools were deliberately divided to cater for student teachers, rendering the segregation of teachers as a separate caste in a particularly stark fashion. Mrs Evers at Wakefield Grammar, a mixed sex school, did not quite get matriculation because of the wrong combination of her subjects at School Certificate, and then she did not take Higher School Certificate because ‘if you were going to be a teacher, you went into sixth form student teachers; if you were wanting to go to university, you went into sixth form, working for Higher’. Her group were going to be teachers, a student-teacher class of about 24 boys and girls. The first term, from September to Christmas, they were at school, supposedly learning things they had not done before, such as hygiene or anything to do with the body, and they were studying these things more or less on their own. So there was a lot of independent study, but of professionally relevant matter, which Mrs Evers interpreted as a starting point, a preparation for going to college. Mrs Moore also experienced a sharp pattern of segregation. Every Wednesday afternoon she and her fellow student teachers went back to the High School where they undertook quite simple tasks, learning to dust-cover books and so on, in addition to some needlework and cookery. She herself valued these activities, but she described this class as ‘from the Remove’, quite distinct from those who were destined to go direct to training college. Beyond the student-teacher year lay training college, the final stage of the initial training experience for many, though by no means all, of our respondents.32 Retrospective evaluations of the student-teacher scheme need to be carefully understood in relation to subsequent college experience. Mr Thompson (A209) recalled that the year spent in teaching predisposed the local


education authority to lend the necessary amount of money to go to college. He supposed that this was to encourage the supply of local teachers in primary and senior schools. He had to promise that he would go into teaching, though not necessarily in Walsall, and he did not in fact return there to teach. His father signed on his behalf guaranteeing repayment of the two instalments of £50 a year, loaned to him for the two year college course. Documentary evidence is fairly plentiful for the college curriculum, which until 1929 was still a matter for central state determination in the form of the Board of Education’s certificate examination. Subsequently the content of courses was a matter for negotiation between the colleges and their local university. This relationship between training colleges and the wider world of higher education has been dealt with by historians primarily in administrative rather than curricular terms, and much work remains to be done in this respect.33 From the perspective of the individual student, oral accounts give us the opportunity to assess what this curriculum may have signified in terms of the personal and professional identity of teachers. That educational theory added little to the practical experience that they had already acquired through their student teaching was a view shared by many respondents, a seemingly persistent opinion echoing down later generations of teachers. A significant minority however had discovered some value for themselves in such studies, extending their professional knowledge and making sense of experience. Mrs Hailey at Southlands in the early 1930s, had found psychology of education very useful, ‘it was all new to me’, and she enjoyed it. She felt it was relevant and practical as the principles might be internalised to emerge automatically in the act of teaching. Mrs Byron (B023) also appreciated psychology and found it useful as she had always liked taking babies out and playing with little children, and she considered the subject to be an extension of what she had already learned in her own way. Similarly Mr Oxley was positive about the considerable quantity of educational theory he had experienced in college at Dudley. He remembered reading Percy Nunn, and found it useful years afterwards, for instance when his head teacher, recognising that he liked children, gave him a class of ‘backward’ children. The contribution which university-level subject studies had made to their personal and professional identities was alluded to by rather more respondents. Mrs Atherton, for instance, had very much wanted to take Latin but the only language offered was French. She recalled that Hereford in 1929–31 was affiliated to Birmingham University, as were Saltley Men’s College and one or two others., and the exams (in these early days of the Joint Boards) were set by the university. Mrs Atherton remembered being examined in practical music by Professor Blacknall from Birmingham. She found it a very stimulating experience and always felt in subsequent years, when graduate staff at school became more common, that she could hold her own in terms of intellectual ability.


The quality of the courses was very much dependent on the quality of the lecturers, and in policy terms, the Board of Education from early on in the century began to assume closer control over the supply of teacher trainers, insisting on higher academic qualifications.34 As the century progressed the Training College Association attempted to emulate the universities by rooting more college teaching in research.35 Christine Heward has demonstrated the high academic credentials displayed by a new breed of female college principals and the tough political skills which they needed, despite supportive Board of Education policies which advocated women fulfilling these roles.36 Undoubtedly many of the colleges offered extensive academic and cultural opportunities, notwithstanding an alternative discourse emanating from the university sector that disparaged the quality of teaching in training colleges.37 Individual lecturers frequently feature as influential in students’ experiences, perhaps all the more understandably given the context of an intensive course and a relatively small residential community. Lecturers often appeared to their students to be well-qualified academically. Mrs Atherton recalled that at Hereford they were all graduates, with their degrees publicised on the prospectus. She remembered them as ‘all pretty intelligent women really’. Moreover, she thought most of her lecturers must have had elementary school teaching experience though perhaps not all. A substantial proportion of respondents, however, were disparaging of lecturers’ school teaching experience and competence. Miss Dennison felt very strongly then, and still did in much later life, that training college lecturers suffered from a lack of recent classroom teaching experience, or indeed any classroom experience at all. She recalled that her psychology lectures were marvellous but that when the lecturer took a demonstration lesson, she was hopeless. Some respondents testified to the strong impact of individual lecturers on their personal growth and it was often particularly close intellectual relationships that were most readily recalled by those who had enjoyed their college experience. At Hereford Mrs Atherton remembered an Education lecturer and an English lecturer, both of whom did demonstrations lessons in town schools for the benefit of the students. She became very close to her English lecturer, went to stay with her, and used to visit her until she died at the age of 90. She had found her both interesting and inspiring, and her views on English introduced a new dimension into Mrs Atherton’s life. This lecturer’s ability carried over into the elementary classroom. Mrs Atherton particularly remembered her doing a demonstration lesson on a Milton sonnet with a Standard V class. I thought, ‘this is going to be too hard for her’, but it was a really excellent lesson. And that lesson did a world of good, how to tackle a difficult poem, you know… I thought the training we got was awfully good, when they’ll stand up and take a class. When they’ll tell you how to deal with discipline and it really makes sense. When they’ll get you to criticise


yourself and say, ‘Well, they didn’t know it because I didn’t put it over right.’ Closer relationships may have been more easily formed with younger lecturers, as Mrs Hailey recalled at Southlands, where most of the staff lived in. When she entered the college in 1932, three new young lecturers stood out because most of the other staff were advanced in years. The younger cohort were remembered as very kind, calling the students by their Christian names, and involving them in extra-curricular activities such as the Rangers. A particular case of poor lecturing seems to have prevailed at the College of St Mark and St John, Chelsea in the later 1920s, a view corroborated by more than one respondent. Mr Greeves considered that physics would really have been his subject but the lecturer was ‘well, hopeless really’. At that time, some ten years after the First World War he thought ‘Marjohn’s’ was still to some extent suffering from its effects. Some of the staff had been kept on but the physics specialist had suffered from shell shock and was not really up to the job. The chemistry lecturer was delightful—apart from his chemistry. He was warwounded and lame, but a kind man who helped Mr Greeves with extra lessons for a very small extra sum. ‘He was a real friend to me.’ These judgments are supported by the testimony of Mr Hind (A154) who considered ‘Marjohn’s’ was at a very low ebb indeed. He went up in 1931 during an interregnum when no principal was in post, and then the Dean died in his first half term, The staff were ‘abysmal really’ in his view. They had two English tutors, one of whom was Ph.D. or D.Litt. and quite good but far more interested in those students destined for degrees. The geography tutor still used pre-1914 notes, which he had kept from his own college days. Mr Pike (B021) and Mr Thompson, who were there in the later 1930s shared a low opinion of the lecturers’ expertise in elementary teaching. Thompson suspected that they had come virtually straight from university. Pike, looking back, could not think that most of the staff were very progressive. Quite a lot of them had done very little teaching. They were there mainly as subject teachers. In his second year, a new head of the Education Department was ‘like a breath of fresh air. He’d just come in from school, obviously knew what he was talking about. We enjoyed that very much.’ From the written and the oral accounts we have drawn upon in this chapter, a composite picture has emerged in which issues of career choice and practices and perceptions of training, both as student teacher and as college student, have particularly featured. In the following part of the book we seek to probe this composite image more deeply as we attempt to locate and to understand a career in teaching within the context of a whole life. NOTES 1. Jones, The Training of Teachers.


2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

Ibid., p.50. Ibid., p.51. Ibid., pp.52–3. Leah Manning, A Life for Education (London, Victor Gollancz, 1970), pp.28–9. D.Wolfit, First Interval: The Autobiography of Donald Wolfit (London, Odhams Press, 1955), pp.70–3; R.Harwood, Sir Donald Wolfit CBE (London, Secker & Warburg, 1971), pp.34–6. Vicars Bell, The Dodo: The Story of a Village Schoolmaster (London, Faber & Faber, 1950). Bell was born in 1904, became a student teacher in 1921 and was awarded an MBE in 1964. Ibid., p.34. Ibid., p.35. Ibid., p.43. Clark, Grateful Caliban. Clark was born c. 1905 and was a student teacher c. 1922– 23. Ibid., p.58. During that year the Parents’ National Education Union (PNEU) system was introduced into the school (with the active encouragement of Gloucestershire’s Director of Education, H.W.Household, and with, according to Clark, a visible effect on the teaching of English). Clark, Grateful Caliban, p.59. Ibid. Ibid., p.60. Ibid., p.61. Robin Tanner, Double Harness: An Autobiography by Robin Tanner, Teacher and Etcher (London, Impact Books, 1987), pp.22–7. Tanner was born in 1904 and was a student teacher from 1921–22. Like Phillips and Mill below (chapters 11 and 13), Tanner’s extended education was thus under the guidance of educationists, but was nevertheless focused on personal rather than professional education. Lance Jones specifically noted this West Wiltshire example where a special class ‘is conducted by a member of the staff of Salisbury Diocesan Training College, who aids and encourages the students to break new ground and to prepare themselves for their work in Training College’. Jones, The Training of Teachers, p.54. Tanner, Double Harness, pp.22–3. Ibid., p.24; not dissimilar in this respect to the experience of Phillips (Chapter 11), who was given charge of the scholarship class in recognition of his intellectual ability. Bond, Life of a Yorkshire Girl, p.51. Nora Hampton [b.1895, ST 1914] Memories of Baptist End, Netherton, Dudley in the Period 1895–1918, TS 63pp., Brunel University Library 3–68. Cited in Pamela Horn, Education in Rural England 1800–1914 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978), Appendix 8: ‘Memories of the Early Twentieth Century as Scholar and Teacher’, pp.292–5. Eighteen of our interviewees are represented in the rest of this chapter, 12 women and 6 men. Another 7 (4 women and 3 men) are heard more fully through their life stories in Part III. The terms respondent and interviewee are used interchangeably,


26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

referring to those 100 respondents who agreed to take part in in-depth interviews in addition to completing a detailed initial questionnaire. Walsall was in fact among the last local authorities finally to give up student teaching, seeking approval for the last time in June 1946. Nora Hampton had an interview with the Director of Education in Dudley who lectured her on the advantages of going to college and gaining a pension at the age of 60. He then appointed to her to work for a year at her old elementary school with Miss Smart, the teacher under whom she had suffered so much. See also Chapter 4. Under the 1902 Act which established the new LEAs within County Councils having responsibility for elementary and secondary education, Part III allowed for non-county boroughs with populations over 10,000 and urban districts over 20,000 to be given responsibility for elementary education only. About 200 of these were created. Also see Bond, Life of a Yorkshire Girl, p.51; the teacher to whom Alice Bond was attached ‘treated me as a full member of staff except for my one Criticism Lesson per week to which she was obliged to listen and report on in writing. She even told me that if I thought it necessary I could punish. This treatment contrasted with tales that I had heard of Student Teachers being used as mere monitors. Perhaps it helped to give me confidence.’ An exception to the general indifference of secondary schools was expressed by the head mistress of the Manchester Central High School for Girls who saw the student-teacher year as an opportunity, for a girl at least, to ‘try out her powers’ and indulge her natural desire for physical activity and more independent action before returning to a regime of bookwork and exams. See Mary Johnstone, ‘The Student Teacher Scheme-Some Favourable Considerations’, Education Outlook and Educational Times, 77:12 (1925). This was probably Agnes Grist from Salisbury Training College whose regime was also experienced by Robin Tanner and noted by Lance Jones (see Note 19). Only 6 out of our 100 interviewees did not eventually go on to college. This is probably a rather smaller proportion than the national average, where the proportion of uncertificated teachers qualifying in 1925 was about 30 per cent, declining to about 10 per cent in 1935. See Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.279. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.273–5; Niblett et al., The University Connection, pp.30–80; Dent, The Training of Teachers, pp. 100–1. Also see C.More, The Training of Teachers 1847–1947: A History of the Church Colleges at Cheltenham (London, Hambledon Press, 1992), pp.77–102. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.206. J. Browne, Teachers of Teachers (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), p.18. C. Heward, ‘Men and Women and the Rise of Professional Society: The Intriguing History of Teacher Educators’, History of Education, 22:1, (1993), pp.11–32. Peter Cunningham, Teacher Status and College Culture in the Development of a Profession’, in Edgar Jenkins (ed.), Studies in the History of Education: Essays Presented to Peter Gosden (Leeds, Leeds University Press, 1995), pp.1–21.

Part III

8 PERSON

Whether talking about themselves, or being talked about by others, the figure at the heart of this history is that of the elementary school classroom teacher. In Part III of the book, we invite this figure to step forward and talk about themselves at greater length. Here, individuals reflect upon their teacher-training experiences in the context of their own careers and their lives; the focus falls squarely upon the person. Such a declaration is disarmingly simple. It implies that at this point we might turn, without further interruption, to attend to the unalloyed testimonies of some of our central characters. It seems to offer a strategy for circumventing all those complex problems of interpretation and judgement which continually challenge the historian’s attempts to relate the past through the documentary record alone. It carries the romantic promise that here we will be able to listen to individuals speaking ‘for themselves’, or ‘in their own words’, as eye-witnesses to the events of their own lives. It is not difficult to see why such a promise can never in fact be realised, why the appeal to speaking ‘for themselves’ or ‘in their own words’ must always fall short of its own confident and beguiling potential. History cannot be fully apprehended by an appeal to ‘experience’ alone as a foundational category any more than it can be fully comprehended by more recent appeals to ‘language’ as the medium through which the past is ultimately constructed. The promise of listening to the narratives of some of our respondents in detail remains, nonetheless, one which we believe we should follow as far as we can. It will offer our attention a rich repayment. How many times, after all, have we flagged in the face of the researcher’s attempts to offer an analysis of oral testimony only to be entranced, when we have had the chance to see it, by the testimony itself? In weighing the evidence of the accounts which follow, we should note above all the seductive power of the concept of foundational self in oral testimony—the self apparently speaking for itself. To understand much of the substance of memory, as well as the form of its narration, we also have to look beyond the memorialist himself or herself. Many others are involved in the construction of the memories of each individual. Most immediately significant here will be the figure of the interviewer, with the presentation, modification or suppression of


discrete memories unavoid ably influenced by the interlocutor or by the circumstances of the dialogic exchange. Moreover, the selection and editing of extensive extracts remains in most oral history research, as it does here, in the hands of the researcher rather than in the hands of the respondent. Giddens’ notion of the double hermeneutic reminds us that true understanding of a life in history does not rest with self-interpretation alone but also with the subsequent interpretation of self-interpretation.1 As Richard Ochberg puts it When we interpret a life story, we do not simply report what our informant told us. Instead, our retelling changes the story in a much more fundamental way than the kind of light editing we take for granted. We do not simply tell a shorter story, one that distills the highlights from a long and repetitive transcript, nor do we simply organize events chronologically or group them into themes. Instead, we convert what we have been told from one kind of account into another.2 To note such matters, however, is neither to regret them nor to apologise for them. As historians, our task and our responsibility is to make the best sense that we can of all the evidence, in whatever form, that comes before us. In this respect, the presentation of testimony in extenso cannot finally stand in place of interpretation and analysis. The researcher’s job is to use all the available data to arrive at a synthetic account which goes beyond the descriptive power or the explanatory potential of each piece of evidence considered separately. It is important to listen to the words of our respondents now at some length, and to set what they have to say alongside the arguments which have been developed in Part II of this book. It is equally important to recognise that the narration of individual life histories and the exercise of broader historical analysis ultimately share common goals in trying to make sense of the past and of the effects of the passage of time upon individuals and societies. Each is therefore the richer for working alongside the other. Interpretation and analysis allow us to make controlled abstractions and generalisations from the mass of data generated by a multitude of individual lives. Narration reminds us that every analytical gain that is made in the reduction and classification of the events of individual lives comes at a price, and that without due acknowledgement of the unique, complex and contingent character of every life, generalisation becomes etiolated and unreliable. Before turning directly to some of the testimonies of our respondents, we should say a few words about the selection of cases and the circumstances of the interviews themselves. Two hundred and twenty-five former student teachers contacted us in response to our appeals in regional and local newspapers throughout England and Wales. Their willingness to identify themselves in this way suggests a predisposition to see student teaching as somehow significant. Respondents in this context might be expected to have been those who identified strongly with their profession and

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who viewed teaching in a relatively positive light.3 We were aware that ‘failed’ or embittered teachers would probably elude us, a factor to be borne in mind when interpreting the accounts below. All those who responded were sent a questionnaire which elicited basic data relating to their life and career in teaching, together with an invitation to offer brief reflections on the effectiveness of the pattern of teacher training which they had originally experienced. The completed questionnaires comprise, of course, documentary rather than oral data. They originate with the written rather than the spoken word and exhibit many of the characteristic differences which mark these two forms of communication. Nevertheless, the questionnaires, generated in response to a very specific historical enquiry, constituted an important source of highly personal and relatively private data and we have occasionally imported some material from them into the chapters which follow. On the basis of questionnaire responses, we selected and invited individuals for interview. Criteria for selection included the extent and quality of reflection on their student-teaching experience, those who appeared to have plenty to say on the subject. Geographical location of their student-teaching experience was also a criterion, as we tried to combine coverage across the regions of England with a degree of concentration that would enable different accounts from similar localities to be compared.4 Those selected for interview included some outside the strict definition of ‘student teacher’ who, like Barbara Mill below, had been rural pupil teachers or who had undertaken extensive preliminary teaching experience in some other guise. A representative gender balance was maintained with about 80 per cent women and 20 per cent men.5 Of the women, 50 per cent taught in primary and junior schools, more than 25 per cent taught mostly in the infant and nursery phases, whereas amongst the men nearly 50 per cent eventually taught in secondary schools. One hundred respondents were interviewed,6 with most encounters lasting between 90 minutes and three hours. All interviews took place in the homes of individual respondents. Because the research had clearly defined objectives directed towards the elucidation of the student-teacher pattern of training, together with its effects on professional identity, a semi-structured interview schedule was chosen as the most appropriate format. In this respect, our interviews differed from a classical life-history approach. Nonetheless, in reflecting initially on the significance of student teaching for their own careers, many respondents were stimulated to range across a much broader constellation of issues and events which they judged to be important. To this extent, though the initial agenda was set by the interviewer, many respondents added their own emphases and, especially in their later stages, interviews took on some of the more unstructured characteristics of life-history interview. In the following accounts, we have tried to include as much material of this kind as possible, setting the student-teacher experience in the wider context of a whole life. Many variables can affect the nature of interviews of this kind. Age is perhaps the most obvious issue in a study, such as this, which seeks to reach back many


years into the twentieth century. Our respondents’ birthdates ranged over more than four decades, from 1898 to 1929, so that the incidence within their lives of major events such as world wars and economic depressions, as well as the period of their own education and training, varied considerably.7 Age, ranging between 65 to 95 years at the point of interview was, in many cases, a notably powerful influence on the working of memory. So, too, was the respondent’s general state of health. Some of our respondents nobly and generously agreed to be interviewed despite the ailments and pains that afflicted them, and this could sometimes be only too evident when we were in their presence. Gender was an important factor, too. It was abundantly clear how, over the course of their lives, as their testimonies show, males and females had been exposed to very different social expectations and educational opportunities. Though many of the older women respondents had been precluded from marriage by inter-war marriage bars, the marital status and subsequent familial histories of younger respondents had a considerable significance for many testimonies. Often a deceased spouse continued to loom large in the narrative and the presence of cherished family photographs on display frequently served to dramatise points about children who had themselves become teachers, or great-grandchildren who were currently going through school. Close family relationships and intimate friendships figured prominently in very many of the interviews, not least in shaping patterns of individual career development. Of the seven cases which follow, therefore, we have chosen four which emerge from two pairs of respondents—a couple of lifelong friends who were interviewed in each other’s company, and a brother and sister who were interviewed quite separately. Three men and four women have been selected whose birthdates, with one exception, fall in the first decade of the century. Their student-teaching experiences came, therefore, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War when the scheme was at its peak and before its decline from the late 1920s. Our one example below from a later generation was chosen for inclusion here for the way in which it displays parallels and contrasts between careers in teaching and in nursing, the other profession open to most of our female respondents, but mostly rejected by them. These seven individuals are mostly of skilled working-class and lower-middle-class families. Only one parent of the whole group had been a teacher before marriage, but generally the accounts portray parents, especially mothers, as educationally ambitious for their children. Two of the women from the group went on to senior posts in schools and others refer to frustrated ambitions in this direction. All three of the men achieved such career advancement, moving between the primary and secondary sectors in the post-war reorganised educational system. The testimonies as selected here cover the entirety of each respondent’s teacher-training experiences, set in the context of their lives and careers. There are some detailed accounts of their own schooling as children, including formative influences on their career choice. Those included here all went on to college at some stage, enabling a comparative evaluation to be made between the

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two components of initial training.8 The careers represented here, although diverse, were generally successful and fulfilling, and it is likely that the subsequent achievements of these individuals facilitated their critical reflections on the quality of training that they had received as young entrants to the profession.9 Some of the descriptions of later careers are relatively extensive, and deliberately so, allowing some hint of how reflection may be influenced by responses to subsequent change in educational policies and practices. Selection of respondents for inclusion here was guided by the presence of many of the themes that emerged across other individual reminiscences, themes that have commonly eluded the documentary record. Such include the geographical location of the student-teacher experience, the experience of extended uncertificated teaching before college, professional relationships in the elementary school and the impact of staff accommodation on these, relationships between college students and their tutors, and experiences of teaching in wartime. Across all of these areas, factors such as gender and social background and the variety of individual circumstances may also be seen working alongside particular patterns of teacher training in the formation of professional identities.10 What these accounts have to offer above all are rich insights into family, career and profession as perceived, evaluated and narrated by individual subjects reflecting upon the course of their lives. NOTES 1. Giddens, The Constitution of Society. 2. Richard L.Ochberg, ‘Interpreting Life Stories’, in R. Josselson (ed.), Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives (London, Sage, 1996), pp.97–113, esp. p. 110; also see Ruthellen Josselson, ‘On Writing Other People’s Lives: Self-Analytic Reflections of a Narrative Researcher’, in R.Josselson (ed.), Ethics and Process, pp. 60–71. 3. About 10 per cent of our female respondents and nearly 50 per cent of the males achieved senior management posts before retirement. Eleven women were heads and deputy heads in primary and junior, and eight reached these positions in infant and nursery schools. About half of the men finished their careers in secondary schools. 4. About one-quarter of our respondents undertook their student teaching in the north of England, nearly one-third in the midlands and East Anglia, and almost onehalf in the south and London. About one-quarter were in rural locations and threequarters in urban. Our selection of interviewees resulted in a particular concentration on Cambridge, Ilford (Essex), Leicester, London and Newcastle, with three or more individuals having undertaken their student-teaching experiences in each of these towns. 5. Of all our 225 initial respondents, 22 per cent were male, reflecting fairly accurately the proportion in 1925 of male entrants to the profession as both certificated and uncertificated teachers. By 1935 the proportion had risen to over 30 per cent. See Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, p.279.


6. The completed questionnaires have been kept on file in the Archive of Teacher Memory, but have not been drawn upon extensively in this book. 7. Ten per cent of our respondents did their student teaching in the 1910s, almost 60 per cent in the 1920s and almost 30 per cent in the first half of the 1930s, with just a handful after 1935. 8. Over 90 per cent of our respondents went on to college, a relatively high proportion which perhaps relates to the predominantly successful career paths of our respondents and their interest in the project. 9. Reflecting the high achievement of our respondents overall, four of our female respondents went into teacher training and four of the men into further education, higher education and educational administration. 10. Our selection includes four women and three men with backgrounds ranging from relative poverty to relative comfort, from working class to middle class and from rural to urban. The selection is also designed to cover a range of experiences of a variety of student-teacher schemes and training college regimes.

9 MR BRIAN SAWKIN

Brian Sawkin (A196) was born in 1902. His mother was the daughter of a relatively prosperous local businessman who also employed Brian’s father as a bookkeeper in the family business. The family was small; Brian had one younger brother, and the premature death of their father was a significant turning point in the education of both young boys. Brian eventually became a student teacher in Plumstead, London, in 1919 and followed that with a Teacher’s Certificate at Goldsmiths’ College where he specialised in maths. From 1922–27 he taught in Poplar at Bromley Hall Road School, then transferred to become science master at Hamo Road School, an elementary school for 8–14-year-old boys in Eltham. Here, he had responsibility for a class of juniors. On the outbreak of war, he was evacuated with these children to Sutton at Hone in Kent, returning in 1942 to work successively in two emergency schools located in Eltham and Kidbrooke. In 1944 he moved to Charlton Central School, which became a secondary modern under reorganisation, eventually retiring from there in 1961 as head of the maths department. Well, my father went to work for my grandfather, my mother’s father, in 1889. He was twenty-one at the time and he’d been working in the [Woolwich] Arsenal since he’d been fifteen, fourteen. Now he’d had an ordinary council school education but he’d been sensible afterwards while he was in the Arsenal as a labourer, studying in the evenings and so he became a bookkeeper. He learned about accounts, you see. Now, between the time that I remember my father taking over a house in Burrage Road in 1905, between then and 1911, it was obvious his health was deteriorating. From being a spry sort of chap, he became a flat-footed, round-shouldered wreck. You can’t explain anything else and I was dimly aware of this. You see, under the Shops Act they had a Thursday afternoon off, and he used to come home quite exhausted, sit in a particular armchair which was his, and he’d sleep the afternoon away. And by 1911, he was a wreck. He had bother with his feet, having been exposed to all weathers and in February, he went down, I think he had some attacks of some sort, almost like fits. He was brought home after one of them [and] in the course


of the evening while I was just going up to bed, he had another, and later in that evening he had another. And he went to bed and he didn’t get up again. He was there for six weeks and—he died, of course, naturally, of pneumonia. I remember the last day, it was a Saturday, the day before his forty-third birth’ day. You could hear his breathing out in the street. And, of course, the family assembled, as they always did on those occasions, and he died about six o’clock in the evening. That was 8 April 1911. Well, my father quite approved, of course, of my going to the schools I went to. That was a couple of good schools, actually, they was council schools, but he was taking it for granted I would sit for a scholarship in the November of 1912. But he, as I said, deteriorated in health, and although he helped me with my sums and that sort of thing, from time to time, he was very helpful, as a matter of fact, he was good at [sums], naturally, he had gone through a course of bookkeeping and he was probably as well educated as any of his family because he was one of a family of ten. Brian’s father himself as a young man had had the responsibility of seeing to the schooling of younger siblings, after his mother had died at the birth of her tenth child. Father had got quite a number of books so that in our home, down in Burrage Road, we had a bookshelf, full of books of all sorts—Strand magazines my father had had bound, and I read all about Sherlock Holmes in those, you see. And my mother had had a private school education, nearly all her family did, there were six of them on my grandfather Roberts’ side, my mother’s side. And she had had a good education, including Italian that she wanted for her singing. She had a good voice, a very good voice, mezzo-soprano, and she sang light sort of songs, and as my grandfather was a mason, she used to sing at their banquets and so on and she was a good advertisement for the business, you see, a musical business. Anecdotes of Brian’s own schooling offer some insights into experiences of gender formation in elementary schools of the period. His infant school was of mixed sex and his memories included one event, timeless and perhaps trivial in its way, but worth acknowledging as the accounts of his next school offer a graphic picture of the very masculine environment of boys’ junior schools. This was where he was taught by Mr Pritchard, his role model: In August 1906, I was admitted to Bloomfield Road Infant School… The most vivid memory I have of Mrs Knowles was of an incident that occurred soon after I started school. It was a mixed class and we had exercises in the playground. The last lesson, one afternoon, was one of these, and we were playing singing, ‘Poor Jenny lies a-weeping’, where

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one girl was kneeling, with her eyes shut, or covered rather, in the middle of a circle of us, as we sang the refrain… whilst moving round her. Suddenly she said someone had kicked her. And when she was asked who, pointed at me so I got sent in and detained after school. I didn’t think much of girls for a long time after that, for I was quite innocent but Mrs Knowles believed her. In late August of 1909 [age 7] I went to Foxhill Boys’ School… The boys’ entrance was by a passage way on the left side of the building, into the playground. When the whistle went, we lined up our classes, in line with buttresses in the back retaining wall. We then marched in twos into the hall, where the music master, Paddy Waltham would be playing the March of the Priests on the piano. We would circle the hall and turn off into our respective classrooms as we reached them. While I was at the school, the head master was a Mr R.H.Howell, a balding gentleman with glasses, and eyes that seemed to bulge out of his head when he was annoyed, a state which I seem to have provoked on one occasion. I was scared stiff… He usually presided at a desk on a dais in the hall. The master I had for nearly all my time—the three years—at the school, was a Mr Dominic Pritchard, known to the staff as ‘Dom’. Apart from him, I remember Mr Boorman who was an amateur boxer, Mr Freeman, a pleasant white haired old chap, near retirement, Mr Charlie Crease, later head master of the Gordon School in Eltham, besides a very big fellow, named Mr Green who was not in very good health. There was also a pupil teacher whose name I forget who was young. Then we had a young lady teacher who I remember told us about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain and got me to make a lot of Roman ships in plasticine with stick masts and paper sails to show when an inspector came. When Mr Pritchard took over the class, I learned later that the head had asked him to take over this class, what he regarded as an important class, getting out of hand. Mr Pritchard was a splendid teacher, a good disciplinarian but very popular with us boys. In the course of the next three years, he took us through Standards Three, Four and Five and into Standard Six. He took us for all subjects, except music which, when I was a monitor, I dodged whenever I could. I had no voice for singing. With Mr Pritchard I learnt to do sums, including problems from a certain McDougall’s Suggestive Arithmetics, elementary algebra, simple geometry, geometrical drawing, reading and writing, plus history, geography, drawing and nature study, including visits to local woods… He was a good story-teller, and on the last period of a Friday would tell us in his own words about the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Fifth Form at St Dominic’s and similar stories in instalments, always leaving off at some exciting point. He was a marvellous story-teller. Moreover, we had regular homework which was marked and returned to us on the day that we handed it in.


I made up my mind when I was 11, that I wanted to be a teacher. Mr Pritchard that I’ve spoken about was the chap I wanted to emulate and in consequence I wanted to be a teacher in an elementary school. I wasn’t bothered about secondary education or anything of that kind. I wanted to follow him in that way… He was a jolly good teacher and he could tell these wonderful yarns and he was such a good teacher, the way he taught us, that I wanted to emulate him and so from the age of 11 onwards, I had this at the back of my mind. I stayed at Foxhill School until October 1912. It was a good school academically. Many boys won scholarships to secondary schools and even so-called dunces got to central schools. Behaviour was good. We all came from working-class houses, living in the neighbourhood, and the standard of honesty was high. I only remember one case of theft by a boy who stole a small loaf from a baker and was dealt with by the head master. One important matter I have kept till last. Every day began with a period of scripture: Old Testament lessons, Monday and Wednesday, New Testament lessons, Tuesday and Thursdays, memory work on Fridays, the Ten Commandments, Psalm 23, the Beatitudes, St John’s Gospel, Chapter 14 etc. Whether children went to Sunday School or not, they learnt something about Christian standards of behaviour. Well, that was the end of my council school experience. Now, my father had died in 1911, leaving my mother with an unpaid mortgage and no income. My grandfather helped her but she had two boys, me and my brother who was about three years younger. Various kind people, and my mother knew quite a number of people of influence, spoke to her, ‘Now what are you going to do about the boys?’ And one of them suggested that she should get us into an orphanage, so she got hold of the various handbooks that these orphanages published and one of them was for a school at Slough, the British Orphan Asylum at Slough. Well, in 1912, I was admitted without voting because the number applying in that particular year, or that particular time, was less than the number of vacancies, so in October 1912, my mother took me down to Slough and our preliminaries were, first of all, being sorted out by the doctor to see that we were healthy enough to come there. And then we had tests, in writing, arithmetic and an interview by the head master, each of us, to find out other things about us. And I was able to make quite a good impression apparently, because I knew about a little bit of simple geometry, construction of triangles and things of that kind. And the head master was talking to me about these things and then after that test, we had a break for a bit of lunch, and the chairman of the governors who was an old gentleman who spent a lot on the school—he came down with a copy of my writing, and he complimented me on the quality of it. Well, as a consequence of those tests, we were sorted out. Now, I was, as you see,

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from a council school, nearly all the other applicants were from private schools, prep schools. He subsequently experienced a fairly harsh regime at the boys’ orphanage. Now, one experience I had, which I didn’t find very pleasant, was meeting the sergeant. He took us for exercises, you see, in a local gymnasium, and he was an excellent teacher, as far as that was concerned, and he had us jumping over the horse, rolling along the parallel bars, swinging along the rings, practising with barbells of some sort, swinging them up and about, and so we were all straight backs and that sort of thing. But he was also general factotum and he used to call us in the morning. Now, no one dared argue with the sergeant. He’d been a sergeant in the army and gone through the Boer War, being wounded twice but he had survived quite nicely, his back was as straight as a board. And he used to call us in the morning. Now, we had a string of dormitories on two floors of the building and he’d start at the beginning on the second floor and he’d open the door of the dormitory and call out, ‘All up, draw curtains, up blinds.’ And if you weren’t on your feet doing that by the time he’d finished speaking, the chances were you’d be put on punishment drill. Now, I was all right for a time because my bed wasn’t against the window side of the dormitory. But for some reason or other, the bedding was rearranged, and I happened to find myself, for the first time, with a bed backing onto the windows on that side of the dormitory. Well, the first time he came in and said, All up, draw curtains up blinds’, I duly got up, put the blind up, that was easy, that shot up, but the room was about 15 to 20 feet high, and I couldn’t get these curtains back, so I got put on punishment drill. Well, I did it. That meant that instead of going out into the town for a short time to spend our pocket money, we had to form up in the playground, a very big stretch, gravel covered, with a big spreading chestnut tree in the middle and we used to line close to that and do knees bending and stretching and the like, instead of being able to go out into town. He was a bit of a sadist, the head master. The discipline was very, very strict. I mean people got birched for serious offences like thieving or anything of that sort. And one unpleasant experience I did have, was at the beginning of my second term, in the January of 1913, and we went back and assembled in our classrooms the following day after our arrival back and after checking the register, the master said, ‘Stand, and turn’, and we were marched upstairs into one of the long dormitories which had about 20 beds or more in it, in two rows. And we were lined up at one end, and down at the other end was a bed with its head towards us covered with a blanket. I didn’t know what it was all about but apparently there was a young fellow there strapped down to that bed for being guilty of being involved in some burglary that had taken place over the Christmas holiday,


when they’d been up, invited up to the house of the chairman of governors for a time, over the Christmas ... So he had been condemned to twelve strokes of the birch. I didn’t know all this till afterwards. So we stood there and the head master began one stroke, two, etc., and it got through about six without a sound, and then this kid, it was only a youngster, started whining and it was a shocking sort of sound, I’ve never forgotten it really, until he had got his full strokes. Now that was a characteristic of the head master, now, he seemed to take a fiendish sort of delight in that. He was a— what do you call it?—a sadist in that direction. Whenever else he got excited, by Jove, his temper was short, we all sort of trembled in our seats in case we made fools of ourselves over anything. Brian was a bright child and on the advice of his teachers at the orphanage, he entered for, and gained a scholarship to the City of London School. I went into the modern side which more or less meant that we were destined for places in the city, office work and that sort of thing, which, of course, with the school recommendation, you could land quite freely. But I didn’t want to go on a high stool in an office. I’d still got this idea of becoming a teacher in my mind. Well, I got London matriculation, a good one too, first division, passed with all the subjects necessary. You had to take five and pass in the lot then. First division, that was in the January 1918. And of course, in those days, you didn’t get put in by the school, it was up to you what you did. The head master once remarked to an enquiring father, ‘We’re here to turn out English gentlemen.’ He sat for a London University scholarship which he failed to gain against stiff competition. He was offered a place, but could not take it up because of the expense. Brian went to seek advice from a former teacher at the orphanage: He was a very helpful chap. He told me about these things that the county council, London County Council had, and this student-teacher training system. It had replaced the old pupil teachers because they served a kind of apprenticeship, you see, before going to college and went to special sessions, at pupil-teacher centres. But in this particular case, he said, ‘Go and see them at county hall, and tell them what you want.’ And so I went down to county hall, and I was very pleasantly treated, and told them that I’d got a good matriculation certificate. They said, ‘Yes, that’s OK, but you haven’t got history or geography.’ I said, ‘Well, I can get that at the first opportunity.’ They said,’ Well, if you do that, on that condition we’ll grant you a student teacher’s course.’ So, it was arranged with the City of London School I should go there for Fridays, just one day a week, continuing my education and go in to a local council school during the

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other four days of the week. And I went duly to the school nearest me. It was only just down the road from my home, as a matter of fact at Burrage Grove School. They were very, very helpful to me. I gave certain lessons. Watched certain lessons, kept a diary and notes and so on, and, of course, the head master had to report upon my progress. But I think I mentioned that during the course of that year, the head master himself got some silly complaint and he was away for two or three weeks and Mr Ernie, the senior master, said to me, ‘Look [Sawkin], you take charge of my class, I’ll leave you to carry on and if you want any help, call me.’ And those two or three weeks were invaluable because when I left that class, I knew I was all right, I got a grip on them and whenever I saw that class of boys, even when they were promoted to the next form, or next class, as soon as I walked in, there was quiet. It’s a lovely feeling, when you get that—really lucky. And so, I went to college, knowing that I could do the job. On his first day as a student teacher: I didn’t know quite what I was going to find, and I was put largely in the Standard Two, which was a class of 60 in the first period. And there was a jolly good chap there, Don Palmer, who had like other teachers been freed from the army. He’d been a quartermaster in the army. He was a jolly good chap, he really was, all of them were, so helpful and he gave some lessons so as to show me the sort of thing that had to be done and I took lessons over the whole range, in that particular class. I remember one of the lessons I had to give was about that English monster, and one of the ancient Britons, sort of fairy stories. [The class teachers] were always there, over this period. The only time, as I said, I got completely free was either when the master was away, or else that was during that period, when the head master was away or if one of the other masters was away for some reason or other and sometimes I was given backward readers, a group of backward readers, to help on, which of course after listening to the head master, he was [an] extremely good teacher. He used to take lessons himself, which wasn’t done by every head master in those days and it was good. They were all certificated teachers on the staff, I hadn’t met any of the other type until I went to college and in 1920 when I went to college, most of the senior fellows there were ex-servicemen and even some of my own year, were servicemen. For his student-teacher year, Brian earned a small salary. [As a student teacher] I got £55 paid in three instalments. I think you’ll find that in the record. Yes, the last one was so paid that, of course, I got it


towards the end and it helped towards my expenses later on. But I must say that when I came out of college at the end of July in 1922, I was just about broke, and my twenty-first birthday I just hadn’t got a penny in my pocket. And I had to wait a month until I got my first payment. But somehow or other I weathered it, I don’t know how it was, I suppose it was a question of having to. For example, when I went away to the orphanage, for the first term I was homesick and mother said to me when I told her, much later on, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have taken you away.’ Well, that would have defeated all the help she needed, you see. And so I had to face up to facts and I did my best to do it. And it wasn’t a question of my own particular happiness. I can’t say I was happy at the orphanage, I just put up with it. Finance was a constant preoccupation in his account: I did very well at the City of London, I must confess, it was a very good school. But what I did find was I couldn’t get the best out of what they offered because I hadn’t got the money to afford it. You see, my mother, as I told you, was a widow, I was living more or less on this £30 a year that they’d granted me extra from the orphanage. And they actually extended that into my, not my student-teacher year, but the year I went to college. And I got a grant from… the Drapers’ Company for orphans for some old dear had died back in the 1600’s who had had property in London and he had left his estate to the Drapers’ people, for the sake of orphans. And they granted me £50 while I was at college so that with the bits and pieces, I wrote and asked the council if they’d grant me a free place—which they hadn’t been doing—and they granted it so I didn’t have to pay fees. I got this £50 from the Drapers. The government kindly gave me £24 a year while I was at college, yes, very kindly gave me £24 a year, the government. And where else did I get money from? Yes, there was this extra £30 from the orphanage. Anyhow, with bits and pieces, I got enough, amounted to about 30 shillings [£ 1.10s] a week and as I lived at home, I’m afraid my poor mother had to put up with very little. I gave her the £50 the Drapers’ Company gave me, you know, in instalments, to help things but it wasn’t until I’d actually got out teaching that I was able to help her much. His mother’s moral support for his career decision was important to Brian: She didn’t object at all. She left me to carry on. She knew when I went away to the orphanage that I was doing well there. She was willing to back me when I went to the City of London School, but she had a very hard time because my father left a mortgage unpaid, he’d paid off a second mortgage on the house and left her with quite a considerable amount to pay back but it was a very good society. They were very kind to my mother and gave

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her time to look round to see if she could sell, but when the war came on, they wrote and told her, ‘Don’t bother while this is on and as long as you pay the interest, we won’t bother you.’ So mother was able actually to live cheaper than if she’d been paying rent because it was only a 4 per cent mortgage. I say ‘only’ but it was a struggle for her to pay it, and she got a small job. You see she’d never gone out to work, so she wasn’t trained to do any of the skills that were needed for that, and she got a job on the London County Council, taking deaf children up the line by train from Plumstead to Greenwich, to the deaf school there, picking them up at various stations going up, then going back in the afternoon to the school and dropping them off again, you see ... When the war broke out, she was still doing this, because I was still at school, brother was too, and it gradually went up until it was a reasonable payment for what she was doing. But it suited her because, you see, it left her in the middle of the day to look after us while we were still at home. At Goldsmiths’ they did not make use of his previous student-teacher experience. They never questioned me at all about it, funnily enough. I got a very good report from the college, you know, the character etc. and my standard. And I also got a first class certificate. No, no, there were quite a number of chaps who had no previous experience. Most of them made the grade but one boy or one lad that stood out in my mind, was a very clever fellow. He wrote poetry and that sort of thing, but he’d got some funny mannerisms and I thought, if this chap is going out, he’s going to be passed out of college as certificated, and he gets in front of a class, he’s going to have a hell of a time … And funnily enough, when I started teaching out in Poplar, with a senior master, I went up to Hampton Court one day. And walking round with our class, we ran into this chap. So I said to him, ‘Well, how are you getting on?’ ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I’m not doing teaching, I’m doing librarianship.’ Comparing the student-teacher year with his college experience, Brian thought: Well, the student-teacher year was very important but in college, I forwarded my mathematical studies to a degree which I couldn’t have got elsewhere without going to very advanced courses because when it came to getting the Intermediate, I was far in advance of the mathematics that they required for that—in BSc intermediate exam at that time. We have seen already how Brian had made an early decision to teach, specifically in an elementary school. His assessment of the professional status of teaching was heavily circumscribed by the relatively low pay and the struggles


that this engendered. He certainly aspired to a more extensive higher education than his economic circumstances would allow. Like many of our male respondents, his later career was pursued in the secondary sector after 1944, but this appears to have had only a small impact on his perception of his own professional status. College training and the Teachers’ Certificate did not of itself confer professional status but he continued with his own professional development. Oh no, no, that was about the minimum they expected of us, I think. But they didn’t give us very much encouragement to get a higher qualification because if I’d worked right through to a degree, I would have got £12 a year extra. You see, there was, well there was no encouragement, although I myself would have been far happier if I had gone on, but for health reasons and common sense, I decided I couldn’t any longer carry on. But it didn’t stop me still going to courses and taking the course in modern maths, for example, in my own time. And I used to go to history refreshers, too, so that I kept up to date with circumstances, and I enjoyed myself on the whole, I must say. My last years were extremely happy ones. In 1944 Brian got a job at the former Charlton Central School, which subsequently became a secondary modern. He felt more at home teaching the older boys, the age-group for which he had been professionally trained. Did the work seem superior in status to junior school teaching? I think so, I think we got more, I think we got more in the way of gratuities in that sort of way than they did in the junior schools. Teaching did not really feel like a profession, but however teachers were regarded, he felt that he earned a lot of personal respect: I always had tried to act professionally but conditions didn’t always work out that way. I mean we had to protest from time to time but, nevertheless, when was the last protest? Oh, the last protest was quite late in my life. Our association had been trying for years to be recognised and one of the Ministers for Education had had the cheek to say, not that it wasn’t justified, but it was not expedient. Well, that was about the last straw. So one day, we all took a holiday, and met at the Albert Hall and we absolutely filled it, in protest against the fact that we hadn’t been accepted. Well, I’ve got a little statement somewhere in my desk over there to tell me that I’d been docked a day’s pay because I hadn’t come to school that day. And we got recognition. [The National Association of Schoolmasters was granted membership of the Burnham salary panel after a long campaign, in October 1961]. So, I mean, right to the end we had to protest in that sort of

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way. I don’t know how satisfied they are now, but they’re certainly getting far more recognition than they did in my time. The professional status of teachers was strongly linked to the issue of pay in Brian’s mind, and he relished the militancy which cuts in pay had provoked. Can I start at the beginning, when I first came out of college, 1922? Now, they had decided that teachers should have a maximum of £425 and then we went into a recession, and the chances of getting employment for teach’ ers from Goldsmiths’ in 1922 was pretty well zero. Thirty of our people at Goldsmiths’ applied for jobs in London and they took four, and I was number four, and I think I got it largely on the strength of the fact that I’d been to the City of London School, a bit of kudos there. Now, when I actually came out in ‘22 to start earning, I was getting eighteen and five pence [18s 5d] a day as a supply teacher because they were hung up about the actual salaries so pro tem, although I got accepted by London, I was paid on a supply basis, eighteen and five pence a day. Now, that was reduced by 5 per cent, I think, to seventeen and six pence [17s 6d] in the course of the next few months. And under those conditions, I was getting more than an ordinary teacher would have got, first year, but I wouldn’t get paid for holidays. But fortunately, before I came to the summer holidays, they stabilised the payments and we were stabilised I think at that time, at £408 maximum, and I was stabilised at £203 per annum in 1923. Well, needless to say, every time we seemed to get another annual rise of £12, they seemed to cut a bit off and we seemed to be always striving. Now what was it that started? Oh when things collapsed in America in 1929, the shock waves arrived over here in 1931 and the government panicked and they decided that all public employees should have a cut of 10 per cent but teachers and the navy, 15 per cent. Well that made us raise our hackles, as you might say, and we actually indulged in a march through London. Our association organised it, we were a break-off from the Union of Teachers, we were the Association of Schoolmasters. And so we organised a march which assembled on the embankment in London and there were thousands of us, a lot of us from the NUT as well, and we marched through and held a meeting, a protest meeting in some hall further along in London and because of the uprising of the teachers in that way, and because of a possible mutiny in the navy, they decided they’d make us the same as the rest, 10 per cent. And the next thing, of course, as prosperity came, we had to agitate, to get back that 10 per cent. Well, once again, our association was active and so one day, it was arranged when the council were meeting at County Hall, our members would go up en masse, all asking to see their member. And so we went up on this particular day, in the evening, after school. The leaders of our particular association had hidden themselves in the library, and we arrived in the


County Hall, and there were thousands of us. The corridors were absolutely packed with us and they put us into these corridors, you know, and there we would be at the bottom of the steps and the County Hall meeting going on upstairs. And the vote was taken, I don’t think they were in favour of us at all at that time. We didn’t get anything out of that. But the agitation that we created reached the next election of members to the council, and we picked out certain members that were standing and took action in those particular centres so as to stop them from getting elected, you know, persuading people not to vote for them and that sort of thing. And consequently, quite a number of those who had voted against us at that first meeting didn’t get their seat and it wasn’t long after that, that we got our 10 per cent back. It was a question of fighting all the time. Did Brian take pride in, and job satisfaction from, teaching? Well, I don’t think we ever were in that sort of way, the salary was never such as to encourage us to be proud. I did the job because I liked it. And in my small way, I was pretty good at it. I became head of the maths, head of department for maths at Charlton School. But we were never regarded as a profession as such, not in those days, as I say, we were always struggling to get some advance. Even when war broke out, there was still this maximum of £408 a year for assistants and I was on, on my last step up, you know, towards that, when war broke out. Now, the year before that, before the war, I managed to save £100 of my salary and I’d been saving a little bit, and a little bit in a building society and that sort of thing, to have some sort of reserve but it was very difficult to do because there wasn’t all that margin.

10 MRS DELIA SKELLEY AND MRS LESLEY THORNBIRD

Mrs Delia Skelley (B015) was born in 1902, the daughter of a former clerk who became an office manager with a furnishing company. Her mother she described as a housewife, and she had one younger brother. Financially, the family was in a reasonably comfortable situation until her father was made redundant late in his career. Delia attended elementary school in Addiscombe, near East Croydon (where, years later, her friend Lesley Thornbird would teach for more than 20 years), and gained a scholarship to the Old Palace School, a convent school for girls. From 1920–21, she was a student teacher in Croydon, thereafter attending St Gabriel’s, London from 1921–23. Croydon was recruiting no new teachers when she qualified in 1923 but eventually she succeeded in securing two months’ supply teaching at Woodside Infants School. In the following January, she took a post in Dudley, in the West Midlands, at Netherton Church of England Boys’ School. In 1925 she was able to return to Croydon through a post at Tavistock Junior School, moving under reorganisation in 1930 to Sydenham School, a 5–11 primary. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Delia was evacuated with this school first to Patcham, near Brighton and later to a village in North Cornwall. In 1943, on recall to Croydon, she taught for a time in a grammar school before returning to Sydenham School, retiring as Deputy Head in 1962. From 1965–70 she worked part-time as a remedial teacher. Mrs Lesley Thornbird (A197) was born in 1907, the family moving to Croydon when she was 2. Her mother, a keen church-goer and a Sunday School teacher, had been a factory worker. Her father, a chorister at the church, had had an unhappy childhood, suffering from public knowledge of his illegitimacy and from the behaviour of his drunken parents, who had prevented him from taking up a scholarship which he had won. Instead, he was trained by his father in the family trade of boot making before moving on to a job in a cigarette factory and, after service in the First World War, to employment with an import company. Lesley attended Woodside Elementary School where her friend Delia would later find her first teaching post. Pressure on school buildings during the First World War—schools being used for military hospitals—led to her receiving only half-time schooling, which gave rise to parental concern about her educational progress, Her father wrote to her mother from the front on Armistice Day to insist that she and her brother Ernest be got into grammar schools. Lesley was a


student teacher from 1923–24 in Croydon and attended Goldsmiths’ College from 1925–27. Her first two years’ teaching after college were on supply in Croydon, but in 1929 she gained a permanent appointment at Duffies Hill, Croydon, specialising in boys’ handwork (a subject in which she had failed at college). In 1933 she was forced to leave on marriage. The wartime teacher shortage brought her back into employment in 1941 when she was appointed as a supply teacher and allocated to Duffies Infants School, later being switched to a mixed sex secondary modern. In 1944 she moved to Oval Road Juniors, specialising in music, and then became entitled to a permanent post which she held until retirement in 1967. Delia Skelley and Lesley Thornbird were old friends. Though born five years apart, they attended the same secondary school and both trained as teachers, though in different colleges. Delia undertook a formal period of student teaching whilst Lesley experienced a more informal arrangement for acquiring elementary school-teaching experience prior to her college course. Their subsequent careers were pursued in schools in Sydenham and Croydon and, in consequence, much of their knowledge of local schools was shared. The interviews were carried out separately but in each other’s company. Themes that particularly emerged as common emphases for both women included their own physical health as significant factors in shaping their individual careers, their contrasting college experiences at Goldsmiths’ and St Gabriel’s, and their shared concerns about teacher status, career development and professional development in the post-war era. Delia’s local authority scholarship to the Old Palace School was especially welcome as her parents had to pay fees for her younger brother who attended the Stanley Technical School in South Norwood. Before I went in for the scholarship, my father heard of a scholarship [competition] being run by a [national] newspaper, and you had to get your school to let you sit [for it] you see… He was very keen I should really do something, but they weren’t terribly willing to do it. Then they said, it would be rather difficult, so then they said, ‘You wait, till there will be a [local authority] scholarship for you to take’. Delia’s scholarship was not a bursary and therefore did not oblige her to proceed to teacher training. You were absolutely free, but it seemed to be the tradition, a number of Old Palace girls went on to teaching. We had such inspired teachers, didn’t we? Soon after I got to the Old Palace School I thought, now, I thought, ‘How lovely to be able to’—because I was so interested, there were more subjects to be taken. And we had very good teachers and, you know, I thought, ‘How interesting.’ It would be lovely to spend my life helping others and children whom I loved, always. When I was quite small, I had

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smaller cousins, you know, and—because we were quite a big family altogether. The English teacher, Miss Reeve, she was a lovely person and she finally came and persuaded my people. You know, they didn’t think I’d be strong enough to do it, you see, physically. I’d had anaemia, as a child, rather badly and had to lose some schooling, quite a bit, for it. And they didn’t think I’d be strong enough for it and my father particularly was a little bit dubious about it but Miss Reeve came and she had a good old chat with us and she said, you know, I really wanted to do it, and she thought I’d make a very good teacher. Delia and Lesley had different views about the quality of their time at secondary school. For Delia, the experience was a positive one. We used to have an examination every term and if you got over 75 per cent of marks, then you were top in your form, you got a certificate. When you had three certificates, you could have a book. So, I thought that was very encouraging, you know, I hadn’t enough books, I couldn’t get enough books so that thrilled me and I got quite a few. Then it came to the state during the war, we were asked to give up our prizes for the war effort, for money to go to the war effort, and have a certificate instead. But I remember getting a lovely Shakespeare volume, a beautiful lovely cover, and also I got a Wordsworth—lovely, I got a few prizes there. It was a thing called Senior Cambridge. It did do Junior Cambridge, then they dropped that and just did Senior Cambridge only and then after that, I also had to take matriculation in the following year in some subjects, didn’t take the whole lot. Yes, I thought, you see, honours, it was all right to get into college, they said it was all right. So there was no further bother about getting in. Only thing was, when it came to the pinch, I had rheumatic fever, and they didn’t think I’d be able to do it but I did. Got through in the end. I shall never forget the marvellous doctor I had. He put off his holiday when I was a dangerous case. He came to see me. I thought, how lovely it was and I think he was excellent. Delia then progressed to her student-teacher year in 1920–21. She remembered it as compulsory for all intending teachers, with all the arrangements made by the local education authority. Her placement was in Sydenham School, where she subsequently taught from 1930 to 1962, ending her career there as Deputy Head Teacher. I was thrilled to be able to go because I’d already seen the head teacher before and she was so interested, she was very good [with help and guidance] and all her staff were very good indeed, they encouraged me all


the time, suggested books that I should get from the library, and so on, to help me. And had small groups, pretty soon after I went there, I really started teaching and enjoyed having them. And it was an all-age range, I say all-age, from 7 up to 14. I started in November as my student-teacher year but I had a marvellous head there and wonderful staff. I shan’t forget them, they were, oh, they were so helpful and they seemed to enjoy having me somehow—I think it was because I liked doing some of the extra things, ‘cause I loved swimming … I mean I could teach it and taught life saving work too, so they were very thrilled about that. I had experience in all the classes. It was very good. [The children] were very polite and very nice. I enjoyed it very much indeed. No discipline problems and furthermore, I lived very close to the school, so the children would get to see me, quite a bit, round and about. Her teaching was observed by the head teacher but she was not observed by advisers or inspectors. She was left on her own with the children. And while I was there, there was a strike on. The head teachers didn’t have to strike and so, of course, Miss Howells and myself, we went, and she was thrilled because I could play the piano, and I could teach a bit of singing— so, I mean it was very difficult to have a whole age range like that. They couldn’t do very much, you can imagine, could they? [The head teacher] had to give a testimonial, of course and, so that helped. I really got a very nice one from her and when I left, she very kindly gave me the Oxford Book of English Verse, which I was going to use in college. Oh, I was so thrilled. She went back to her secondary school, the Old Palace, every Wednesday (probably for the whole day though there was some uncertainty about this). Sister Rosemary used to take her for psychology and hygiene which she saw as helping her professional work, and she thought she also did some personal study, probably English. Otherwise her memories of this part of the work were vague. There were no other student teachers at her school. Delia spent one day each week in further study back at her secondary school. This aspect of the programme seems to have been more professionally oriented and more efficiently organised than was the case for most student teachers. As there were no other student teachers at the Old Palace School in Delia’s year, she had the benefit of individual tuition. When I went to college, there was a girl who was my senior, and she’d been student-teaching but there hadn’t been any others at the Old Palace, that particular year.


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So when she went back on the Wednesday, she was absolutely on her own and had the attention of Sister Rosemary to herself. The year was remembered as hard work, but she still had a strong desire to teach. At the end of her student-teacher year she felt reasonably competent in the classroom. Yes, to a certain extent but I was rather a nervous character and I used to think, well, I hoped all would be well, and that I’d get nice children and sympathetic staff as I had been treated so well beforehand. I think they gave me £60 for the year, for my student teaching, and—but I had to promise that I would come and serve Croydon for five years. So when I was new to the college, a letter comes, ‘We are not taking on any more teachers, you are free to go where you please.’ When it came to trying to decide which—student teaching or the college course— had ultimately proved more important for her subsequent career, Delia found it impossible to make a choice: I was looking forward to the extra things and opportunities that I would have while I was at college, in training. And exactly what I was going to do, ‘cause I changed my mind over my specialising because I was going to take to maths and I liked maths, very much, you see, and then I was talking it over with one of the staff, Miss Webb, at the Old Palace, when I went those Wednesday mornings, ‘Oh [Delia]’, she said, ‘Why don’t you take botany?’ In the end, I did take botany. *** Lesley Thornbird’s journey towards teaching began in 1918 on the last day of the Great War, with her father’s fateful letter from the front. He wrote to my mother, ‘Get Lesley and Ernest into grammar schools, as soon as you can, they’re growing up complete ignoramuses.’ Well, the reason for this was, first and foremost, that I was having only part-time schooling because my school was having to be shared with Davidson School. ’Cause Davidson School was a very new school before the war so that was commandeered as a hospital for the wounded soldiers and therefore we were having to share—one week in the mornings only, and one week we went afternoons only. But on top of that, at a medical exam, they had thought I had got curvature of the spine; I hadn’t but they thought I had. So four times a week, I had to walk, four half days a week, I had to walk a distance of about two and a half to three miles, to exercise… Then [I] walked home again—but of course I got no school in that day. So a fortnight when I should have attended at least ten half days, I would only


have attended six. So [you can] understand my father being worried about it. I didn’t have a scholarship because, you see, I wasn’t the age to take [one]. My father was urging that I went before ever I was old enough to take the scholarship. I should have taken it that Easter. But I had gone down, like the whole of the family, with that awful Asian flu that was going around. And being the last one to go to bed because I was kept up to help nurse everybody else, when I did go down, I had double pneumonia. My elder brother who was the first to go down, was sent down to fetch food that mother had cooked’ ‘cause she could fear herself going—getting ill, to feed the family, you see, upstairs. And he couldn’t resist going up to see his pet rabbit so he went down with double pneumonia. Mother had us both down, double pneumonia at the same time, both going through the crisis at the same time. There was no sort of drugs, no wonder drugs then for it. You had to go through the crisis. I suppose mother went round to all the girls’ schools to see which was the most likely to take me in. The Old Palace said if I attended in the first week of term and took an entrance exam, if I passed I could start then. So that’s what happened. We paid fees but as the fees went up and up and up, the school were very good to mother. They knew that she was having a struggle and I think they refrained from putting the fees up for her. How did Lesley come to follow the student-teacher route? It wasn’t my choice, you know, not really. At 14 my father said to me, ‘You’re growing older and you must make up your mind what you’re going to do.’ And his attitude was that if you lived, your duty was to leave the world a little bit better than you found it, so you should be doing something towards the betterment of the world. This is at the age of 14, only I wasn’t I was 13 actually. I was sitting playing on the piano when he had this serious talk to me, and I turned round to face him and got cramp in my thigh. And my father was one of those people you couldn’t let on, you know, I was hanging on to my thigh and trying to answer his question. Anyway, he said I’d got to make up my mind what I wanted to be by the time I was 14. So I went to mother and I said, told her what had happened and I said, ‘What can I do?’ I’d no idea what I wanted to be. ‘Well’, she said, ‘make a list of all the things you can think of.’ So I made my famous list, my famous list was teaching, nursing or office work. Now, I don’t think that there were any other openings at that time, were there? So I couldn’t face being on an office stool and that came out; I couldn’t—I really didn’t fancy nursing, so that came out; so I said I wanted to be a teacher but, you know, it wasn’t really true. It was something that was being forced on me. So at 16, the opportunity to apply for a teaching bursarship came up and we applied. I had to fill up a form, had to take it


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back to Miss Taylor—I was by that time in the Upper Fifth, you see, and she said, ‘What’s this? You’ve crossed out that you want to train for infants and you’ve put in girls. Why?’ So I said, ‘My father said any fool can teach infants.’ ‘Huh’, she snorted. She could see the sort of man he was. The student-teacher scheme which Lesley joined in Croydon in 1922 entailed full-time study in the sixth form for two years, with four fortnightly periods during her vacations spent in Birchanger Girls’ Elementary School. This arrangement included payment of her fees during sixth form (a bursary), but no additional maintenance support. My student-teachership was very different from Delia’s because all I had to do [was to attend secondary] school the whole time. I lost no schooling whatsoever. But a fortnight of my holiday, I had to spend in Birchanger Upper Road School only observing the first year. And then the second year, there was some teaching and much to my horror I was teaching 14year-old girls, I was only 16 myself, and I put my hair up to try and look a bit older, ‘cause I had long plaits down the back. And into the room walked Miss Appleton. Now Miss Appleton was the drill inspectress but she had also been the one who was responsible for taking me through my exercises that I’d had to attend [for suspected curvature of the spine]. So she comes in and she stops dead at the door and she said ‘Lesley [Bright] [maiden name pseud.].’ And she turned to the head mistress, and in front of the girls she said, ‘You wouldn’t think she had a back, would you?’ So it wasn’t very comfortable. I got on all right though at the school. I was only [at Birchanger] for a fortnight at a time. I don’t think [I was accepted as a member of staff], I don’t think there was a staff room in those days, anyway. There were no staff rooms, you didn’t meet the staff as such, you only knew the teacher you were working with. Lesley was less satisfied than Delia with the quality of education at the Old Palace School. In her initial written response she described it as ‘now an extremely prestigious school with high academic results, but in my day [it] was run by the Sisters of the Church of England which “set its mark on its girls”, gave a good all-round education but not too high academic standards’. When it came to having my Senior Cambridge, I went into the sixth form, and four of us sat for matriculation in London, and not one of us got through. We all failed it. But then we didn’t do maths in the sixth form, at all, and none of us got through. I don’t know what I failed in but there were four of us and not one of us got through. But I didn’t think that the school was a very good school academically. Delia thinks differently but I didn’t.


At the close of their student-teacher programmes, Delia and Lesley each progressed to training college. Delia’s choice of St Gabriel’s Church of England Training College was evidently influenced by the denominational character of her secondary school and its strong traditions. Well, first of all, I knew that it was the tradition and then, of course, there was somebody who was my senior who was in the sixth form. She was in the upper sixth and I was in the lower sixth, and she was [at St Gabriel’s], happily situated there. I got in touch, I was in touch with her quite a bit. And then somebody in my year thought that she would like to go to St Gabriel’s too. And then I knew there was a, I’m just trying to think, there was a college at Streatham, I can’t for a moment think of the name of it, which had a very, very good reputation and I knew of girls who had been there and they said it was very nice—but somehow I felt that St Gabriel’s would have a lot to offer and I thought I would probably find it easier in a way to get in because there was an awful lot of competition. I wasn’t very worried about that, though. But St Gabriel’s seemed to like Old Palace girls and also we had all the training and we had chapel every day at school and there was chapel every day at college you see, morning and evening; it was really lovely and also we had a very, very [good] course in scripture. And we had the canon who was at St John’s at Kennington. He came and gave us the lectures, you see, and we also took an examination so I had the archbishop’s certificate in that, as well. And it was helpful because I got quite a lot from that. I enjoyed that part. And also, I was keen on being a resident student, very keen on that. They did take a few day students but it was mostly, mainly residential, that’s why I liked it so much. I was really blessed. Lovely lecturers in college, too, and they organised visits out, you see, in groups. I remember going to music recitals and things. They organised things for us to do really, culturally. It was really lovely, and I enjoyed that. And also, I was a resident student, and in the evenings, the lecturers would, if you wished to go, you could join them for a really cultural evening whatever you liked they would give you their time. In college, I couldn’t do any physical education because I hadn’t got over rheumatic fever sufficiently to be able to do that. ‘Cause I was very pleased with St Gabriel’s for accepting me. You know, the principal said, ‘Well, the doctor has said, the report I had from your doctor is that you’ve made such great progress that I’m sure it will be all right so we’ll accept you provisionally.’ So I wasn’t absolutely sure, but they kept the place open for me. So I was very fortunate from that point of view but I just had to attend lectures and make notes you see, and no PE or games, the whole of the two years, yes. And yes, I missed my swimming most of all. Lesley’s choice of training college was Goldsmiths’.


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I could have gone to St Gabriel’s, the college that most of the girls from the Old Palace, going on for teaching, did go to. It was a Church of England college, you see. Or I could have gone to another one whose name escapes me, I can’t remember, but [it] was all girls, or I could have gone to Goldsmiths’. But Goldsmiths’ carried an £11 a year [bursary] towards books. And it was also a mixed college and since I had always lived among brothers and cousins, they were all male, I thought I would be happier at Goldsmiths’. I was a ‘homer’. Most were in halls of various sorts, not very many ‘homers’. I was ever so happy at Goldsmiths’. It was an absolute revelation to me because the Old Palace School had been all girls. And my family were not very well off—on army pay, as you can imagine—and I got the impression that many of the girls at Old Palace were a bit toffee-nosed and I did not make any friends, at all. I wasn’t like a sore thumb, at least I hope I wasn’t, but to begin with, you see, I had only just got over double pneumonia when I got there. We had to go to chapel every morning and I cannot stand first thing in the morning, I can ’t stand anyway very much, but morning after morning, I was having to be dragged out of chapel because I was fainting. So I got the name of being no good. So when it was a question of choosing your teams for games, I was always one of those left at the end and I never played any games at all at the Old Palace because I was always one of those that stood on the edge and watched. When I got to Goldsmiths’, I was chosen every time, I was in everything, and it was an absolute heaven to me, to be one of the accepted ones because I hadn’t been accepted by the girls at the Old Palace, not really. And I was in a seventh heaven of delight. I was even picked out for special PE, would you believe it, although I had done very little at the Old Palace. Well, I wanted to take maths as my special subject [at Goldsmiths’], I was down to take it, and I attended it but I was absolutely at sea. I had done no maths for two years, and I’d got nobody older in the family I could go to. My father, I mean although he was, he was good, he’d never done that sort of work. If I’d had help, I might have done. But with no one to go to for extra help, I could face failure at the end. So I went to see Miss Graveson, the Vice-President, and it was decided that I did biology.1 At Goldsmiths’ it seemed, Lesley’s course was quite separate from the degree programme: Of course, Goldsmiths’ did do a three-year course for a degree but we had nothing whatsoever to do with that. Despite her evident academic ability, Lesley had no regrets about the lack of opportunity to follow a degree course.


Money would have stopped it mainly—and I was happy. Despite ultimately spending the bulk of their careers with long spells in a single school, both Delia and Lesley had to be very flexible in their early careers. Like many other respondents from this period, they each found difficulty, on leaving college, as a consequence of the shortage of jobs available. Both were obliged to begin their careers, like so many other teachers, ‘on supply’. In written correspondence with us, Delia remembered, Croydon were not taking any new teachers in 1923. I had two months supply work at Woodside Infants School. My work was approved by the head teacher who of her own volition gave me a testimonial when I applied for posts all over the country. And, again in correspondence, Lesley recalls, By autumn 1927 teaching jobs were difficult to obtain—we were drifting into a bad depression period, and I did supply work in Croydon until my first appointment in January 1929 to a junior mixed school just opened, at Duffies Hill, Croydon. I stayed there, specialising in boys handwork (I had failed handwork at college!) until I married in 1933 when I was forced to leave—no married women were employed in teaching. In 1941 the war was affecting our financial position; so I applied for supply work and was told ‘no teachers were required’. However a few months later, I received a telegram telling me to attend Duffies Infants’ School as soon as possible, and was heartily welcomed as they were short handed and had been for three months. Although working full-time and expected to take my part in all school activities, I was still only paid as a supply teacher so that a full week’s work ranked as ten-fourteenths of a week—affecting my pension ultimately. After one term in the Infants, I was switched to the secondary modern—still mixed, and took training courses to enable me to cope with boys’ football etc. In 1944 when ‘doodle bugs’ started falling, I applied for a school near my home, as my son was now at school, and too young to be responsible for locking up the house. I was appointed as supply to Oval Road School, a mixed infants and juniors. Here I specialised in music throughout the junior school. My head master disapproved of married women working, but had reluctantly to inform me I could switch to permanent employment follow’ ing the new Education Bill, which I did. I continued at this school until I retired on reaching the age of 60, in 1967. Professional status of teaching was explored in several dimensions. A dearth of viable accommodation for teachers in elementary schools was seen by a number


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of respondents as a salient issue. Lesley commented on the effect of having no staffroom. I don’t think there was a staff room in those days, anyway [at Birchanger Elementary in 1923–24]. There were no staff rooms, you didn’t meet the staff as such, you only knew the teacher you were working with. Even the head mistresses in the elementary schools hadn’t got a room. All my experience at these schools was that the head mistress had a desk in one of the rooms. Delia recalled that at Sydenham There was no staff room for years. Ours was an old school, quite an old school and there were the newer schools coming up, and they were having staff rooms and so on. It was an awful long time before we had one. I think the headteacher had a miserable little place for hers and we would crowd in there, sometimes. At a later period, Delia campaigned to get decent seats for teachers in her staffroom. There were certain members of the [Education] Committee—shopkeepers, in particular, that [thought] that we were asking quite a lot. But in my early days, I had felt that we had some status. It was really quite good with parents in particular and people whom you met in authority, in various walks of life and so on. They really did think something of you but during that period then, you felt well, yes, oh, you were very different to doctors and so on, and so forth, you see—oh, no, much beneath them. Another job was trying to get some bibles that were illustrated, instead of the tiny, tiny print and the children—they couldn’t, well hardly read and so on. They were terrible. And, of course, I had one of these cheese-paring councillors who said, ‘Huh, money for that?’ And, in the end, I got enough for my top class to share. One of Lesley’s sharpest memories regarding her professional status related to the health problems which she had experienced. I knew I was going in to a profession. But I didn’t get the feeling that teaching was—well, it was very much the Cinderella of professions—that was my impression. It was terribly difficult to get a job, of course. I mean, I was four years after Delia but we were headed straight for that awful 1929–33 depression. I came out of college in ’27 and I couldn’t get a job. I eventually was teaching, mornings only, in a private school locally. And having to light the fire when I arrived in the morning. Then I got onto the


supply list in Croydon, I managed to pick up all kinds of things that were going. I spent my twenty-first birthday in a darkened room with chickenpox and my twenty-first Christmas in a hospital—in the children’s ward of the isolation hospital and the doctor used to come in and say, ‘Lesley [Bright] [maiden name pseud.], a school teacher.’ And there were nothing but children there. Every time there was a new child coming in—because I’d been doing supply work [I thought] ‘Oh I shall have a child who knows me sooner or later.’ The bed was so short that my feet stuck out the bottom. They had got a room for adults but they’d taken in a batch of new probationary nurses who’d gone down with it themselves, so they were filling that. Both women held ambitions for headship, but these were frustrated in different ways. Delia became a Deputy Head, and gained satisfaction from her responsibilities, in particular the induction of younger staff with whom she maintained lasting relationships. They did introduce first of all positions of responsibility, but very often you have older teachers who were there and you didn’t get the chance of going out anywhere else. And you were happily teaching there so you didn’t bother an awful lot but I did have interviews for headteachership. I had one just before I was going into hospital for a major operation and the other one came when I was recovering. And the then education officer, Mr Roberts, he told me afterwards, he said, ‘You only lost that last one by one vote.’ He was very sad. He was an awfully nice man, he used to come and see me quite a lot in schools, to see my teaching and so on. And he said he felt that I deserved it but of course you don’t know with the people who are on the committee who haven’t,—well, I don’t know. It just depends doesn’t it? So I lost but, in a way, I wasn’t too sad about it. Had I got the job, I should have been with a college friend and she was in the infants, she got the infants’ school, and I would have had the junior. And she was very sad about it that I didn’t get it. But in the end, I was really quite happy being with the children a lot and I did have the experience of almost introducing three new staff, straight from college into the ways of our school. That head, she was younger than me. I knew her, and she and I worked very, very happily together. And she used to consult me a great deal. She said I’d saved her from doing a lot of foolish things, nicely. And so, she gave me the job of really incorporating these three, and two of them I still see now and they say they won’t forget the time when they started. So it’s rather pleasing to have them sort of talk about it. Lesley’s ambitions were thwarted by an obstacle all too familiar for women of her generation.


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I would have loved to have been a head mistress. I have got a gift for organising, and I would have loved to have been a head mistress. But it was impossible, of course, if you married. If you were left a widow, you could, but not otherwise. So I can’t really say that I ever saw myself as a head mistress because of those difficulties. I know jolly well I would have made a good one. Lesley’s perception was that teachers were not always well regarded by the general public, a view which she focused through a small, but wounding remembrance. There was a lot of feeling against us, definitely. I had my cousin, part of the family, in to see me. And one of [her] little girls looked up to my table because I was sitting and having tea, you see, ‘I don’t like you.’ So I said, ‘I’m sorry about that Pam.’ ‘You’re a teacher.’ But over time, the relationship between the profession and the public did change and Lesley offered an important reason: Because for one thing, the schools were encouraged to start parents’ evenings, even if it was only once a term. And our school was always used for polling, and our head master always volunteered to be in charge of the polling office because it gave him a chance of meeting parents who otherwise wouldn’t come up to the school. He was ever such a wise man, Charlie Baxter, very, very charming. Charlie Baxter had also been known to Delia and this mutual acquaintance raised another issue about the impact of gender differentiation and local policy upon women teachers’ careers. Despite her high professional regard for him, Lesley remembered that: When he was made head master, he was the youngest head that Croydon had ever had, and he was a good man, biased against women, he really was. He had one assistant teacher who was a male and had special pay. Every one of those men that’s passed through his hands ended up as head master somewhere, not one of the women, not one. Delia carried the point further. No, the women didn’t get a fair chance, quite often. I think it was the council, the education committee or sub-committee who sort of organised that—that was the feeling that it should be. And then there was an assumption particularly if it were a mixed school you see, it should be a


male head, that was the sort of feeling amongst them. But it did get to change a little bit towards the end. Gender inequities within the profession were seen by Delia to be related to the ages of the children taught. They said ‘Oh anyone can teach infants, you see. You don’t need any training.’ It was easy. And yes, you had that, and then there was a feeling with some people that you were quite superior if you went in for the further education, secondary grammar school or whatever, yes. And there was a difference, but you had to let people know where you could; but some people, you could never convince, they always knew. And even so, it was amazing how in some of the little private schools that went around, they would have [as teachers] children straight from the elementary school. I knew of somebody who had been to Woodside, left at 14 and her mother was proudly claiming ‘Oh yes, my Gladys is teaching in such-and-such a school.’ Yes but recently, they’ve been inspecting [private schools] haven’t they, in recent years, which is a good thing. That’s going back to the poorer authorities who would only appoint teachers straight from grammar school. I met that, of course, during the war[time evacuation]. In fact, I had an uncertificated teacher in the school where I was—I had my own group in a Methodist church hall, and she was in the school at the top of the village but she lived in the same house. But we got on very well together but I was very careful not to change my pay cheques in the village. Yes, somebody said, ‘Oh no, you go to Mrs Sandicott, she’ll change your cheque.’ You see the authority used to send us a cheque—which we had to cash, you see, so I had to cycle eight miles into Bude up and down hills to get my cheque changed. I had to be very careful. Lesley taught in a secondary modern school during the war. In fact it was rather nice because I had a family of my own at home and always I was teaching a different age-range from my sons. While they were in the junior age, I was teaching at the secondary modern and by the time they were coming up to 12, I asked for a transfer nearer home and got a junior mixed so that there was always—I mean it wasn’t a case of coming from children that you’d been handling to your own age-range at home, it was always completely different and I think that that helped a lot. No, I got on extremely well with the modern, in the secondary modern. I did a lot for them out of school, too, and I know Delia did. I used to take them on walks in holiday periods because holidays were very awkward times with war conditions and I went to a training course for women teachers, teaching boys how to play football.


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Delia had a similar sporting memory. I had to take the boys for football, in wartime, yes. And I think that the boys realised that it was me or nothing and were grateful to me. I got on very well with them but, of course, I ought to, oughtn’t I? I have had such large experience, lifetime experience of boys, really. A feature of their professional development in Croydon experienced by both women and recalled with enthusiasm was the Primary Club, a form of continuing professional development. Delia recalls: Yes, that’s right, yes, you’re right there, I was just trying to think back. Yes, we had the head teacher for whom I was working at that time, Miss Howard. She had been very much concerned with one of the London colleges, and they had formed an association of primary school teachers and she introduced it in Croydon for our school and inaugurated it, the whole thing. It was a professional meeting, we used to meet about once a month. It started off at our school, the Sydenham School for the first wave. And then it went on to a bigger school because we expanded and teachers in primary schools would come and sometimes, teachers in the secondary schools would come along. They were allowed to join in, if they wished to do so and we had various lecturers down to talk about education generally and how things were going and so on and we had opportunities of asking questions and so on, it was really quite a professional job. And yes, we had some status. The education authority were very, very pleased about that, they thought a great deal of it, and I think it did a lot of good. [It started] before the war, just before the war. I think—I’m not sure—it was 1938 or ’39, somewhere round about there, yes, before the war, actually. And it went on, and on, and on and it petered out, I think, because, the time came when we had such a lot of change in teachers and they started coming back, if they’d been out, you see, having families and so on. And there was an awful change over of teachers and eventually it faded right out because Miss Howard who organised it retired but she was a great enthusiast too. And as I say, it did a lot for us professionally, particularly with the [local education] office. NOTE 1. Caroline Graveson was also President of the Training College Association in 1921. See Chapter 3.

11 MR GERALD PHILLIPS

Gerald Phillips (A018) was born in 1907. His mother had been a teacher prior to marriage and his father a civil servant. He had one sister. His student-teachership was undertaken in Portsmouth in 1925–26, followed by study for the Teachers’ Certificate at Borough Road in 1926–28. The remainder of his career was spent in London. From 1928–32, he taught at the all-age Westville School; and from 1932–40 at Queensmill, a boys’ secondary school (and part-time at Latymer Endowed School); in 1940–41, he returned to Westville Junior School, followed by a post at Latimer Road (a mixed secondary school) until 1948; he was Deputy Head of Finlay Primary School from 1948–52; and, finally, head teacher at Robert Blair Primary from 1952 until his retirement in 1968. For many years he also taught in further education and evening institutes for the London County Council. Gerald came from a well-educated, white-collar background, with a strong naval tradition. Mum had been a teacher and dad was a civil servant. A lot of my relatives had been in the Royal Navy or been connected with the Royal Navy. My maternal grandfather had been a Royal Naval Architect: Royal Naval Construction Officer—very interested in maths—hence perhaps in the genes there’s an interest in maths. I had one sister. She was in the civil service. But—how shall I put it?—it was a naval town, Royal Naval town. Many people were interested in the forces: the Army and the Navy. The Air Force hadn’t really built up into anything. But it was at the time of disarmament. And I would like to have been a school master in the Royal Navy as my ancestors were so connected with the Navy but at that particular time, they were throwing Naval school masters—they were throwing them out and many were re-training for civilian work. I was connected with the Church. I’d done Sunday school teaching at St. James’ in Southsea there and I was a choir boy at the Royal Garrison Church. Gerald’s testimony, in common with many respondents, strongly pointed up the significant differences in educational and vocational opportunities open to boys


and girls, presenting gender contrasts which were substantially maintained across class divisions. [My elementary school] had a good reputation. That had a very good reputation indeed. In those days, schools were not mixed, they were all separated. You had boys’ departments and girls’ departments, the majority of the population spent their whole time in an elementary school. They were in an infants’ department until they were 7 and then from 7 they went into the main school which they called the ‘big boys’ or the ‘big girls’. The ‘big girls’ kept them until they left; the ‘big boys’ kept them until they left. [For Portsmouth Grammar School] there was an entrance exam, which was set annually and for a city of that size, the competition of course was pretty tough. I can’t remember how many, I think it was about 120, admitted, I’m sure it was 120 admitted each year, from the whole of the city. And it wasn’t till after that time that they opened a second grammar school. The competition was quite fierce then. There was, I won’t say undue pressure, but there was a pressure especially for boys to get to grammar education. There was a private grammar school there but that was in a private building and expanded considerably later on. And it’s still the Portsmouth Grammar School. That of course was a fee-paying school. We still paid fees. Now although it was local authority supported, and although we passed an entrance exam, we still had to pay fees. They weren’t very heavy fees but [there] they were, so all the way through there was this question of financial backing. And then when we went on to college, there were no grants as there are today. So unless your parents were prepared to sacrifice to a considerable degree, there was no way you would be able to go on for further education. If things had been easier, I’m sure my parents would have wanted [a university education for me]. Largely a question of money in those days. And there were so few universities… In those days there were the ancient universities and a few red brick universities such as Reading. But once again if you went to a place like Reading to study education, it was much more expensive. When the head master came round talking about future occupations, he was emphatic that he would not recommend anybody for teaching unless he thought they were very good. Now that’s perhaps not quite the same today. You see his attitude was, he wanted the best to go to teach. He was a Doctor of Science himself, Dr Parkes. The security of teaching in a period of high unemployment was a particular attraction in the 1920s. The fact that there was such high unemployment and jobs were not easy to come by, there was a tendency for the young people to look for something


fairly secure. That was the background at the time. So teaching and the civil service were two of the popular occupations. Gerald’s family were proud of his achievement in becoming a teacher. And so would neighbours be and people round about. Oh yes. It was tied up with the fact that teaching was one of the more secure occupations which was a job for life and had a pension at the end of it. And people were all quite jealous of that. [My sister] left school and she studied business studies: shorthand, typing and that sort of thing, which was common for girls to do. But she didn’t have what you call now an academic career. She went for civil service exams later. Gerald went back as a student teacher with the teacher who had coached him for his scholarship exam to grammar school. He did not think of that teacher as particularly influential on him but he had been a strict disciplinarian and believed in hard work. The scheme in Portsmouth was clearly well-organised, with the participation of Portsmouth Municipal College, both for extension of student teachers’ personal education and for monitoring their teaching in elementary school. The student teaching?—1926 it was good, it was good training, student teaching, I felt. You had to apply for a post as a student teacher. And once again a recommendation from the head. You were then allocated a school and one was given a small salary So you were really employed by the local authority. I forget what it was, it wasn’t a large sum of money, but we were paid. It was a small sum of money. And not only did we do teaching but we had to go on with our studies. So for two half days a week, we attended the Portsmouth Municipal College, which is now Portsmouth University. Same buildings. As I had by that time got ‘matric.’ we then had to attend a course at inter-degree level in chosen subjects and I chose mathematics, pure and applied; and then we were encouraged to do at least one evening a week at the same college for evening classes or further education as they call it now. And what did I go there for? The geography. It’s a lady by the name of Newbigin who became quite famous in the geography world and she was our lecturer.1 So that was the set-up. Two half-days a week as far as I remember —you weren’t compelled to do the evening but the afternoon studies were part of the scheme. [At Portsmouth Municipal College] that was the typical student atmosphere and some of course weren’t even doing student teaching. They were there just to study—further education. You could pick your subjects. [In the elementary school] one interesting point is the size of the class. When I was a student teacher, there were 60 on roll. The normal thing was


for the class teacher to take half of the class one side of the room and I would take the other half so we were teaching together. But that was only part of the job. Then he would take the whole class and there would be times when I would take the whole class. And the head of the school would come in and listen to the lesson. Sit at the back of the room. And while we were doing student-teaching work we also had visits from these tutors at the college. The lecturers at the college would also come and listen to us give [lessons]. It was Portsmouth Municipal College so it would have been supported by the local authority, and I think this was part of the scheme that they would come in and listen to the lessons. Mainly women who would come in, they had only a women’s teachers’ college at Portsmouth, not a men’s section. [Their comments] would perhaps be more academically slanted, do you know what I mean? The head of the school would be looking for the practical teacher, class control which was so important in those days. Whereas the tutor by nature would perhaps be looking for the academic content of the lesson—checking. There was a good deal of checking then. The checking was what you had taught because then it was almost essential to give a test at the end, to see whether they had learnt what you had taught them. Now that of course is not done so much these days. While I was [at the elementary school] as student teacher, I had to take every lesson, any lesson, including PE. Whatever it was you would take the class. Either a whole class or half a class as it worked out. And it was, it was what they called the scholarship class. Now that was the class that was going to sit for the entrance for grammar school tuition. There was one other student teacher with me by the name of Gibbs. He’s dead now poor chap. But he had another class which was not the scholarship class. But I think it was perhaps chance, I don’t know. Yes, now come to think of it, my particular pal who was with me as a student teacher there, I think he got second-class honours in the school cert. I was lucky enough to get first-class honours and first division so that was perhaps why they put me with the scholarship class, I don’t know. It could be, I’ve never thought of it before. When you work it out, it’s possible isn’t it? These were 11–12 year olds but on occasion he taught older children in the school. The head insisted we took mainly that class but there were times when we were given another class to take. That was done deliberately I think because you see the others weren’t quite so academically endowed so you had to take that lot as well. It was very strictly controlled. There was a timetable which you entered. You kept a diary. Now that diary was printed by the local authority. I had it until a few years ago. I wish I’d kept it. And each lesson was ticked. And


where it was an observed lesson, there were remarks at the bottom by the head of the school who would come in to listen or by the tutor from the college who would come to listen. And they would criticise the whole of the lesson: its presentation. The atmosphere was one of strict control. Now if control began to slip and the class was getting disorderly, they would step in and they would say, ‘Mr’, or whatever it is, ‘Excuse me, Mr Phillips, for one minute.’ And they would then reprimand this pupil very severely. Make them sit down and say nothing. ‘No, don’t you ask the teacher anything unless you put your hand up. There’s no shouting. Now do you understand that? Right.’ And then you’d go on with the lesson. And this became so strict that the students fitted in with it. The idea was that no adult present would allow those children to get out of order. Coloured the whole thing— the whole school. The class teacher would tell you what he wanted done, that was all. And he said to me, ‘Look you have been learning the modem geography. Now when you fit in with our syllabus for geography, I want you to approach it in the more modern way, and I will see what you do.’ He watched me then. The difference being that up till then geography had been a list of capes and bays and rivers—most of them learnt by heart. I came along with what was then beginning to be known as regional geography and geography was a question of the area, land formations, how this led to certain agriculture development or industries. It was a completely different approach and I think it was this Miss Newbigin, who was one of those leading lights in it, she wrote books on it. But up till then it had been—the class master still wanted them to keep on with these bays. They used to sit, even then, he insisted that they learnt things like the peaks of the Pennines. Well the master was walking up and down with a stick under his arm, even in those days. And then he would stop and say, ‘Stop. Come here so-and-so. Come out at the front of the class. Recite the peaks of the Pennines.’ It wasn’t a free approach at all in the elementary schools. It was a strict approach. There’s no doubt about it, it gave a firm foundation in their education but it wasn’t education in the broader sense. Do you know what I mean? You knew all these bays and capes, rivers but although you knew the peaks of the Pennines, you’d never seen pictures of the Pennines, you’d never been taken on school journeys. So they were just names. [Maps] were few, they were very limited. You see the cost was high. So you were very lucky and these maps were handed round the school. They were very precious. And then these places were on occasion pointed out. But the main thing was to learn the names in order. It was the syllabus you see. It was the syllabus because there was a syllabus tied to the entrance exam. The entrance exam included arithmetic and until recently I had some of the papers. They involved adding, subtraction, with long figures—money: three hundred and forty-three thousand five hundred and twenty-two pounds, eleven and four pence three


farthings and then there were perhaps 12 columns. Figures like that and you added them up. And you either got it right or you got it wrong. That’s extra-ordinary, isn’t it? You either got it right or you got it wrong. Now that was in the entrance exam. You also had elementary algebra at 11 years of age. You had composition. You also had a dictation exam. Now how some would get on in these days with dictation exams I don’t know because marks were taken off for every spelling mistake. Or every word misunderstood. The lessons were if I remember they were about half an hour—normally half an hour spells. And of course the class master wasn’t in the room all the time. He would go out and leave you to it. And make sure you had good control by the time he came back. As a student teacher he was not allowed a stick. Not allowed to use corporal punishment at all. But the pupils were made very aware that if they stepped out of line, and you reported them to the class master then they would be punished, possibly physically. So it wasn’t a question of ‘well, if the student is there we can all go mad’. As it has been perhaps in more recent times: ‘Here comes a student, you know, he’s a lark.’ Training in professional skills was more or less anchored to the school. Although the tutors would come in from the [Portsmouth Municipal] college, that was done in the school. We did not have discussions in the college. It wasn’t a sort of education department at the college if you know what I mean, no. We didn’t see a lot of [the other student teachers] because they would go off to the various subjects when they were in the college so we got lost from them. It wasn’t until we got on to [teacher training] college itself [i.e. Borough Road] that we began to share experiences. And they did vary. They varied from area to area in the country. And many of the rural areas still did not have a fully developed student-teacher system. I felt that they were still mentally in the pupil-teacher [era]. He was not exploited with menial tasks. We had nothing of that at all. No, we were looked upon as a member of staff. Because you were told by the master in charge that ‘Here is your new teacher and you treat him the same as you treat me etc. etc.’ There was only one small thing which is interesting. The head master insisted that— he said, As you’re not much older than our oldest boys in the school, as you go out of a night, the older boys always say to me, “Good night sir”, and so I’d like you to do the same.’ The routine was quite strict. Perhaps more strict than in the provinces, than in the country as a whole, because we were a naval town. And some of the teachers had been in the First World


War, some commissioned, others not. But there was that semi-military atmosphere. He was treated by the other teachers as a full member of staff, they were helpful and supportive. By the end of his student-teacher year, he felt ready to teach. Yes, but I still felt I was a learner. I was a beginner and I was quite pleased to be able to go on to college. I felt I wanted further education and further practice in all kinds of education. The student-teacher year was useful experience. That was the point. Very strict year, hard work. Because having had that experience of having been in charge, I felt it was a job I could do. No doubt I could have done other jobs, I don’t know, but I felt well here’s something I can do. Some dropped out, yes, some dropped out. Not in that particular school. But some dropped out. Phillips thought you were expected to do the student-teacher year before moving on to college. At Borough Road I think they all had done student teaching. I think they’d all have done student teaching. That was the routine. But student-teaching experience among his colleagues at college did vary: Some found they’d got a lot out of student teaching. Others found they hadn’t got a great deal out of it. So much depended upon the master, the teacher you were put with. So much depended on that. Perhaps even more than the head of the school. And if he happened to be an enthusiast—I say he because they were boys’ schools in those days,—if he happened to be a keen enthusiastic hard-working chap, then it rubbed off on you and you had to fit in with his scheme. Looking back, had I been with a chap who was extremely easy going and didn’t worry too much about how lessons were prepared and so on, I would have suffered from that. Yes, I happened to be lucky. At Borough Road the college lecturers showed some interest in the studentteaching experience and made links. But did Gerald’s student-teacher experience in any way obviate the subsequent college experience? I had a feeling that I wanted wider experience. Had I gone on in that one school, I would have been set in a pattern without a further picture of education in a wider sense. But when you got to your college you saw the whole realm of education which was essential. Otherwise, you yourself would be tied to this old list of bays and capes. Do you know what I mean?


You could fall into this trap of education in a very narrow sense, which it really was. Some [students] stayed on for three years to complete the degree. I did only two years. Well, it was money wasn’t it? You see if you stayed on, you had to have somebody to support you. Very few stayed on. It was a minority. Most did the two years. I think to be fair to the staff at the college, I think they always felt sorry that we couldn’t go on for longer because they had so much that they felt they could teach us and we could learn, And why didn’t we? Money. It was entirely a question—one couldn’t afford to keep on studying. One had to begin to earn some money. I mean there was not the slightest doubt that many of those with me could have gone on, with advantage, to longer, further education but then would they have been lost to teaching? The point is they became good teachers. Nearly all those I’ve pointed out became heads and did other things. They became JPs [Justices of the Peace] and chairmen of councils and so on. I knew that I was hampered in a way by the fact that education in my early days was tied to money. Students who didn’t have quite a lot of money to spare, didn’t stand a lot of chance of going far. You were limited because it was a question of, ‘Well the money won’t take me any further.’ That’s not quite so today. Not to the same degree. But in those days that was true throughout society. Comparing the student-teacher year and the training college experience: I think I got quite a lot from both. I would marry the two. I would think that the student-teaching training was as I say the senior NCO level of class control and that sort of thing, which you see you still carry over to college. You’ve got that basic work so you get to college. You’ve learnt to be the NCO, you’ve learnt to be the senior NCO, but you then, you’re given your commission as it were, or you’re a junior officer. You then learn that higher rank. No those two things are essential because you see, if you only got the academic or the higher training shall we call it, you’re losing out on that, what shall I call it, basic drill. You see even in the army or the air force, even if you have a commission, you’ve got to do the basic drill. You’ve got to learn to control people. You’ve got to order, haven’t you? Well now I think that’s in teaching, part of teaching is that. Class teaching anyway. Now if you’re going to be a private tutor that’s a different thing. It’s an easier job, much easier job. Then you have the academic knowledge and so long as you’ve got a pleasing personality, can talk to young people, because I’ve done tutoring work as well, it’s much easier. But class control with a big organisation, brings in different powers, which some people have and some people haven’t and at student-teacher level it picked those


people out. If they found they just couldn’t do that, there’s no point in going on and educating yourself for teaching. Psychology and issues relating to physical development were well taught at Borough Road and these, in Gerald’s view, impinged upon the perceived status of teaching as a profession. Yes, psychology-based as well, yes. Yes Hughes [the college lecturer] ,2 he was a deep-thinking man. He would delve into these problems as to backwardness. How it would be linked with home circumstances, health. And this brought us in touch with what they called hygiene which was the development of the child, the physical development. Now, that was quite good, though later on in teaching I found that other colleges, particularly the women’s colleges developed that to a higher degree. And I think that is most important. I think more should be done in teacher training on the medical side. I found that later on teachers who had come from one or two particular colleges had… lectures [on this]. In one particular instance, they insisted that it was a doctor gave these lectures. Now this would include child development, things to look for in a child’s stance, walk, posture, hearing problems, eye problems, psychological disorders, and I found this was extremely useful because as more and more parents were going out to work, the teachers saw more of the children during the day than the parents did. Your staff must be trained. You can’t have a nurse in school all day long, and if she were, she wouldn’t be watching them, but the teacher is watching them. Now that’s where I think we’re looking into the future. We should have medical training at a certain level so that teachers could spot these problems at an early age preferably. This expectation of detailed and distinctive professional knowledge for teachers is further reflected in Gerald’s enthusiasm for further study after qualification, an enthusiasm which was also alive to instrumental ambitions. I went on studying as an external student. Academic subjects. I thought I would go on with the science—maths, science—which was physics and chemistry. There was great difficulty in getting enough practical work done with physics and chemistry as an external student. It cost a lot of money to use labs as a private student because I wasn’t at school any more. And I was teaching. So I then switched over and took a course in economics, which from an educational point of view is very useful because you’ve got economic history, economic geography, maths again. But yes, I felt that need for further study. Not for any particular reason though I knew, looking ahead, that it might help in promotion. But it was a feeling that I wanted to learn a bit more.


Gerald set great store by his own reading and academic development. Though in no sense bitter, he did feel frustrated in his own educational career by the persistent lack of resources. I was quite proud [to be a teacher] but the attitude of some people was you had become a little cultured shall we say, the attitude was, mind how you behave yourself. Now this was tied to the vision of a teacher. Do you know what I mean? Teachers were highly regarded. More so perhaps than now. And if I can break off on to another subject, when I was teaching in North London, when I had my own school, when I started in 1952 there— because I was 16 years as a head—we had all London children. Not necessarily cockneys but they were all London children. And then, in the 1960s we had an influx of people from abroad. And when I left the school, we had 40 per cent overseas children from 15 different countries. But this is an interesting point, when we first had the Caribbean children here, they were strictly disciplined. The parents were strict with them, they would smack them, they would control them in quite a severe way, and you were addressed as teacher: ‘Yes, Teacher; no, Teacher’, as you’d say doctor. It was the same atmosphere, ‘Good morning Doctor.’ And when they got to know you a bit better, as you do with a doctor, you say, ‘Hello Doc.’ ‘Good morning Doc.’ They’d call you ‘Teach’. It’s quite true. Back in the 1920s there were still people who addressed teacher as Teacher’, yes, but that faded away. But when these Caribbean children came here and the parents and children found that this wasn’t done, wasn’t the usual thing, I think that sowed the seeds for some change of attitude. They became more free and easy. Another reason for the respect in which teachers were locally held was their role as gatekeepers for grammar school entry. I think because of this competition to get into grammar schools. The pity of it was that those who’d just failed to get into a grammar school did not always have continued good education. The attitude of the teacher as a person of authority was important in those days because teachers did take note of what went on outside school and woe betide the pupil who was found playing the fool in the street. Now I feel that as time has gone on, even perhaps today, perhaps not all teachers but many teachers will say, ‘Well now, if it’s outside school it’s nothing to do with me.’ You had some of the grammar school teachers who weren’t all that good and you had some of the elementary school teachers who were excellent. You had some elementary school teachers who were widely read. You had some grammar school teachers who might only have just got into the job and not had much practical experience of teaching. They’d come straight


from university—without any teacher training. So yes there was an artificial distinction there, which also reflected itself in the pay scales, because the elementary pay scale was totally different from what they called the secondary scale which meant the grammar school scale. [The main rewards were] economically, I suppose, security of tenure. Not a high salary but a reasonable salary, and a pension at the end. But as for getting satisfaction from the job, yes I did. And if I had a choice to make now, if I were to go back and they said, ‘Well now you can choose a job again’, I still would reckon that teaching was one of the most rewarding. There is a tone of self-confidence and authority (if of a benign sort) in Gerald’s account of his professional development. This derives to some degree from the naval traditions of the family. I suppose quite frankly I was a disciplinarian by nature. I don’t know whether that was having connections with the Royal Navy. I had a grandfather on my father’s side who had been a full-time naval man and had been chasing slave dhows off the coast of Africa and he was a very strict person. I think perhaps that gave me a sense of discipline. No, I had no trouble in those days. And I had a good strong voice which was helpful. As in the case of Brian Sawkin (Chapter 9) and so many other of our male interviewees, Gerald’s career trajectory led on, in the context of the changing school structure after 1944, either to headship or to the secondary sector. Such movement frequently involved an adjustment in perceived status. Professional status in teaching also was more generally affected by wider changes in educational practice and theory. Here, for example, Gerald is referring to his experience as a student teacher, and to the regard for one section of the profession by another. But the point he makes carries a much wider significance for the way in which attitudes to teachers may have been changing. [As a student teacher] you shared the staff room [with older teachers]. And as education was altering across the country, I won’t say they looked upon us with awe, but they looked upon us as being a new generation who were coming out with new ideas in how you studied subjects. We were coming— we were from a generation which had more or less left behind this learning by rote. We had been to a school where it wasn’t learning by rote. So you were doing study in a totally different way. To be a good teacher you need, as you know, so many attributes. You need good health for a start. You need to be enthusiastic. You have to be hard-working. You have to have a broad vision of education. And industrious intelligence. You want a high degree of intelligence because I’ve known some people academically well-qualified who didn’t seem to


have the quick wits to be a teacher. The students would be ahead of them. Do you know what I mean? If they were too deep-thinking, too involved in the academic side, they could leave the students behind and they would go on with their academic thought while the students had gone off on another set of rails. You’ve got to be intelligent, quick enough to bring them back, or twist your rail to go in with them, as it were. NOTES 1. Dr Marion I.Newbigin (1869–1934) was a founder member of the Institute of British Geogographers, and wrote a number of geography textbooks for elementary and secondary schools and for the Home University Library in the 1910s and 1920s. See R.W.Steel, The Institute of British Geographers: The First Fifty Years (London, Institute of British Geographers, 1984), p.145; Rex Walford, Geography in British Schools 1850–2000: Making a World of Difference (London, Woburn Press, 2001), p.88. 2. From Phillips’ testimony it was clear that A.G.Hughes had had a considerable influence on him, A former inspector of schools for London County Council, Hughes and his wife were joint authors of Learning and Teaching: An Introduction to Psychology and Education (First published 1937, 21st impression, 1959), described as ‘one of the most successful British textbooks of educational psychology’. L.S.Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology 1840–1940 (London, Methuen, 1964). What our respondent valued in Hughes was that he successfully combined the academic and the practical. A skilled and experienced practitioner in the schools of London, he brought the new science of psychology to bear on his experience. ‘Well he was the leading light. Yes. He knew he was good. He knew he could handle the job, and he had started in an elementary school in London you see.’

12 MISS DAISY SHIPLEY AND MR ARTHUR SHIPLEY

Daisy Shipley (A232) was born in 1907, her younger brother Arthur (A021) in 1908. They were the second and third in a family of five children. Both had long and distinguished careers as head teachers in primary and secondary schools respectively, whilst a younger sister also became a deputy head at Dartington.1 Their mother was a housewife, their father trained as a builder, becoming manager of the maintenance department in a large Sheffield cutlery works. Daisy and Arthur responded to the project’s press appeal quite independently of each other and were interviewed separately, living as they then did, at some considerable distance apart. The contrasting style of the testimony of each is instructive. Daisy’s very fluent account of her career was steeped in the technique of teaching, and in the craft of the classroom, though not without substantial philosophical underpinning. Arthur was more reticent generally (at the time of interview he was in pain, and tired) but he too was concerned with the mechanics of curriculum innovation, especially for less able secondary children. Common features of their personalities and their childhood experiences appear to have had some significant bearing on similarities in their subsequent careers. It was clear from their interviews, as from their teaching records, that both were strong characters, critical and independent thinkers, articulate, hard-working and well-organised. The family were active members of the Methodist chapel, attending services twice on Sundays, and had high educational ambitions for their children. Despite some criticism from fellow protestants, Daisy was sent to a Roman Catholic Convent School: My father had a job as clerk of the works because he’d been trained as a builder and he got this job in 1901, I think, to care for the buildings in this famous cutlery firm of James Dixon and Sons. And there was a Doctor of Science working with him there and apparently from what I remember of the discussion, he said to my father, ‘You should send your daughter to the best school in Sheffield. Don’t neglect her education, it’s important.’ So Dad said to him, ‘Well, what do you consider the best school in Sheffield?’ So there was a convent high school called the High School for Young


Ladies— on the door that’s what it said. I forget what we paid but my father had to pay and my sister followed me there later. Arthur recalled that: My mother never even went to school. She came from the centre of Lincolnshire and the only school that there was there was a dame school. And she never went to school—found it very difficult to read. But she was a lovely person and very astute on housekeeping. But father was very keen, so was mother. And, of course, I went to grammar school. I think it was 1920, either 1919 or 1920. I had six years there and of course, it was the depth of the depression, after the First World War. There were more unemployed and my father said, ‘You want a job where they won’t sack you and where you’ll get a pension.’ I don’t know why, but he was very good. He worked a lot in the church and in the Sunday school where he was very good at controlling children and it didn’t seem an unnatural thing to want to be a teacher. And when I got to the end of my grammar school career [at Sheffield Grammar School], he said he couldn’t afford to send me to university. It was four years—but I could go to college and I applied to the authority to be a student teacher. Two younger siblings also went into teaching, as Arthur noted: I had a younger brother, and he went to college and he became a teacher as well. I don’t think he wanted to, but I think parental pressure was put on him. And I had a younger sister and she went into clerical work—she was younger than my brother—but they started that emergency training course for people, she was selected—and I think she went for a year to a college in Leicester. Daisy and Arthur shared a profound love of nature, in part the result of regular family trips to the countryside in childhood. For Daisy, this lasting interest would permeate the curriculum when she was a teacher. Moss Carr was a lovely spot in Derbyshire where my father, he had a motor bike and sidecar, and we used to go regularly to Moss Carr to picnic. Moss Carr as it was called, and then we got bicycles and—my brother and I used to go out on our bicycles a lot. And when coming back from Moss Carr, it was downhill so we could free pedal. I was very fond of nature study with having been out every weekend, practically, with my parents who used to walk and go into the country, which was very nice around Sheffield.


The family was reasonably secure financially, though there were constraints and these did have direct career effects. Following his student-teacher year, Arthur was obliged to spend a year in uncertificated teaching before proceeding to college, whilst his elder sister completed her college course, the family being unable to afford to have both attending college at the same time. Daisy was offered a job in London on completing her training, but decided that as it was now her brother’s turn for college, she should look for a local post. Both also remembered the wider impact of the recession. As Arthur observed: Costs came first. My elder sister was at college in Darlington largely on a loan from an elderly head mistress. I had to wait for her to finish before I could expect to go—family finance. One had to pay for college hostel residence. My father arranged a loan for me. I repaid it as soon as I began teaching. Daisy recalled that at the end of her college training: You had to go and be appointed, and I was very lucky because then the recession was on and so teachers were scarce, they cut down the teaching. Neither of my friends got a job straight away but I was fortunate and got one in Sheffield. I’d been offered one in London but since my brother had to go to college after me, I decided my place was to stay at home. I can’t remember what the annual pay was but I remember receiving my first salary. The man came with a Gladstone bag and you all went in, the staff went into a queue after the head, into the staff room. And I was the bottom on the list, I remember. And you had to sign, and I got £11 a month then, and then as things got worse during the recession, we were asked to take a reduction. Nobody struck of course, you just accepted it, then I got £9 a month. And I remember feeling very sad and almost weeping because I couldn’t afford to buy myself an umbrella. I hadn’t got an umbrella at that time of my own. Both recalled alternative early ambitions. Daisy had wanted first to be a missionary teacher in Africa, inspired by missionaries who visited her church, and secondly a nurse, but poor health in the form of rheumatism closed off each of these routes. Third, I would have become a Domestic Science Teacher. I had enjoyed Domestic Science and won a prize. To enter college I had to do one year pupil-teaching. When the year was completed my parents were sent for and were told that I was a born infant teacher and that is what I would train for. So that was it… Of course, my mum and dad, not knowing a lot about it accepted this.


Arthur had hoped to become a doctor, but the cost of training was prohibitive. At 16 he was a teacher in the Wesleyan Chapel Sunday School and enjoyed working with teenage boys. This experience shifted him towards a career in elementary teaching. He was taken on as a student teacher in 1926–27, worked for a further year as an uncertificated teacher in two schools, and then attended his local college, Sheffield City Training College, from 1928–30. Daisy recalls that her place on the student-teacher course required her to pass a special examination in arithmetic, instituted by the then Director of Education, Percival Sharp, out of concern for standards of arithmetic teaching in elementary schools. A lot of candidates failed but she thought that she was lucky as she was not bad at arithmetic. At the age of 17 she was placed in a Sheffield elementary school called Philadelphia. I enjoyed it ever so much. But looking back on it, I thought, how, essentially I thought how stilted it was. It was all the teacher talking and the children just sitting there. And you’d have 50. Yes, I can remember then standing in front of this class when a teacher was away, showing them how to make a house out of paper. And I can remember saying, ‘Now, fold it this way first and then fold it again there’, and went around watching them all do it. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. But you see you’d no material at all or colour to make it attractive. It was just a plain piece of paper built so that it stood like a house. And you didn’t have crayons to do the drawing. There was reading, you could hear them read. And I wasn’t one that believed in group reading from an early age. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’re learning anything, doing this, I don’t think they can read like this.’ So I used to hear children individually and give the others something to do from the reading book or when I had my own way as a teacher, I used to make a lot of apparatus. And you used to have to buy your own cards to do it but there was a good shop in Sheffield where they used to sell all that sort of stuff. I used to buy the card and make apparatus. I would be up late at night making this apparatus so that the children could be employed and use it to learn. And latterly, of course, you’d been able to buy a lot of [this apparatus] that was used when I was in school eventually. As a student teacher she was visited by: the inspector of the town, advisers I think they were called, and this particular one that’s not nice to say but she wasn’t liked by the teachers and they called her Miss Hassel but they used to call her Kertassle. And that’s stuck in my mind because I remember that very plainly and she nearly always came dressed in green in a green hat. She simply liked what I did, and she said to me, ‘You must not go in for domestic science, you are a born infant teacher.’ So of course the head mistress took this tone as well and said, ‘No, you can’t—you can’t go for domestic science, it’s too limited.’ She


sent for my parents. I think in fact she came to the house as well to see them. She said, ‘She must go to college and train as an infant teacher. She has the ability, especially for infant training.’ So, of course, my mum and dad, not knowing a lot about it accepted this and she said ‘Darlington is the best college, they’re very good there so I suggest she goes to Darlington College.’ So that was the end of it really, and that’s where I went. Daisy was not really aware whether most of the other students had been student teachers and the college had not made much reference to her student-teacher experience. I don’t think my friends had done the student-teaching—straight from school, I think. But I always thought it was an advantage. I still think when the students go just straight from school to college, it would be nice if they knew about inside a school before they went. But then the authorities say, ‘Well, if they don’t get into a good school, they’ll pick up bad habits.’ Well, you would have thought they would know which were the good schools, wouldn’t you? But no, I feel they ought to know about schools first so they understand what goes on but I don’t really know what’s taught in college these days—my teacher friends have never thought much of the system recently. When she finished her student-teacher year she did not feel experienced enough to work as a class teacher ‘because I knew that college was looming all the time and that I would learn more’. But as regards actual teaching, in completing the project questionnaire she discussed with her old college friends how and what they learned about teaching. And neither of them could remember that we had lectures on method and I can remember when I was put in my first class, all these little children had got these books. My first week, I can remember being stunned by the thought, ‘Oh I’m going to have to teach all these children to read.’ And they were five-and-a-halfs and there were 48 of them and I kept wondering how am I going to start? Then as I say I saw through the partition, this teacher in the next room got these children round and these little books were full of sentences with three letter words. And rather like the coloured pictures at the top half and then the bottom was The Fat Cat Sat On The Mat, The Dog—all that sort of thing. So then I thought, Well, I’ll have to teach the sounds. So I taught sounds, and sounding from the board to all the lot at once, and I used to hear them read separately, I still didn’t have an open ring with them standing round. I think [student teaching] had given me a confidence in myself which made me feel I could teach and this head mistress was a very good person. It was very formal teaching. And I could almost blush with shame


at the way I taught design and when the inspector came, he thought it was a good idea but now I think ‘how terrible’ thinking that was the way. There was some squared paper supplied, and how I first taught patterns to these six-year-olds: you cut out squares, and you arrange them, square, space, square, space then the next line you put the square in the space and the next square. Her experience at Philadelphia School may well have contributed significantly to the progressive teaching style which characterised her own subsequent career. It was in a very, very poor area, half way to town from where I lived. And the head mistress was a little lady, but she was very interested in Montessori work and there used to be some lectures given on this Montessori work. And so I used to go with her and—various lectures with music and use of the gramophone, and this Montessori building work. And in that school I had 20 children, the head teacher’s desk was there and my little class of 20, was just there, right next to her desk. And she was helpful in telling me what to do and I enjoyed it. And I loved it when anybody was absent because she didn’t get a supply. She said, ‘Would you like to take the class?’ ‘Oh I would’, I said, ‘Yes, I would thank you’, so she let me take the class. Daisy had few strong memories of having learned much of use to her teaching while at college, but personal aspects of the experience were strongly recalled. I don’t really know what we learned about teaching, I can’t think, but we never learnt much. It was called Method. Well, I took science and natural history and I took advanced gardening because I was going to be in an infant school, hoping there’d be some garden. The gardens were very neat and with being interested in gardening of course and my father was a gardener, I noticed these lovely gardens and as I said, there were rows and rows of cabbages and onions. And then you took the history of education and hygiene, and the hygiene person was a very tall lady who—one thing I can remember her telling [us] about—was if you travel on a train, you must put a scarf at the back of your head, before you lean on the seat or you might get lice in your hair. I can remember that ever so well, that bit, because we used to say, ‘Oh fancy, going in the train, putting a scarf on, they’d think you were funny.’ But that’s what she said, and you had to wear long stockings when it was cold and you had to wear warm underwear. It was more that sort of hygiene. No, it wasn’t [very useful] it was a personal affair really. And then the music teacher, well, she sparkled music and we sang and we did rhythmic work— they were pleasant, her lessons; and then the art mistress, she was a nice little person.


I kept saying to my friends when I was thinking about filling in this form [the project questionnaire] in the first instance, ‘Can you think how—what we learnt about teaching?’ Kim said, ‘No, I don’t, I can’t remember much at all’ And neither of them could remember that we had lectures on Method. You hardly ever saw the Principal; she was a very severe looking lady who had—you’d call it a lorgnette, one eye and one of those things, and she was always looking at everything through that and she never—she didn’t really know us at all. She took the assembly, Sunday night, that was the only time we had one and that was about the only time I felt sad; when we were all together, singing hymns and either one of the staff or she would say the prayer, I used to feel homesick then, Sunday nights. Arthur recounted: I decided to teach while I was still at grammar school and I’d done quite a bit of teaching in Sunday School and quite enjoyed that and it seemed an almost natural thing to do, to go on teaching. Father was very keen, so was mother, it was the depth of the depression, after the First World War [1926]. There were more unemployed and my father said, ‘You want a job where they won’t sack you and where you’ll get a pension.’ When I got to the end of my grammar school career, he said he couldn’t afford to send me to university. But I could go to college and I applied to the authority to be a student teacher and that meant that I taught Monday morning, I went back to grammar school on Monday afternoon and then I taught Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday in the school. And the condition was that I never taught more than 20 children. In those days there were classes of 60 and I started in a room with 60 children and these 20 were mine and those 40 were the teacher’s, you see. Now, for some lessons, he took the whole lot, and for occasional lessons, I tried to teach the lot. Teaching 60 was no easy job. But the 20 were mine and occasionally, I was allowed to take them outside into the cloakroom and teach them separately. And then, for some reason, I was transferred from that school which was Upperthorpe to Netherthorpe and Netherthorpe was a grim castle of a place. It was all locked up at nine o’clock so nobody could get out and no one else could get in. And again I had 20 children and the woman, Miss Hall it was, she had 40 and I was taught by the head master and by her how to teach arithmetic and English and that was it. I can remember standing close up to the boys and the head master coming in and getting hold of the seat of me pants and saying, ‘You stand here when you teach’, and pulling me back so that I wasn’t on top of them, I was back from them. That’s a little thing I remembered. But apparently, they liked what I did, and in April when the school year ended, I was given a little classroom of my own with 20 children in it.


And that was a great honour to have a classroom of my own, and it had an open fire in the front and the seats were pews and they went up to the back and I had 20 children in that room. And then, I had to prepare four quite different lessons for four different age-groups and be prepared to teach one of these lessons to the senior inspector of schools. And he came in one morning and said, That’s the one, I want to hear you teach that.’ He was quite pleased with what he heard and he asked me what I was going to do. And I said, ‘Well, ‘course I want to go to college but I’ve a sister who’s nearly two years older than me and she’s at college and my father can’t afford to send me to college while she’s at college so I’ve got to wait a year.’ So he said, ‘Well, you can apply for a job as an uncertificated teacher but I’m not very hopeful.’ So I applied for a job and living in Sheffield, I also applied to Chesterfield and Chesterfield appointed me and I think the salary then was £98 a year. Now, how I thought I was going to live in Sheffield, travel to Chesterfield, teach and get home, and live on £98 a year, I don’t know. Now for some reason and I don’t know what it was, the Director of Education sent for me, and questioned me, but he said ‘Go upstairs and see Mr Quine and tell him to give you a job.’ I said, ‘I’ve seen him and he’s told me to emigrate to Canada.’ And he said, ‘Go and tell him what I tell you, he’s to give you a job.’ So, of course, I went upstairs, saw Mr Quine and said, The director says you’ve to give me a job.’ The net result was that I was medically examined, very strictly, I passed that and I was sent to a Church school where I was given a small class to teach, ‘cause they were all small in a Church school in those days, as an uncertificated teacher at £108 a year. Surprising how far it went in those days and I taught in that Church school until the end of the school year, which was March 31st and then my class disappeared. And the inspector of schools came up and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you somewhere else’, and he took me off down to a big school in the centre of the city and the head master said, ‘This is your class. The teacher’s in hospital/ And when I enquired why he was in hospital, one of the students had hit him in the face and smashed his glasses and all. And it was a class of 60 again, pews, right up to the back. And that’s what I had to do from April ‘til the end of July. That was as an uncertificated teacher and then I went to college. [The children] were all in the senior part of the school so they would be aged between 11 and 13. I never thought about the near equality of age [pupils being only four or five years younger than him]. I enjoyed teaching and I didn’t really have any terrible difficulties with discipline. I don’t know why but I didn’t. I prepared my work. As a student teacher—alternate weeks where one week I had to give a lesson which the head master did a severe criticism of, bit


by bit, and the following week, he would make me listen to him give a lesson and I had to give an appreciation of the way he taught a lesson, that was done alternately as a student teacher with a full class. The discipline in both the schools I taught in when I was a student teacher was good. They were both boys’ schools, not mixed, and there was very firm discipline so I don’t think there was any—I don’t remember having any—problems. You were accepted as part of the staff and at Netherthorpe, I’d strict instructions never to try to walk from the school to the centre of the city which was through the back streets because it was too dangerous. We always went in either twos or threes, preferably in threes, and ‘If anybody asked you a light for a cigarette, don’t give them one, because that was the way that they would attack you.’ These are the things I remember learning at that time. At Upperthorpe, the head had a room and the staff had a room. At Netherthorpe, there was only one room and that was a big stock room and the head used that as his private room but all the staff came in to my little classroom to sit round the fire for their lunch, which was an amiable business, of course. Staff rooms were not frequent things in all schools. Netherthorpe’s been demolished long ago. I don’t think Upperthorpe has, it was a nicer school, high up on the hill. Teaching staff in those days were held in high regard and it was a good job to have because you worked five days a week, and Saturday you had off, and that was important because the rest of the world was working till one o’clock on Saturday. And in my early teaching days, before I was married, it was possible to go into the centre of Sheffield and do some shopping when the shops were nearly empty. Now, Saturday afternoon, they were packed to the doors because everybody was free to come so you had a privileged position. Didn’t last after the five day working week was brought in but it was all right in those days. It’s astonishing to me in these days that on £108 a year, I could manage. I could pay my mother a reasonable amount for my board and have, not a lot, but a bit left over to buy clothes. I could get a good suit made for £5, I mean a good suit at a first class tailors and a pair of grey flannels tailor-made for a guinea. Even uncertificated he felt like a real teacher, but, ‘I never dreamt of not going onto college, oh no, I wanted to go to college.’ So by the time he did get to college, Arthur had ‘had a lot of experience in different schools and difficult schools too’. I thought it was a great pity, [that ‘they abolished student teachers’] I thought the student-teaching year was a very helpful and a very good year, training. You got close attention of the head on how to teach, how to handle classes.


Though a period of uncertificated teaching prefaced his college training, Arthur never contemplated foregoing college altogether. I wanted to go to college. Well, it offered you a training as a teacher, you see, and a certification as a teacher and I know that the actual college training was paid for by the education authority but I lived in the hostel, a very, very pleasant hostel attached to the college and for that I think we paid a sum of £80 a year. And when I’d finished, I’d that to repay. It was borrowed and I had to repay it as soon as I started teaching. My father borrowed it [privately]—I can’t remember quite how, but I think it was a kind of insurance policy. It never occurred to me to be a day student because the college was the other side of the city, was in a very highly residential area of the city and it would have been a long journey each morning and evening to college. I suppose you lived in an atmosphere of education, and teaching and learning. You were never away from it, really. You went down to the college in the morning for lectures, you came back for lunch. We had lunch in the dining room and we discussed, there were eight of us at a table, and we discussed things, I suppose. Then you went out to college in the afternoon for lectures. One afternoon we had for games. It was a very full life and a very sociable life because you’d a common room and the dining room and your own study. Everybody had their own private study. So it was in a sense, it was a very concentrated educational experience. I got a very good qualification from college, a very good qualification and so it gave me a lot of confidence. At college, Arthur formed good relationships with a number of his lecturers. One or two of the tutors invited me to their homes and the English tutor kept up a friendship with me for some years. I was very friendly with two of the other tutors. I had a very good experience and knowledge of Derbyshire, which was on the doorstep, and they’d come as strangers to the area and they wanted me to show them some of Derbyshire so I had some long Saturday walks with two of them, separately. [Teachers] were a very distinctive race, I thought, yes. I think in those days, I’m talking about the early ‘thirties, the teaching profession was held in considerable esteem. I’m judging this from the fact that the church I went to, well it was a Wesleyan chapel actually, but there were a number [of teachers] and they were considered to be, you know, people of quite high standing. And while your salary wasn’t enormous, it was adequate. A number of other students at Arthur’s college [City of Sheffield] had been student teachers.


But some students from the North didn’t seem to have had any student teaching. I found that I had a big advantage when I was at college because I’d already had two years in classrooms and when we were in college, we went out on what was known as school practice. A group of six students would go into a school for a fortnight and the lecturer in charge of teacher-training method would come and assess us, and that was no trouble to me, I enjoyed that. Mind you, you taught with the teacher remaining in the classroom for the most part. It didn’t worry me because I’d been used to teaching in the presence of other people. The lecturers in college didn’t really discuss student-teaching experience. In college there was a specific method we were taught and now I’m speaking from memory, and it’s way back in 1928–30 but it was known as the Herbartian steps. I think I remember it as five steps of learning and every lesson you prepared, to be prepared on those five steps and taught on those five steps. I don’t think it was any bad system, it led to a very good method in your teaching, a purpose in your teaching. I don’t know that when I left and started to teach that I thought about that a lot but that was the plan that was used right through the teacher training and every week, we went to a school and we sat in a classroom, and the master in charge of method taught a lesson and we had to do a criticism of the lesson. And then, that night we had to write it up and pass it in, and it was passed back to us with a graded mark, A, B, C or D, you know, plus or minus on each one. And it was regarded as one of the big weekly tasks that of writing your ‘crit’ up. Yes. The satisfaction he derived from teaching, like that of his sister, had a lot to do with helping those who were manifestly less fortunate. Well, there were various satisfactions. I was very happy, very satisfied when I took over my first school, which was right in the centre of the city. It was in an old back-to-back housing area, and it had been an area where miners had lived for many years. And on Monday morning, the washing was put out across the street. The six or eight houses in the enclave all had [between them] one or two WCs, you know. I remember going into one of the houses and they’re really three stories high, one room and then a little staircase in the corner going up into the next and then up into the next. And these were in the process of demolition and people sent out, into new estates on the outskirts of the city. But that was my first school and I took over the boys’ department and then the head mistress of the girls’ retired and I was given the girls’ and then the head mistress of the infants’ retired and it was made into an all-age school. ‘Cause one chap said to me, ‘You’ve got them now, from the cradle to the grave.’ And of course the war broke out and the school was made into an ARP centre and a special sort


of medical centre and I had the rest. But it worked quite well and even in the heaviest bombing, we had windows shattered but we survived. Arthur’s appointment to his first headship had come at the relatively young age of 29. I wanted my own school, and to run my own school in my own way. I wanted to be a head master. ‘Cause it’s a great thing to have a school and to know what you’re doing with it. I certainly wanted to succeed in my profession and I think, I think I was helped by the inspectorate, and by the fact that I’d got a very good teaching certificate and I could teach. I enjoyed teaching and I think the move from the old elementary school with 60 boys in front of you, to the new conception of a senior school, where all the facilities that you wanted like laboratories and workshops and art rooms were provided, was a very great step. It was quite a move. You only had 40 children in front of you instead of 60 for a start. Both Daisy and Arthur recalled the hard work that teaching entailed and, in particular, the preparation of resources and materials in their own time, outside school hours. For Daisy, this ‘zeal’ may have contributed to two nervous breakdowns in the course of her career. And there would be an inspector of registers come, he was called Mr Steer, and he would look at the register, and see what number there was. He would count the children and check to see that you’d got the right number… And I remember once I’d got a class -I was taking the boys of Standard I, it was. I was doing clay with them. I’d been to a course on claymaking which was held in the town—using clay in school. And, of course, it needed a lot of preparation, you had to cover the tables, you’d to have the clay right, the right moisture… He came and I’d never marked my register. Oh dear, the head mistress came round with him, ‘Now, what’s happened to the register? Why isn’t the register marked?’ ‘I don’t know’, I said, ‘I’ve just been getting ready for this afternoon. I’ve forgotten to mark it.’ So fortunately, I mean I was let off and so in the log book it had to be entered—‘Zeal for work prevented Miss Shipley’s marking the register on this day.’ I was excused, ‘zeal for work’, that’s all. That was the only time I’d forgotten to mark my register. Both Daisy and Arthur benefited from the personal intervention of Percival Sharp, Director of Education for Sheffield. Sharp had helped Arthur in gaining a post as an uncertificated teacher to tide him over the year before college; in Daisy’s case, Sharp’s involvement came later in her career.


Seven years, I was there [at Langsett Road Infants’] and, at the end of that time [1935], I had a nervous breakdown and the doctor said it would perhaps be a good idea if I had a change of school. Well, I was very reluctant to do this but he thought that I’d taught long enough in a poor school. But actually I liked it. The children were appreciative and I liked being there and I liked the head and everything. But he said ‘No, I think you would benefit’; so I don’t know whether he wrote to the Director Percival Sharp. A very strict man was Percival Sharp. After this application had been made through the doctor he sent for me and—he had to have a special desk I think, he was rather a large sort of man—and he sat there and, ‘Good morning. How long have you been teaching?’ I said, ‘Seven years.’ ‘Well, you don’t look like that.’ I can remember that, and he said, ‘Now, I understand it’s better for you to have a change in school.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what the doctor seems to think’, so he said, ‘Well, now, I’m going to put your foot on the ladder. I’m going to send you to a new school which is just opening.’ And so, after the summer holidays, I went to this new school [Woodthorpe Junior Mixed Infants], right at the other end of the town, which meant two different tram journeys. And it was a very different school but of course even in this school, there were always children who’d been moved from the slums to occupy this big estate. The stresses and strains of teaching in wartime Sheffield resulted in a second nervous breakdown for Daisy. But the war also gave her later enthusiasm for progressive practice, a further boost in the unexpectedly propitious experience of Sheffield’s wartime ‘home schooling’ service. Daisy was already familiar with the poor home backgrounds of many Sheffield schoolchildren, but this experience took her even closer to them. If home teaching deepened her sympathy for the poor, it also placed practical constraints upon teaching methods. It was then at this school that home service was introduced and the school was closed. Their homes had been visited by somebody to make sure which homes would take the teacher and groups of children in the mornings. So you actually went into the homes of the people and you were perhaps left to keep the stew going in the oven. It was very peculiar really and sometimes the smells weren’t always good. You went from house to house teaching a group of-I think there were perhaps 12–15 children and if there was a table it was good, you could get them round. And you only went in the mornings. So that was an experience in itself and that wasn’t really a successful thing. It was very difficult to teach children under those conditions. [The parents] went out, they didn’t stay in, they always went away, they didn’t stay in. And they would wait till you arrived which was about half past nine I think. And in their way, they’d cleaned up and made the house look nice but it was what they left cooking that was the problem.


The advisers came to visit us, to see how we were getting on in these schools just as they did in the school itself. I can’t remember how long it went on, probably till we had shelters built. [The war] was very stressing for teachers really I think. [Later] I was sent to a school in another part of the town [Pye Bank Infants’] and that was an old school, such an old building with infants, the lower ground, and girls above and the boys’ school was separate. And there we had [air raid] shelters just the same but it was much nearer to the works and the railway, that school, so I was a bit nervous there. And there again there were rough poor children but some better dressed than others and better kept. And the parents were always very friendly and nice, and I liked that school very much. The war brought conditions of unexpected freedom in terms of curriculum practice and Daisy began more and more to reflect for herself on teaching method. I liked the atmosphere and I could teach as I wished. I don’t know whether the head teacher had even got a syllabus—I never saw one. I was thinking a lot then whether I was giving children the right way to learn. I became very interested in psychology. And I used to read, I can’t remember what the books were, but I read English psychology books. And then French ideas about education, and I heard the French people had certain ideas? And then the Germans; but the Germans were more rigid, but it was the psychology that interested me. And I began to think about teaching more in a psychological way and how the child grew and how the brain developed. And that the reading side developed sooner than the maths side, and that fascinated me. I did this on my own because I just became interested in it. I can’t remember how long I was at this school [Pye Bank Infants’] because the school was bombed. It was when Sheffield was raided, badly. And it was bombed and I remember walking through all the debris going to school, the morning after, through all the glass and stuff in the streets, and going up and seeing the devastation in the school. But I always remember my goldfish were still swimming in the tank! And so I rescued those, took them home. After this bombing attack, children and teachers were dispersed among other schools. I was then sent to a junior school [Woodside] and it was quite close to the gasworks, which I thought was worse still, in this bombing period. I was terrified actually. However my experience there was very enjoyable. I loved this class of 8- to 9-year-olds and got on very well with the head teacher. And she’d never had anybody to teach nature study or to do the sort of handwork I did. And it was quite new to her, the way I taught


anyhow. She liked it very much and—so did I. I enjoyed the freedom of working in this junior school. And it stood me in good stead. In 1944, after her second breakdown, Daisy moved to Swallow Nest Junior Mixed Infants’ School near Rotherham, which came under the authority of the West Riding—‘a wonderful Committee to work for’—and so embarked on her 24 years of headship which she came to regard as ‘the happiest years of my life’. Like Arthur, whose later professional development included national networking through work which he subsequently undertook for the Schools’ Broadcasting Council, Daisy went on to acquire a professional reputation beyond her immediate locality. An important factor here was her attendance at a series of courses run by HMI on the development of progressive primary practice. These were advertised in the West Riding and never happened in Sheffield. HMI courses [of] which the first was at Cambridge in the ladies’ college, I think it was.2 And that was about the 11 plus, which I’d never agreed with because there was so much coaching went on, which I thought wasn’ right. And I didn’t agree with that at all, and I wouldn’t coach my children. I went to this course and learnt about how they arrived at the percentage —what the [pass level of] intelligence [quotient] was. But they were all men except three of us, there were only three women. And it was very rare at that time for a woman to get [a] head[ship] of a junior school, they were mostly men. But I came away deciding that they were all coaching children and trying to make, their school successful with results. And so I wasn’t influenced by that at all. I was very fortunate how I was selected for these courses. There was another one at Chichester with HMIs, and some of the HMIs were lovely people I thought. And they had ideas which they talked about more freedom, and developing the child. And then there was that one at Chichester and then another one I went to, I forget where that was held then. The West Riding held a course at Filey about art. And the man in charge of art in West Riding, he was a delightful person, but it was all free art, big papers, big brushes and introducing children to colour.3 I was very attracted by that and I took up that method and then there was music, a music course in the West Riding during the holidays at Bingley College and I went to that one. It was this freedom in education which fascinated me. And developing the whole child rather than just his development in arithmetic and English. To think of the spiritual side and the child as a whole, that was what mattered. And I used to tell my children, ‘We don’t have tops and bottoms, it’s what sort of a person you are that counts. Everybody can’t be clever but it’s if you’re a good person, that’s what’s important.’


Daisy had not realised when she applied to the West Riding that the Chief Education Officer, Alec Clegg, was particularly interested in progressive teachers. Subsequently, an educational psychologist brought Clegg to visit her school, and he was most supportive, borrowing children’s work to show at lectures which he gave around the world, and readily providing her with any special materials that she requested. Then I gave a lecture to teachers at Woolley Hall who’d come from the rural schools in Yorkshire.4 And some of those teachers had tears in their eyes at the end of my talk. They were very moved. I talked to the teachers [at my own school] about it and they were ever so cooperative, yes. One poor old soul, she was uncertificated. She was ever so keen to take part. I felt sorry for her really because she hadn’t been to college. She just learned to teach in her student teaching. They used to do a lot of uncertificated teaching at that time, it was cheaper. Oh yes, the teachers entered into it and they enjoyed it. Some of the HMIs seemed to like to come. And they would come after school and the caretaker said, ‘Oh, they stayed till half past six’, and they would be reading some of the English that was written. They used to come to the school a lot, visitors. In coaches actually at night. I gave lectures sometimes about that. I took the children out a lot…and I took the top class to York every year. Then they all had a big book and they wrote about York on their own terms, not dictated. And they were lovely books. Daisy thought that the teaching profession was very much respected when she was young. You had ‘got somewhere’ and were considered well paid, though infant teachers were not held in the same regard as other teachers. When I first started teaching, no, they thought you were not as clever as the top—as those who taught the older children. We didn’t get the same pay as men. I never knew about it for ages and eventually, it began to be talked about and discussed. There was discrimination between men and women obviously at that time but infant teachers, it was thought, they weren’t as important as senior people. By the time of her retirement in 1968, Daisy found aspects of the profession beginning to disappoint her. The age was becoming…more slack. Teachers weren’t dressing so well. I had students—in fact I had letters from the principals [of training colleges) asking me to watch how they dressed when they came to school. Well, that never used to be, I used to have quite a lot of students.


And, looking back from retirement in 1968, it was clear to Daisy that teaching had changed enormously. It was much more interesting and the teachers like me even now, they say, ‘We taught in the golden age’, that’s how they refer to it… It was happy, and it was called the happy school. I converted a little classroom into a staff room. I had a wash bowl put in it and things were made much more comfortable but we were a team. I wasn’t head and [they] the teachers, we were just a team and worked together all the time. I regret what they’re doing to education. I think what myself and some others who I used to meet…believed in developing—what we call a whole child. I love to talk about [education] and my sister, she doesn’t. She says ‘Oh, I don’t want to know about [the mess] they’re making—we’ve had enough about making a mess of education now.’ She taught on similar lines but she was deputy head at Dartington School. And my brother [Arthur]—now I don’t know whether he favoured the freeness so much, but he had a very good school. Yes, he believed in expanding it from the classroom. He took children out and did exploratory work much more interesting than—the normal schools did. He got on very well with the education officer there, and he helped him with his materials and—and he was a good producer of Gilbert and Sullivan. A secondary school, and it was all boys when he first went and then of course his school became mixed, he liked that. He got the OBE for education in that county [Shropshire]. I went to his school when I went to visit there, He retired because those applying for jobs and those who had applied and got jobs, he couldn’t stand their approach. They didn’t dress properly and he was very keen on teachers looking smart and respectable. NOTES 1. Dartington Hall (1926–87) was a notable progressive independent school with a strong commitment to the creative arts, and was also the location for many HMI courses for teachers in post-war decades. See Michael Young, The Elmhirsts of Dartington: The Creation of an Utopian Community (London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1982); Mark Kidel, Beyond the Classroom: Dartington’s Experiments in Education (Hartland, Green, 1990). 2. HMI Leonard Clark describes an HMI poetry course at Newnham College, Cambridge, in August 1948. Leonard Clark, The Inspector Remembers: Diary of One of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, 1936–1970 (London, Dennis Dobson, 1976), p.117. 3. Art adviser Basil Rocke, who had worked with Franz Cizek and was brought to work in the West Riding by Alec Clegg. Peter Darvill, Sir Alec Clegg: A Biographical Study (Knebworth, Able Publishing, 2000), pp.46–7.


4. Woolley Hall was a pioneering residential Teachers’ Centre near Wakefield, the location of many important in-service courses for progressive primary teaching. P.H.J.H.Gosden and P.R.Sharp, The Development of an Education Service: The West Riding 1889–1974 (Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1978), pp.120–1; Peter Cunningham, Curriculum Change in the Primary School Since 1945: Dissemination of the Progressive Ideal (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1988), pp.54, 85; Darvill, Sir Alec Clegg, passim.

13 MISS BARBARA MILL

Barbara Mill (A236) was born in 1921 into a large working-class family from Lincolnshire. Her mother had been a barmaid before marriage, and her father was a sheet-metal worker. Barbara’s varied career began as a rural pupil teacher in Nottinghamshire from 1935–39, following which she taught as an uncertificated assistant teacher for three years. She then turned to nursing and trained at the Leicester Royal Infirmary in 1942. From 1948 she worked in Corporation Day Nurseries and in a variety of roles which included health visiting, advising in ante-natal health clinics and lecturing to nursery students for one day per week. But increasingly, Barbara hankered after the classroom and eventually undertook college training as a mature student at Scraptoft, Leicester from 1961–63. Thereafter, she worked in primary schools, particularly teaching children with special educational needs. She retired in 1981 as a teacher in a Special School. Barbara’s interview was an emotional occasion during which she ranged over her whole career, interpreting it both in the context of her own personality and her childhood experience. Social class is often a highly problematic category in terms of personal recollection. But for some interviewees, socio-economic origin presents itself as a strong theme, and this was certainly the case with Barbara Mill. I was seventh of a family of eight and my father was a sheet-metal worker in the local Marshall’s engineering firm. My mother didn’t work. When she did work she was a barmaid before she met my dad. My dad came from Lincolnshire, Stow, and my mother came from North Scarle which was Lincolnshire so we’re pure Lincolnshire. And there was four boys and four girls and the eldest two, of course, were away from home before, right, when I was born they’d gone. My brother was in the police force in Windsor and my sister had gone to live at York as a sort of companion to an auntie who had taken to her bed. And then there was us younger ones, you see, six of us. Ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I wanted to be a teacher. And people would say, ‘Oh, you’d never be a teacher, you’re too poor. Only rich folk are teachers’ you know this sort of thing. ‘No way you’ll ever be a teacher.’

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We were poor, and I think mainly we were poor because my mother was a very bad manager. She spent money sillily and she spent on the boys you see. It wasn’t until I’d been teaching a year before I got a coat of my own that was actually mine new on me. Despite the economic hardships of her upbringing, Barbara’s parents were intent upon securing the best opportunities that they could for their children. Her father strove to safeguard his children from the factory, whilst her mother was responsible for the detailed negotiations leading to Barbara’s entry into teaching. It was my mother if anything who did all the sort of spade work getting me there. Well, she went to see the head master and said, ‘Was there any chance?’ And that I wanted to be a teacher very badly and could—could I sit the examination and that sort of thing. She went—my dad wouldn’t do that. It was just that dad—dad never wanted any of us to go in the factory. He said, ‘Don’t any of you go into factory, get yourself into careers.’ Well, you see, my elder sister was in service, she didn’t have much chance, bless her heart. My brother was—he became an inspector of police, my second brother, he was in the transport police. My third brother, he went into the police but he came ‘out and he went into nursing. My two sisters next, they were both in nursing and they both finished, well, the one sister, Mary, she went from job to job, she never really stuck at anything but Ruth, the next one to me, she ended up as a sister in the same hospital that she trained in, you know. My younger brother was an inspector of taxes so we all went into careers, as it were, so no, the influence was in me. I definitely wanted to be a teacher and when other girls were playing with the dolls, I know I liked playing football and that sort of thing. But if ever I’d to stay in or if I was indoors, I was always teaching, not necessarily dolls or anything, but I was always teaching. I was always giving lessons, you know, from about four, yes. Well, before school, I was sort of—‘I’m going to be a teacher one day’—sort of thing, you know, and then from school, I mean it was just well, school, school, school. Oh, I’d done a lot of singing and I enjoy singing and if I wasn’t taking church services in the front room with my mother’s nightie on, I was teaching, you know; but no, I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I’ve never ever thought of anything else except being a teacher. It’s funny, you know, and even when I got into teaching, it wasn’t anything strange, it was just, thank God I’ve got a classroom of my own, you know. I’m in a classroom of my own, sort of thing. I’m not in with a group of people. It seemed to be marvellous to have a classroom of your own and able to do your own thing. When I was 13, mother went to see the head master about this business and we had to sit a special scholarship, you know, it was the same day as the 11 plus scholarship. We sat another paper for this centre. Well, I was


only 13 but you were supposed to sit when you’re 14. It was the Notts pupil-teaching centre actually and there was a centre at Nottingham where the schools from all round the Nottingham area went. And then the schools from the other side went to this polytechnic [sic] at Worksop and so we went to Worksop, you see, which meant going on a bus to Gainsborough, going on an 8 o’clock train from Gainsborough to Worksop, and it was only Saturdays that we went. Now at this point I wasn’t doing any teaching at all. Well, then when I turned 14, you signed the contract and your parents signed a contract and you were paid sixteen and eight pence [16s 8d] a week. We used to teach either morning or afternoon and study the other time and the head master had to do an hour after school with us for four days of the week, he would do an hour from four to five, going through work or whatever we were doing at that time, you see. And the only difference with the school and with the centre was that we did art as a subject and we did French. For the first three years that was it and then for the fourth year, you were given I can’t remember the exact sum but it went up into a pound and something or 30 bob [£1 50p], Two pupils from her school were doing this at that time, and a senior girl had been doing it for three years. Well, you see, rural pupil teaching because we came from all the villages, you see, but funny enough, most of them came from the mining villages, Nottinghamshire mining villages. We were that side—we were the Worksop side, you see. I’m going to stick my neck out here but I think it was a Nottinghamshire thing. I know a lot of other people did it by just going on with the village schools, just going straight in and training in the village schools sort of thing. But I’ve not heard of anyone going to a centre, as such. You know, the grammar school sort of thing. At the centre, on Saturdays in Worksop: There was four years, from 14 to 18 and there would be about 20 in each form, I should think in each year. So I should think there would be about 80 of us altogether. A Miss Beecroft ran it, her mother was something high up in education in Nottingham. She was the head mistress as such and she took English. And then there was a teacher took French and history. And then we had one who took maths and PE. There was only about four teachers anyway, you know. We were all day Saturday. We didn’t get there until about half past nine in the morning or getting on for ten in the morning and we left at four o’clock in the afternoon. Well then after we’d been going a year, like the following September, they decided that alternate weeks you were three days at

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school and two days at the centre or three days at the centre and two days at school, you see. ‘Cause it meant you got the weekends free. That was nice and you took all sorts of lessons, I mean, and you had groups in the hall, and things like that. It was pretty good training really and then every month, we had a big red book in which you have to keep all our records of how we taught and every lesson we took and the boss asked you to sign it. And then every month, we had what we called a criticism lesson, and the criticism was based on ‘aim’, ‘planning’, ‘actual lesson’, ‘head master’s comments’, you know. And I always remember my first criticism lesson, it was a drawing lesson, and we did a design and I got quite a good criticism so I thought that’s not too bad. Well, then we had, we took a criticism in every subject, a criticism lesson in every subject. She worked for three years under a head teacher whom she regarded as progressive and then in her last year another head with whom she did not have a lot of contact as by that stage she was 18 and had a lot of experience. She took the Northern Universities School Certificate and subsidiary Higher: but there was only one or two of us, you see. And one or two of them had to stay behind Because they kept them down a year but I was lucky I went on, and I managed to get me certificates, you know. Well, then we were on our own, you got a job then. Shortage of money was a recurring theme. Although phlegmatic, Barbara several times contrasted her own lot with that of other girls whom she knew. As a rural pupil teacher she travelled to the Pupil-Teacher Centre in Worksop, a long journey from her home, and all the more inconvenient because of her financial situation. I used to catch the 8 o’clock [bus home] which meant I’d got to walk a mile from top of the village to our house. At 8 o’clock at night which wasn’t good in winter. Well, the other girls, they all were given pocket money, I think; must have been, because they could manage to get the train, you see. Well, I just had no money. I was not allowed any more money than my bus fare, you see. It all came from my parents [none from the local authority]. We had a train pass but we used to get a five penny return bus fare and they could afford to go by train which got them home about half past six, something like that you know. But it was just one of those things—it was the sort of family we were and that was it. The cultural context of her family home—all keen readers but with very few books in the house—was also a factor in Barbara’s appreciation of the literary experiences to which she was exposed at the Pupil-Teacher Centre:


[The Centre] did introduce me to things like plays and Shakespeare and She Stoops To Conquer and things like that, which I didn’t know about, which I desperately wanted to know about, which did give me a chance to get to books, you know, books. For instance it introduced us to Thomas Hardy. And Silas Marner, Adam Bede, all those, you know, it gave me a chance to get into books which I hadn’t had a chance to ‘cause we never had any books at home apart from you know, Mother’s Weekly, and my brother had one or two annuals but as a family we didn’t have books, you know, which was a pity because we were all great readers. Regularly delayed by having to wait for the last bus on her return from the Centre, Barbara used to visit the public library which was: by the bus stop, yes, and I used to go in there and do my homework or whatever. I used to go to the reading room and I would read reference books ‘cause I’ve always been an avid reader, you know, since I’ve been able to— and I can’t ever remember not being able to read, you know. In Barbara’s eyes, most of her colleagues at the Centre came from familial backgrounds which afforded them important advantages. You see, a lot of them had a teaching background. A lot didn’t, I mean a lot came from mining families and things like that. But mostly of those from mining families, it was the highest strata of the mining industry they came from, you know. Not many were just miners’ daughters. The other girl in the village where I was, her father was a—I think he owned his own business, something like that. I suppose it was possibly as I say, the fact that we had a big family—it was a bit of a difficult childhood. The statuses and identities conferred by teaching in the twentieth century have been widely discussed in terms of the general category of the feminisation of the profession. Barbara’s account is important in showing us how the ramifications of this process could manifest themselves in complex configurations within the context of an individual life. I was very close to my dad, my dad had done everything for me because my mother never took much interest. She was more for the boy there and the girl there, you know, she’d not time for us girls at all. She was all boys you know. So I depended a lot on my dad and I went everywhere with him, you know. He was a man who—he used to love to roam about especially at night, the moonlight nights and things like that. He used to love to go over the fields and that. He used to come and get me up and we’d go out mushrooming, 3 o’clock in the morning. And things like that. So I was very close to my dad, very close to my dad.

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I must admit I was a bit naughty. I’m a naughty sort of person, and I used to be a bit of a thorn in the side of the senior girl when I was not a pupil teacher. And the head master used to say, ‘I don’t cane girls but you’re different.’ I used to get the cane. But it was because I was just a bit of a tomboy, you know. I dearly loved to get in the boys’ yard and play some decent games. I couldn’t be doing with the girls. I’d always been a cricket, footballer and tennis player, that sort of thing, you know, I’ve always been into a lot of sport. Despite her flaunting of gender conventions, Barbara nevertheless suffered from something of a grudge on the part of her brothers, who themselves went to grammar school, on account of her academic and professional success. Oh yes, yes now, funnily enough the three boys all went to grammar school but left at 16, sort of thing. They didn’t follow it through—and the three girls, none of the girls went except me, you see, ‘cause I’m the black sheep, ‘cause I was at school until I was 18. It rankled that I was the only one who went to school till I was 18, you know, I was the lucky one. I didn’t get to grammar school, I didn’t get my 11 plus, strangely enough to go to the High School in the town but my brother who was—he was only 10 actually, he got his 11 plus, the year I got my teacher’s thing. The usual abbreviated scholastic destiny for girls was clearly reinforced by the careers of most of Barbara’s peers at the Pupil-Teacher Centre. Two people out of probably 80 went to college. And one was a mining manager’s daughter and the other one, her father was a head master or something like that. [The rest went straight into teaching jobs as] uncertificated assistants, you see. So what the rest did?—I think mostly they got married. I think most of them got married quite honestly ‘cause I know three of them that were like my friends out of the village where I was. [One] married a farmer quite soon after I’d left home to come to Leicester, she married a farmer in the village and two more friends, twins from Stockwith, they were engaged almost as soon as they started teaching. You see they were let loose and they immediately became engaged or what have you. I’m afraid my tendency was never that way. I never looked—I never wanted marriage. I just wanted to teach. Oh, I was determined. I was determined I would. Sexual harassment was always a real or potential issue for girls, as we have found in other testimonies, though for many respondents the recollected embarrassment or pain of such episodes means that they remain hard to talk about and are often expressed discreetly or obliquely. Barbara’s account gives us some sense of this, as she talks about her first post as an uncertificated teacher.


So I got a job—unfortunately, I was a bit stupid actually, and I was very stupid about not wanting to leave home. I was very much a home person. I hated leaving home, I hated leaving my mother, you know. And most of them went to Nottingham, well, instead of that, I intended to stop near home and went to Lincolnshire. And it was a terrible grotty school I taught in. It was a church school [in a small village] and it was the worst thing I ever did. It destroyed me completely because the head master—well, he’d been sacked from a girls’ school for interfering. And he’d been sent to us. Well, he—you still had to watch him with some of the senior girls. If ever a senior girl went out I used to be hanging about somewhere because—you still had to watch him. But not only that, he would come and start talking [to] me. I was in the same room as him at that point. I was taking Standards III and IV and he’d got the Upper. And he’d come and talk to me and we’d got those great tortoise stoves, you know, and he’d come and stand talking to me and he’d probably stand talking half the morning. And you see, and then, he gave me a bad report at the end of it. I just could never understand that. Anyway, then the next year I was a bit happier because he put me in the other room with Standard I’s and II’s but it meant I was away from him. I was with the infant teacher which was happier. Barbara, who qualified and practiced as both teacher and nurse in the course of her career, was able to draw many comparisons and contrasts from first-hand experience between these two predominantly female occupations. The most telling of such observations turned on aspects of professional status, as a number of deeply wounding experiences illustrated. I think I was sensitive in a way and not in others. I was a bit brash in some ways but I was very sensitive, I was very easily hurt, you know, and this Miss Beecroft we had [County Organiser for Pupil Teachers in Nottinghamshire] she’d got the most sarcastic, wicked tongue in her head. And she said terrible things to you, you know and I’ve thought since you know, we took it— we took it, why did we take it? Why didn’t we turn back and say, ‘Oh well’, like the kids do today, ‘Stuff the job!’ and, you know. We didn’t, you see, we took all this—took all these insults, and they were insults. I mean she’d turn round and say, ‘Oh well, you, what can you expect?’, you know, you know. And things like that. And when you were nursing, I always remember, and this sounds terrible but I always remember I had to have a medical and I’d only got two pair of briefs. Well, I used to take one pair for washing. And they were faded and they weren’t brilliant and they weren’t new. And I was sent for to the matron’s office and I got absolutely slated because the doctor had complained at my underwear. And so I said, ‘Matron, what am I supposed to do?’ You know, I said, ‘There’s no way my parents can help.’ I said, ‘I’ve only got the money I’m getting here, I said, ‘and you know what that is.’ I said, ‘Now, I

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have difficulty getting clothes anyway.’ Oh my, oh God, she made me feel if I could have crawled down a hole, I would have done. But they used to do this and you were supposed to—you’d no retaliation at all to her. You know they used to—used to just say these terrible things to you. I mean words that nowadays, the kids would just turn round and say, ‘Oh, if that’s what you think!’, now, you know. And I’ve often sat and thought, why did I take that sort of thing? But then we all did, it wasn’t just me, they all did. But I always vowed and declared that if I came to be senior, I would not treat the nurses like that. If often defended by tones of stoicism or grim jocularity, Barbara’s testimony preserves a deep sense of disappointment over the status slights and insults which she endured. She particularly recalls how the teacher trainees at the Worksop Centre were openly treated as the inferiors of their colleagues at Nottingham. One incident illustrating this was indelibly engraved on her memory, as it involved sport, of which she was so very fond. Although she and her friends were drawn from mining villages, they came under the lowly category of rural pupil teachers—a group commonly associated with oldfashioned and unreformed professional practices. Well, you see, rural pupil teaching—because we came from the mining villages, Nottinghamshire mining villages. And with us, you see they came from Beckingham, which was next door to Gainsborough, Walkeringham, Misterton, Stow, Stockwith—which were all the villages round about there, you see. We were that side—we were the Worksop side, you see. Oh, we were, we were very second-class citizens [at Worksop PupilTeacher Centre]… I must admit, this is personal, it’s my own personal thing, I always felt very—even nursing—I always felt very second-class. One speech day, there was an inter-school match between the Worksop and the Nottingham centres. We had to go to Nottingham. They never came to us, we had to go to them at Nottingham and we played the inter-school sports thing. And, blow me down, we won, we beat them, Worksop did, and when she gave the score out, she gave Nottingham out as the winners, which was typical you see, ‘Nottingham’, and then she said, ‘Oh I’m very sorry, no, it was Worksop.’ The rural pupil-teacher centre was for many a second-best substitute for a grammar school education. Barbara remembers her education, however, with pride, both on its own terms and as the expression of great personal sacrifice. The grammar school, well they only did a smattering of extras, didn’t they? Latin and French but that was all. It isn’t like the education today. I mean


if these children really knew how—how lucky they are to get the education because I mean, we pulled ourselves up on our boot strings, there was no doubt we got ourselves out of what we were by what we did ourselves, you know what I mean. There was no special grants and you couldn’t go to college just because you were 18. You didn’t automatically get a place at college sort of thing. You paid to go on and that was it. It cost you to go and that was it. Though so few of her peers had the financial resources to go on to college, this did not much temper Barbara’s own sense of disappointment in not being able to progress further. For her, as for many like her, the anticipation of college was emblematic of a wider world of social and intellectual promise beyond the restricted confines of her childhood experience. I was very disappointed with life anyway. Because I always wanted to go to [college]. I always wanted to be doing things that I couldn’t do, you know what I mean. For instance we had a very good vicar at the church when I was between 16 and 17. And he said ‘Before you do anything else’, he said, ‘if you can get your voice trained.’ You know, and I’d dearly have loved to but you see there was no hope. And also we never went anywhere. I mean I never had a holiday until I was—I never saw the sea till I was 28. Though Barbara was introduced to the ambivalent social and professional status of teaching through many of her experiences as a pupil teacher, this was to some degree ameliorated by her positive memories of the profession’s internal culture, into which she found herself easily inducted. Oh yes, [the teachers] were, oh yes, they were great, oh yes, once you became a pupil teacher you were one of them. We had the staff room where we could make drinks. Well, you see, that helped because the teachers were professional towards us. They always called you Miss [Mill], you see, so therefore [we] were professional towards the children, I think, it just rubbed off on [us]. It was a very easy change-over. I think the biggest change-over was in myself—in myself. The fact that I couldn’t go out and play in the playground, and things like that, you know. And I had to behave like a lady. We were in uniform, [the uniform of the Pupil-Teacher Centre], we had cream blouses [and] brown and gold tie. At the age of 20 she had wanted to join up in the forces, and being a teacher she could only have joined up for nursing. And anyway, I didn’t want to be a nurse because two of my sisters were nurses but they were both nurses in mental hospitals and I’d no, no desire, no wish, none at all.

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But when she went into hospital for an appendicitis and helping with general duties during convalescence, she was spotted by the matron as having an aptitude for nursing. So I was terribly fed up of teaching, I just didn’t want to come back, you know, and I desperately didn’t want to come back, really. And so I talked it over with mum and dad as much as you ever talked anything over. My dad went spare. Barbara did eventually go to college to gain a Teachers’ Certificate, but not until the age of 40, following a substantial period of nursing. In her early teaching career, she had not been aware of any significant status distinctions between those who were certificated and those who were not. Not really because—no, because there were so many uncertificated teachers, you see. The school where I was, there was only one collegetrained teacher and she came from Scunthorpe and—she’d been to college. But the one who took the infants, she’d never been to college, and I’d not been to college, and then there was a teacher came from Hull with the evacuees, now, she’d been to college you see and of course [there was the] head master, but no—it was just salary really Well, if it’s anything, the only difference was the money. I mean, you did the same hours, you did the same work. You had the same responsibilities. Contrasts and comparisons were frequently made by our respondents between their recollections of the popular status of, and respect for, teachers in the inter-war years and their perceptions of more recent decline in both. In Barbara’s case, one particularly traumatic experience from her early years of pupil teaching framed her strong views on the status of teachers today. There were people when I first came [to live in this] street who daren’t speak to me because I was a teacher. There was one person especially who chats to me now. ‘Oh, I couldn’t talk to Miss Mill, she’s a teacher’, you know. And until they realised that I was just Barbara Mill, you know. Oh no, you were treated with respect, yes. I think nurses are now more. Just after I started [teaching] my mother had a miscarriage. I didn’t know at the time she was having a miscarriage, I just knew that she wasn’t well, and I couldn’t leave her. Oh, there was hell to pay. I nearly got thrown out because of it, you see. Because I’d stayed off this day from school. And — oh, the head master was absolutely livid with me. He was going to report me so I said to the [County Organiser] Miss Beecroft,—I said, ‘Sorry, but you’ll just have to report me because my mother’s desperately ill.’ I said, There was blood everywhere’, because I didn’t know then what was happening, I said ‘There was blood everywhere, had to get her up the stairs


and had to clean up, and I just could not cope.’ And—oh, there was no end to pay. I had to pay because teachers didn’t do that sort of thing, you see, teachers went to school regardless. And there was only my brother, otherwise, at home, and dad was at work still. And so there was no one, I mean you couldn’t leave a woman out in the middle of the village with nobody, could you? And we hadn’t been there that long so she didn’t know a lot of people. And the same thing happened when you were nursing. I wanted time off for my dad’s funeral and I was on night duty. And I was told that I could have one night off so I went home that day and I came back the next day and on to night duty, that night. And we were told that once you were a nurse, your family was secondary. Well, nowadays you have counselling, you know, and all that sort of thing. And as I say, with teachers, anything go wrong in the classroom, you get counselling. We never had counselling. For all the personal commitment it demanded, Barbara felt that nursing had changed over the years to become less personal and more technical. Her vicarious experience of school since retirement in 1981 suggested to her that school teaching had changed also, and in a similar way. Nursing definitely is a different sort of profession anyway nowadays. I think that rather than being nurses, they’re part technicians, you know. We were used to nurse, and I mean nurse. Here, they just press a button and something comes out and you unpack it and use it, and things like that. I mean, whereas we used to have to sterilise all our own kit, I know that it’s a saving, probably, but we used to sterilise all our own kit. Since I’ve left, this Longclose [Special School] has got a computer in every room and oh no, again, it’s so highly technical, it makes you wonder what sort of pupil-teacher relationship there is, if any. Though, on completion of her pupil-teacher course, Barbara had not been in a position to attend a training college, the regime at the Leicester Royal Infirmary where she subsequently trained as a nurse reveals some strong parallels with the accounts of other respondents who had been able to experience the women’s training colleges of the time. It is clear from Barbara’s account, however, that the nurses might expect to be even more tightly regimented than the teachers. I mean let’s face it I mean, you were only just one above the streets if you were a nurse. [At the Leicester Royal Infirmary] it was very rigid you know you couldn’t go out at night. You had to be in by ten sort of thing and you had to clock in and out. We had to clock out in the morning when you went on the wards, you clocked in when you went off duty. Very [much] more restrictive [than teaching] in that respect and, you see, in those days

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we lived in nurses’ homes, remember, we didn’t live out like they do now… In fact when my friend and I wanted to live out, and we were both staff nurses, and quite senior staff nurses, we had to ask matron’s permission to live out. Oh yes, and you had to go to chapel every morning. You were booked in at breakfast, you know, register taken at breakfast. And you had to go to chapel. You had to go to chapel every Sunday morning if you were on duty and you had to go into the choir, you know. The comparative status of teaching and nursing was most sharply and painfully brought home for Barbara in the disappointment of her father when she announced her decision to change career. My dad went spare. Because well, you see, he always wanted me to be a teacher, you see. Anyway, he said, he was very, very angry and he wouldn’t come and see me in hospital or anything like that. So anyway I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry dad, but I’m just going’, but I said, ‘I’ll make you a promise, I will make you a promise, as soon as I am able, and I’ve got money behind me, I will go to college and I will qualify’ [as a teacher], you know. And—then I said As I am now, I’m doing nothing’, I said, you know, ‘I’m not going to get any higher’, and I said, ‘You can’t just put me into college.’ I said, And, you know, I’m just wasting my time’ sort of thing. So anyway he was very good in that he relented and he bought me my uniform because we had to buy our own uniforms then. Anyway, my dad was very good, as I say, he laid out the £5 or £6 it was that the uniform cost, which was a lot of money in those days, as you know. Anyway, I started to pay him back, and he said, after the first two payments, he said, ‘Barbara, that’s it, you needn’t pay any more, you’ve shown you would pay me back and that’s it.’ And he didn’t take any more money and well, I didn’t go home for 18 months because I—I felt, you know, he didn’t want me at home. But anyway, then mother wrote and said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, come home’, you know so—I did go home then ‘cause he accepted it, you know. Ironically, it was teaching which conferred a status on Barbara that enabled her to transcend the social class origins that would have otherwise prevented her entry into nursing. For all its oppression of student nurses, the Leicester Royal Infirmary was, in Barbara’s words, Very snobby’. A very matronly person interviewed me and said at the end of it, ‘Oh well, as you’ve been a school teacher and you have interviewed well, we will accept you. But had you not have been a school teacher, we certainly wouldn’t have accepted you, with your father being a labourer.’ And so I got into nursing because I had been a school teacher. But anyway there you are.


Questions of status recurred in Barbara’s accounts of both nursing and teaching. In fact quite honestly, when I came to Leicester, I mean when I took my certificate and started teaching [again], I looked at it and thought well how I’m back home sort of thing, you know, I’m back in me proper channel. I loved nursing, you know, I really loved nursing too and especially the chances I got when I got more senior, and I could help take the youngsters round the wards and things like that. And then I was teaching the nursery students and that. I loved it all, and I did like nursing but there was always this niggle at the back of me brain, come on you’ve got to get back into teaching. You want teaching, you want to be a teacher. I even tried to get to be a sister tutor but unfortunately, the matron at the Royal Infirmary didn’t look kindly on this, I didn’t get it. [It] could have been ideal in a way but even then it wouldn’t because I wasn’t with children. And basically too, as well as teaching I wanted children. I’m a teacher first and last and anybody around here will tell you, you know, if they sit here long enough, they’ll get a lesson.

CONCLUSION

This study grew from a small but insistent starting point. It originated in the memories of elderly former teachers as they recalled their entry into the teaching profession six or seven decades before. The student-teacher scheme, relegated in the secondary literature as an insignificant feature of the educational landscape of the early twentieth century, loomed large in these memories, raising a number of important questions for historical research. What were the origins of the scheme? What were its characteristic forms and practices? What became of it and what legacy did it leave? Oral recollections could tell us a good deal about the second question but about the first and the third, they were largely silent. To answer these, we needed to turn from oral history to the more familiar techniques of documentary analysis. The virtual absence, however, of references to the scheme in the secondary literature implied that there might be relatively little archive material relating to it. This was not the case. There is, in fact, a considerable volume of such material but it had not been drawn upon before to any significant degree. Educational historians have shown little interest in undertaking studies of the student-teacher scheme. In their local investigation of the West Riding, for example, Gosden and Sharp simply note the regional abandonment of the student-teacher scheme in 1927, adding that: ‘A year of service in an elementary school between leaving a secondary school and entering a training college at eighteen had for some while seemed to be of little value to those in a position to assess its worth.’1 The coventional configuration of the dominant narratives in the history of education has, in short, scarcely been attuned to the existence of the scheme, let alone to exploring its possible significance. The prevailing paradigm for relating the history of teacher training in the twentieth century has rested above all else upon an optimistic model of incremental advance through political and administrative reform, more or less enlightened, from above.2 In this model, historical condemnation of the studentteacher scheme flows logically from the fact that it was excoriated by much expert educational opinion in its own day. It represents, apparently, nothing more than a policy dead end. The coup de grâce for such an argument is simply to dismiss student teaching as having nothing to offer to pedagogical or professional advance, as little more than a warmed-over variation of nineteenth-century pupil teaching and all its well-known failings.

222 CONCLUSION

But the search for roots in history is never straightforward. Unexpected or forgotten origins may be uncovered at any time, but particularly, perhaps, at moments of current and significant policy change. In this way, as the emphasis of teacher-training policy has turned in recent years towards a revivified interest in school-based training, initiatives which once appeared as policy failures now assert themselves as candidates for serious attention, not merely as historical curiosities, but as disregarded alternative traditions which may yet have something to say to the present. It is clear that the documentary record, like the accumulated oral account, does not support easy or dismissive treatments of student teaching. Each indicates, rather, that the practice was a far more resilient phenomenon than we have realised until now. Moreover, documentary sources show that although official ambivalence was built into the operation of the scheme from its inception, student teaching attracted significant local support—and not only from those in the classroom—until the mid-1920s. At this point, the government’s policy response to the 1925 departmental committee report proved to be critical in reorienting the direction of teacher training away from a combination of classroom and college towards an exclusive emphasis upon the latter.3 In one sense, this amounts to a more concentrated expression of Morant’s original concern for radically enhancing the composition, character and status of the nation’s teaching profession. The origins of this perception lay with a continuing official suspicion of, and dislike for, the traditional classroom teacher understood as a characteristically narrow, uncultured and uninspiring figure.4 In an education system in which hierarchical distinction was the major determinant of ascribed status, the central thrust of policy was to garner a new and more elevated level of distinction for the teaching profession. The entirely logical way of seeking to achieve higher status was to diminish the accent on those aspects of teachers’ training and work which attracted low regard and to concentrate on those which secured higher esteem. This meant a downgrading of the classroom and the role of classroom teachers and an enhancement of the teachers’ connection with the training college and, latterly, with the university. Spurley Hey put the terms of this calculation in particularly striking, if stark, terms when he declared that, ‘it is a far pleasanter prospect to talk with a professor in a University than to work with an Elementary School teacher in a slum school’.5 A programme for the advance of the profession and for a corresponding enhancement of its social standing were essential for the development of a just and efficient system of national schooling. In important ways, the search for effective strategies in this area has continued ever since. The paradox at the heart of professional reform in the 1920s was that in seeking to achieve it, the figure of the classroom teacher himself or herself was marginalised. The long drive towards the ‘university connection’—a strategy wholly consistent with Morant’s original reforming aims, if not his short-term objectives—undoubtedly gratified teachers and brought them real benefits, both individually and collectively. But, despite the enthusiastic efforts of the NUT leadership, this was never a campaign


in which many teachers could feel their fundamental professional sensibilities to be truly or authentically invested. But the practical connection which they could bring above all else—that which might be called the ‘school connection’—could not begin to be revisited in practice until the long struggle for an all-graduate professional status had finally worked itself out. As a result, for the better part of half a century, the development of such a ‘school connection’ of the character, if not necessarily of the kind, which had been pre-figured in the student-teacher scheme was effectively lost. Any residual utility of the scheme as a resource for building such a connection remained confined and isolated within the memories of thousands of individuals rather than within the collective memory of the teaching profession itself. And, though it remained the familiar locus for the exercise of their everyday expertise—their ‘magic’— the classroom became, nonetheless, estranged from teachers as the symbolic site of their professional power and their pedagogical mastery. It is with the demise of the student-teacher scheme too that we might identify some of the origins of that disastrous dislocation in understanding of the nature of teachers’ professional knowledge about which we continue to puzzle today.6 The post-war hegemony of a technical rational regime based upon the transmission of disciplinary knowledge in the training colleges did not become embedded in the profession. At least, it did not become embedded in patterns of classroom practice. Technical rational knowledge was perceived by many teachers in training, and indeed in service, as immensely valuable. It was seen as both intrinsically important and as the best defence and guarantee of high professional status. But the practical consequence of such perceptions was a deep fracture at the heart of teachers’ professional knowledge. The mismatch between the insights derived from disciplinary knowledge and the demands of daily classroom practice maintained a space for discontent into which, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, alternative models of practitioner knowledge as reflective, critical or evidence-based could stake their various claims. Each of these approaches asserted a claim based upon this or that paradigmatic authority and promised a better articulation between professional knowledge and classroom practice. Whether calling upon Schon, Habermas, Hirst or Hargreaves, each held out the prospect of a new start by bringing to teaching a model for the more effective interface of knowledge and practice. Doubtless, each of these imports had—and still has—much to contribute. What this might be, however, calls not only for advocacy or assertion but also for careful attention to the one resource which has always belonged to the teaching profession itself—its own long history of accumulated professional practice. Within this history, the record of the student-teacher scheme remains perhaps one of the greatest unexplored and unconsidered episodes. After a long and often fruitful, if also frustrating, detour of more than three-quarters of a century, it stands as a legacy to be reclaimed. Whether this turns out to be a legacy with any

224 CONCLUSION

significance for a profession now substantially distanced from the notion of teaching as a lifelong endeavour is perhaps another matter.7 If the history of the student-teacher scheme may have something positive to say to classroom teachers about their own professional history, does it also have a message for the makers of policy?8 Perhaps. To use a tired metaphor—but one which, nonetheless, is well suited to the modern history of education—we might say that in the post-war years, the teacher training pendulum swung fully away from a training model which accorded an important place to classroom teachers and their expertise. This movement conforms to a more general historical pattern which describes an oscillating trajectory rather than a steady upward curve driven by that liberal dialectic which obsessed a succession of mid-twentieth century whiggish educational histories.9 As Michael Sadler once noted, when it comes to matters of education, successive generations ‘have a disagreeable way of siding with their grandparents’.10 Time and again we see the educational pendulum swinging towards the limit of its arc, sweeping past the moment at which the gains of its previous movement might have been absorbed into a composite, progressive advance.11 Instead, the features marking the point of departure for each swing have tended to attract opprobrium for their failure to correspond with the concerns of the present rather than evincing sympathetic respect for the struggles and achievements of real people in a real past. By the time of its demise, just after the end of the Second World War, the studentteacher scheme was seen by policy makers as an outdated relic of a less enlightened educational age; its few remaining supporters as merely foolish or short sighted.12 Similarly, in the current policy climate, it is not impossible that the notion of researching the history of such an apparently discredited scheme may itself attract criticism of a related sort. In short, any contemporary attempt to understand the historical significance of the scheme lays itself open to the maximal criticism of seeking a return to an outdated form of apprenticeship training. Such a critique, however, would operate under a fundamentally unhistorical impulse. To suppose that a mode of training now long past and developed under wholly different historical circum stances could in some way be transported in its pristine form into another age is absurd, even if any could be found who desired it. What, however, does require careful and respectful historical attention are the ways in which the teachers and the policy makers of the early decades of the twentieth century sought, within the practical possibilities of their own time, to act in accord with the best principles they could then conceive for the professional preparation of teachers. If we wish to assert that the extent of our ambition for education and for the teaching profession is one elemental characteristic that we may hope to hold in common with our forebears—and one which we doubtless hope that our successors will share with us—then we would do well to enter into a dialogue with them over the principles which informed their practices. Of all the principles at stake in such a dialogue, one of the most important remains the


intellectual legitimacy and the practical fulfilment of a substantial role for classroom teachers in the process of preparing and inducting new members of their profession.13 For it is at just this transmissive point that the principle of professional autonomy, if it is to continue to be regarded as a desirable characteristic of the nation’s teaching force, necessarily finds its fullest expression. Historical dialogue across long periods of time has an inescapably representational aspect. But in this research, we have also been fortunate to engage in direct face-to-face conversation with the teachers of the past. Attending to the teacher’s voice has been a central methodological concern of this work, and part of its force derives from provenance as well as from substance. From the outset, we have recognised that oral testimony and documentary evidence offer two distinctive, if clearly related, routes into the past. Undoubtedly, the least problematical approach would have been to concentrate upon one or other of these sources to the effective marginalisation of the other. But in seeking to use both as extensively as possible, we have tried to arrive at a detailed and multi-faceted appreciation of the student-teacher scheme that could not have been gained in any other way. In its nature, such an approach has also signalled a number of important methodological difficulties, each of which calls for substantial future discussion, inhering in the epistemological validity of the conjoint use of written and spoken sources in historical research. Such problems particularly include the processes of the textualisation of speech in the act of transcription; the distinctive characteristics of texts which are transcribed—‘speech masquerading as text’— against texts which are inscribed, which are consciously and artfully designed as writing, to be read by unseen and unknown future audiences; the differential operation of memory in the singular act of recollection and the cumulative act of repetition; the place of individual and collective memory in the construction and sustenance of narrative identity; and the role of documentary materials or other visual artefacts in the stimulation or maintenance of individual memory. Though touched on in Chapter 1, the importance of such methodological work has been a largely immanent feature of this research, for it has not been possible systematically to address it here. As for the substantive question of the student-teacher scheme itself, the fundamental impulses which informed this study at its outset remain undiminished at its close. These were to explore and amplify those fragments of the scheme surviving in the memories of the former teachers who first brought it to our attention; to write an account which placed the scheme in the mainstream and not at the margin of the history both of teacher training and of teachers’ professional identities; to seek to include rather than to exclude the voices of the classroom teachers in whose names teacher-training reforms were professed; to remind ourselves that in history, as in life, the way that things are and the way that they are presented are seldom quite the same; and, in recognising factual accuracy as a defining characteristic of historical endeavour, to remember that in

226 CONCLUSION

engaging the ‘how it was’ in the past, factual accuracy is far from being the only objective for which we need to strive. Careful critical analysis will always edge us closer to a fuller knowledge of the organisation, operation and scale of past institutions such as the student-teacher scheme. But such analysis must always go hand in hand with the endeavour to understand the meanings with which such features were also imbued. ‘Student teacher’, ‘apprenticeship’, ‘school-based training’ are all, whether as memory or as policy, inescapably normative as well as descriptive terms. If, in the pursuit of a ‘thick’ conception of the ‘how was it?’ of past times, we aspire to unpick the temporal threads which entwine history with memory and policy with practice, we may render our task an easier, but also a diminished, one. NOTES 1. Gosden and Sharp, The Development of an Education Service, p.104. 2. Dent, The Training of Teachers. 3. Gosden, The Evolution of a Profession, pp.268–73; Niblett et al., The University Connection. 4. Gardner, ‘Teachers’. 5. Hey, Some Influences, p.6. 6. John Furlong, ‘Intuition and the Crisis in Teacher Professionalism’, in Terry Atkinson and Guy Claxton (eds), The Intuitive Practitioner: On the Value of Not Always Knowing What One is Doing (Buckingham, Open University Press, 2000), pp. 11–31; John Furlong (2001), ‘Reforming Teacher Education, Re-forming Teachers: Accountability, Professionalism and Competence’, in Phillips and Furlong (eds), Education, Reform and the State, pp. 118–35. Also see Philip W. Jackson, ‘On the Place of Narrative in Teaching’, in McEwan and Egan, Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research (New York, Teachers College, 1995), pp.3– 23. 7. ‘Not our life’s work say half of new recruits’, Times Educational Supplement, 12 July 2002, p.2. 8. Gary McCulloch, ‘Publicizing the Educational Past’, in David Crook and Richard Aldrich, History of Education for the Twenty-First Century (London, University of London, Institute of Education, 2000), pp.1–16. 9. Roy Lowe, ‘History as Propaganda: The Strange Uses of the History of Education’, in R.Lowe (ed.), Trends in the Study and Teaching of the History of Education (Leicester, History of Education Society, 1983), pp.48–60. 10. Michael Sadler, ‘National Education and Social Ideals’, in David A.Reeder (ed.), Educating our Masters (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1980), p.220. 11. PRO ED 86/26, ‘Extract from a Letter dated 9th April, 1921, addressed by HMI Mr W.E.Urwick to CI Mr Richards’: ‘We all know that the old early P.T. system produced little men and women at 15 and 16, i.e. it forced on the maturing process disgracefully. The pendulum is in danger of swinging too far in the opposite direction; we can’t afford it.’ 12. Crook, ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education’, pp. 29, 54.


13. See Frank Roscoe, The Training of Teachers’, The Schoolmaster, 16 May 1908, p. 979. Roscoe offers a very early vision of the prospect which, with careful selection of ‘training schools’ and staff, the development of student-teaching appeared to hold out: ‘This plan would have the best features of the old pupil-teacher system, since it would place the beginner under the care of a capable and sympathetic master, who would regard him as an apprentice. It would have the further advantage of providing what is urgently needed in primary teaching, a further stage of promotion, for the pay and status of the teachers in these training schools would be high, and from them the inspectorate might properly be supplied.’

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ARCHIVE SOURCES Public Record Office PRO ED 67. Teachers: Local Education Authority: Supply files 1912–15 and 1924–49. PRO ED 86. Teachers: General files 1903–35. Local Record Offices Greater London Record Office: EO/STA/2/1—Student Teacherships: General File 1910– 1936. Leicestershire Record Office: 19D59/46–54—Minute Books: Teachers’ Sectional Committee. Manchester Record Office: 1920–25—City Council Minute Books (Education). Cambridge University Library The Schoolmaster 1903–39 School Guardian 1902–37 Brunel University Library Norah Hampton (n.d.) Memories of Baptist End, Hetherton, Dudley in the Period 1895– 1918, unpublished typescript.

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Webster, Scott W. (1996), ‘A Historian’s Perspective on Interviewing’, in R.Josselson (ed.), The Narrative Study of Lives, Vol. 4 (London, Sage), pp. 187–206. Widdershoven, G.Q.M. (1993), ‘The Story of Life: Hermeneutic Perspectives on the Relationships Between Narrative and Life History’, in R.Josselson and A.Lieblich (eds), The Narrative Study of Lives, Vol. 1, (London, Sage), pp.1–20. Widdowson, Frances (1980), Going Up Into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training 1840–1914 (London, Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications). Williams, George H. (1908), Careers For Our Sons: A Practical Handbook to the Professions and Commercial Life (London, Simpkin, Marshall & Co.). Wolfit, Donald (1955), First Interval: The Autobiography of Donald Wolfit (London, Odhams Press). Young, Michael (1961), The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (Harmondsworth, Penguin). —— (2001) ‘Down with Meritocracy’, The Guardian, 29 June 2001.

UNPUBLISHED THESES Brindle, Patrick (1998), ‘Past Histories: History and the Elementary School Classroom in Early 20th Century England’, Ph.D., University of Cambridge. Crook, David (1997), ‘The Reconstruction of Teacher Education and Training 1941–54’, Ph.D., University of Wales, Swansea. Robinson, Wendy (1997), ‘The Pupil-Teacher Centre in England and Wales in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Policy, Practice and Promise’, Ph.D., University of Cambridge.

INDEX

ADSE see Association of Directors and Secretaries for Education AHM see Association of Head Mistresses Acting Teacher’s Certificate, 33 Addiscombe, 171 Appleby, Miss, 138, 140, 141, 143 Appleton, Miss, 177 apprenticeship model, 28, 42–3, 51, 53, 54, 89 Archive of Teacher Memory, xiii Association of Directors and Secretaries for Education (ADSE), 49, 50, 55, 58 Association of Education Committees, 58 Association of Head Mistresses (AHM), 49, 50, 55–6, 66n33 Atherton, Mrs, 137, 139, 143–4, 145, 146– 7

and policy development, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 44n22; and policy debates, 49, 50, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61–2, 62–3; and policy concluded, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81; and stolen profession, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 99, 104n25; brief mentions, 3–4, 7, 110, 113, 114, 136, 145, 146 Bond, Alice, 133–4, 149n29 Boorman, Mr, 161 Borough Road, 186, 192–3 Brindle, Patrick, 3 British Orphan Asylum, 162–4 Bromley Hall Road School, 159 Brookes, Felicity, 122 Bryce Commission, 112, 125n17 Burnham, Viscount, 34 Burnham: Committee, 114; salary panel, 168; settlement (1919), 112 Burrage Grove School, 164–5 bursar scheme, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 55, 56, 98–9, 100 Bury, 136, 137, 143 Byron, Mrs, 145

Bangor Normal College, 132 Baxter, Charlie, 183 Beecroft, Miss, 217, 221, 225 Bell, Vicars, 130–31 Berry, T.W., 116; How to Become a Teacher, 116; Professions for Girls, 116 Bingley College, 212 Birchanger Girls’ Elementary School, 177, 181 Birmingham, 140 Birmingham University, 145 Blacknall, Professor, 145 Bloomfield Road Infant School, 160–61 Board of Education: Circulars, 29, 61–2, 91;

Cambridge, 212 Cambridge University: Faculty of Education, xiii Cambridgeshire, 137 Campbell-Bannerman government, 14 career choice, 117–24

238

INDEX

careers guidance literature, 116 Caribbean children, 195 Carr, E.H., 5 Carr-Saunders, Alexander, 116 Charlton Central School, 159, 168, 170 Chater School, 135 Chesterfield, 205 Chichester, 212 Circulars: Board of Education: Circular 597 (1908), 29; Holmes-Morant (1911), 29; Circular 1377 (1926), 61, 91; Circular 1383 (1926), 61–2, 91; Ministry of Education: Circular 85 (1946), 70–71 City of London School, 164, 166, 169 City of Sheffield College, 207–8 Clark, Leonard, 131–2, 139 class sizes, 24, 114 Clegg, Alec, 212–13 Cleghorn, Miss, 102–3n12 collective memory, 8, 15 College of St Mark and St John (‘Marjohns’), 147 competitive model of source analysis, 8 complementary model of source analysis, 9 Corporation Day Nurseries, 215 corroborative model of source analysis, 9 County Hall, London, 169–70 Craven Street Municipal Secondary School, 120 Crease, Charlie, 161 Croce, B., 5 Cross Commission, 26 Croydon, 171, 172, 177, 180, 182, 185 Cumberland, 50 Danby, Mr, 137 Darlington College, 200, 202, 203–4 Dartington, 198, 214, 214n1 Davidson School, 175 Dennison, Miss, 134, 137, 138, 139, 146 Dent, H.C., 23, 26, 29–30 Departmental Committee on training of teachers, 34, 61, 77, 114–15; report (1925), 34–5, 38, 39, 60, 61, 62

239

Derbyshire, 199, 207 Desford, 136 documentary sources, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 228, 229, 232 Doncaster, 134, 136, 137 Double View School, 131–2 Drapers’ Company, 166 Dudley, 134, 145, 171 Duffies Hill School, 172, 180 Duffies Infants School, 172, 180 Dunn, HMI, 65n22 Eastbourne, 130 Economic and Social Research Council, xiii Education, 62 Education Act (1902), 113, 149n28 Education After the War (the ‘Green Book’), 79 elementary education, x, 14, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 39, 40, 41, 43, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 88, 92, 95, 96, 97, 110, 112, 113– 14, 115, 116, 117, 124; experience of working in, 128–33, 138– 41, 164–5, 174, 177, 188–92, 201–2, 204–6, 221 Elliott, Stella, 134 Eltham, 159 Emery, John, 131, 132 Emery, Lilian, 131 Entwhistle, Miss, 121 Escott, Miss, 55 Evers, Mrs, 136, 144 Fairhurst, John R., 81 Falconer, HMI, 74–5 Fallowfield, Grace, 41–2 Fanner, Grace, 49 feminization, 112–13 Filey, 212 financial aspects, 39–40, 49, 56, 59, 61, 86, 90–91, 93–4, 165–6, 200, 218 see also maintenance allowances; salary Finlay Primary School, 186 Fisher, H.A.L., 49, 114 Floud, Jean, 97–8, 114


Forest of Dean, 131 Foxhill Boys’ School, 161, 162 Freeman, Mr, 161 Gabbitas and Thring, 129 Gateshead, 70 gender, 112–13, 155, 156, 183–4, 187, 220– 21 Giddens, Anthony, 154 Gloucestershire, 70 Goldsmiths’ College, 131, 133, 137, 167, 169, 172, 179 Gosden, P.H.J.H., 4, 23, 228 Gould, Sir Ronald, 65n24 Grace, Gerald, 103n24 Graham, James, 58 Graveson, Caroline, 49, 63n1, 179, 185 Greaves, J.E., 100 Green, Mr, 161 ‘Green Book’, the (Education After the War), 79 Greeves, Mr, 138, 141, 143, 147 Greyton, Cynthia, 122 Grist, Alice, 133 HMI see His Majesty’s Inspectorate Hailey, Eileen, 135, 136, 145, 147 Halbwachs, Maurice, 15 Hall, Miss, 204 Hamo Road School, 159 Hampton, Nora, 134, 149n27 Hanson, Mr, 138 Harland, Mrs, 134, 135, 136, 143 Harrison, Maurice, 14–15, 111 Hartley, HMI, 50 Hassel, Miss, 201 Headlam, Reverend Stewart, 129 Herbartian steps, 208 Hereford, 145, 146 Heward, Christine, 146 Hey, Spurley, 38, 41, 48n101, 63, 65n31, 67n43, 81, 84n69, 85n76, 229 Higher Schools Certificate, 134, 135 Hind, Mr, 147 His Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), 50–55, 59, 63, 89–90, 212 historical sources, xii, 3–10, 11

see also documentary sources; oral history Holmes-Morant Circular (1911), 29 ‘home schooling’ service, 210 Homerton College, 41, 129 Howard, Miss, 185 Howell, Mr R.H., 161 Howells, Miss, 174 Huberman, Michael, 10 Hughes, A.G., 194, 197 Hull, 120 Humphrys, Darlow W., 81 Ilford, 134, 136, 139 Ilford County High School, 135 Inkpen, 122 Intending Teachers’ Scholarship, 133 interviews, 155–6 Isle of Wight, 70 Jackson, Marshall, 102n1 Joint Board exams, 145 Joint Standing Committee of the Training College Association and Council of Principals: memorandum, 70 Jones, Lance, 33, 67n44, 85n74, 113, 128, 135, 148n19 Junior Cambridge exams, 173 Katz, Michael, 10 Kay-Shuttleworth, James, 41, 87, 99 Kean, Hilda, 4 Kearney, Richard, 9–10 Kenton Lodge Training College, 72 Kerslake, HMI, 52, 65n21 Ketley, 140 Kidbrooke, 159 Knowles, Mrs, 160, 161 LEAs see Local Education Authorities Labour Party, ix–x Lane, Margaret, 119–20 Langsett Road Infants’ School, 209–10 Latimer Road School, 186 Latymer Endowed School, 186 Laurie, S.S., 115

INDEX

Lawn, Martin, 4 Leicester, 50, 215, 227 Leicester Royal Infirmary, 215, 225–6, 227 Leicestershire, 142 Leverhulme Trust, xiii Liberal reforms (1906–11), 113 Lincolnshire, 215, 221 Local Education Authorities (LEAs), 29, 33, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 77, 137, 149n28 London, 169, 186, 195 London County Council, 164, 167, 186 London Institute of Education, 97 London University, 164 Longclose Special School, 225 McKibbin, Ross, 112 McMullon, Mrs, 134, 137 McNair Report, 71, 72–3, 77, 79, 80–81, 110 maintenance allowances, 32, 59–60, 61, 91, 94 Manchester, 38, 137 Manchester Central High School for Girls, 149n30 Manchester Sunday Chronicle, 86, 91, 97 Manning, Leah, 129 Mansbridge, Albert, 132 Marven, Enid, 122 Marwick, Arthur, 4 Masterman, C.F.G., 110 Mayor, R.G., 50, 53, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64n7 Mee, Staff Inspector, 74 memory: collective, 8, 15; unreliability, 5 Mercier, Winifred, 55 methodology and approaches, 3–20, 232–3 middle class, 112 see also social class and teacher supply Mill, Barbara, 27, 28, 155, 215–27 Ministry of Education, 66n39, 71, 73, 76, 77; Circular 85 (1946), 70–71 Montessori education, 203 Moore, Mrs, 136, 140, 144 Morant, Sir Robert:

241

and development of student—teacher scheme, 14, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 36, 38, 41; and new idealization of the teacher, 16; brief mentions, 53, 54, 57, 73, 77, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96, 99, 142, 229, 230 Morris, Henry, 137 Morton, Mary, 65–6n32 Moss Carr, 199 Murray, HMI, 52 NFAT see National Federation of Assistant Teachers NUT see National Union of Teachers narrative approaches, 10 National Association of Schoolmasters, 168, 169 National Federation of Assistant Teachers (NFAT), 98–9, 101 National Union of Teachers (NUT), 28–9, 33, 40, 49, 50, 55, 56–8, 63, 70, 88, 100, 103n24, 107n73, 169, 230; and professional identity, 109, 110, 112, 115–16 Netherthorpe school, 204–5, 206 Netherton Board School, 134 Netherton Church of England Boys’ School, 171 Nevinson, J., 82 Newbigin, Dr Marion I., 188, 190, 197n1 Newcastle, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 105n40 Newcastle Commission, 118 Newcastle Head Teachers’ Association, x– xi, 72, 74 Newcastle-upon-Tyne Teachers’ Association, 100 Newton, A.W., 113, 114 Niblett, W. Roy, 81 Northern Universities School Certificate, 218 Nottingham, 217, 221, 222 Nottinghamshire, 215, 217, 222 Nunn, Percy, 145 nursing, 221–2, 224, 225–6, 227 Ochberg, Richard, 154


Old Palace School, 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 176, 177–8, 179 oral history, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 11, 34, 228, 232 see also personal histories/testimonies Oram, Alison, 112–13 Osmond, S.P., 73, 74, 75 Oval Road Juniors’ School, 172, 180 Oxley, Mr, 140, 145 Palmer, Don, 165 Parkes, Dr, 187 personal histories/testimonies, 13, 136–41, 142–7, 153–227 see also oral history Philadelphia elementary school, 201, 203 Phillips, Mr Gerald, 186–97 Phillips, HMI, 53–4 Phipson, Miss, 136, 142–3 Pike, Mr, 147 policy, 10–11, 13, 14, 23–85, 229, 231 Poplar, 159 Portsmouth, 186, 188 Portsmouth Grammar School, 187 Portsmouth Municipal College, 188, 189, 191 Powell, G.H., 57, 67n46 practice, 13, 128–49 Primary Club, 185 Pritchard, Mr Dominic, 160, 161–2 professional issues: professional identity and status, xi, 13 15–16, 61, 74, 82, 109–27, 181, 193–6, 213, 219, 221, 223, 224–5, 226, 229– 30; social class and teacher supply, 86–108 progressive methods, 210, 212–13 pupil-teacher centres, 26, 217–19, 220, 222–3 pupil-teacher system, 23–4, 26–7, 28, 31, 36, 77, 86, 88–9, 112 see also rural pupil-teacher scheme Pye Bank Infants’ School, 210–11 Queensmill School, 186 Quine, Mr, 205

recruitment, 30–31, 33, 62, 75, 78, 91 Reeve, Miss, 173 Richards, Chief Inspector, 66n33, 90, 110 Robbins, Miss, 139–40 Robert Blair Primary School, 186 Roberts, Mr, 182 Roscoe, Frank, 88, 234n13 Rosemary, Sister, 174, 175 Roseveare, Sir Martin, 75–6, 78–9 Roseveare Report, 71, 76, 77, 78–9 Rotherham, 211–12 Rousmaniere, Kate: City Teachers, 13 Royal Commission on Secondary Education, 26 rural pupil-teacher scheme, 28; personal experience of, 217–19, 222 Sadler, Michael, 87, 231 St Gabriel’s Church of England Training College, 171, 172, 178, 179 St George’s Preparatory School, 129–30 salary, 113, 114, 165, 169, 170, 200 Salisbury Training College, 133 Salter Davies, Ernest, 58 Saltley Men’s College, 145 Samuel, Raphael, ix–x Sawkin, Mr Brian, 159–70, 196 Schoolmaster, The, 19n48, 28, 88–9, 99, 104n25, 111, 118–19; ‘The Teacher in Social Life’, 109 Schools’ Broadcasting Council, 212 Scraptoft, 215 secondary education, 26, 27, 28, 31–2, 33, 35, 39, 40, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 70, 78, 79, 87, 90, 91, 97, 100, 123–4; experience of, 129, 142–4, 173, 174–5, 177–8 Senior Cambridge exams, 173, 177 Senior Oxford exams, 134 sexual harassment, 220–21 Sharp, P.R., 228 Sharp, Percival, 91–2, 201, 209, 210 Sheffield, 91–6, 104–5n37, 137, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 206, 210, 211 Sheffield City Training College, 201 Sheffield Grammar School, 199

INDEX

Shipley, Arthur, 105n39, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204–9, 212, 214 Shipley, Daisy, 105n39, 198–9, 200–204, 209–14 Shropshire, 214 Skelley, Mrs Delia, 171, 172–5, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183–4, 184–5 Slough, 162 social class and teacher supply, 86–101 sources see historical sources South Norwood, 172 South Wigston, 136 Southlands, 145, 147 Stanley Technical School, 172 Stead, HMI, 53, 54 Steer, Mr, 209 Stephen Committee, 114 student-teacher scheme: introductory and concluding discussion, ix–xiv, 228–33; methodology and approaches to study of, 3–20; personal testimonies, 153–227; policy, 23–85; practice, 128–49; professional issues, 86–127 Swallow Nest Junior Mixed Infants’ School, 211–12 Sydenham School, 171, 173–4, 181, 185 TCA see Training College Association Tanner, Robin, 132–3, 148n19 Tavistock Junior School, 171 Taylor, Miss, 177 ‘Teacher in Social Life’ (article), 109 teacher supply and social class, 86–108 teacher training: policy, 10–11, 13, 14, 23–85, 229, 231; see also student-teacher scheme Teachers’ Certificate, 168, 186, 224 Thomson, Alistair, 5 Thompson, Donna F., 115–16 Thompson, Mr, 144–5, 147 Thornbird, Mrs Lesley, 171–2, 173, 175–8, 179–81, 181–2, 182–3, 184 Thornton, Peter, 72 Tonkin, Elizabeth, 6

243

Training College Association (TCA), 49, 50, 55, 58, 146 training colleges, 25, 27, 28, 29, 33, 40, 41, 42–3, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 63, 70, 72, 75–6, 79–80, 81, 90, 99, 229, 230; experience of, 144–7, 167, 178–9, 192– 4, 203–4, 206–8 training regulations (1907), 26–7, 28, 88, 99 Tropp, Asher, 4, 23, 110, 124n1 Trowbridge, 133, 143 uncertificated teachers, 33 university, 229, 230 Upperthorpe school, 204, 206 Urwick, HMI, 66n33, 90, 110 Venn, Ruth, 135, 140–41 Vose, Ruth, 137 Wakefield, 136 Wakefield Grammar School, 144 Walling, Thomas, 72, 75, 76, 79, 104n34 Walsall, 67n44, 68n72, 68–9n73, 134, 135, 143, 145, 148n26 Waltham, Paddy, 161 Ward, Herbert, 56, 61, 102n10 Wark, HMI, 53 Watford, 136 Watford Girls’ Grammar School, 135 Wath, 121 Watson, Ernest, 123 Webb, Miss, 175 Wellington High School for Girls, 136 West Riding, 212, 228 Westville Junior School, 186 Westville School, 186 Widdowson, Frances, 107n71, 112 Wigston, 136 Wolfit, Sir Donald, 129–30 Wood, Miss J.F., 57, 66n38, 67n43, 70 Wood, S.H., 79–80 Woodside Infants School (Croydon), 171, 180 Woodside Junior School (Sheffield), 211 Woodthorpe Junior Mixed Infants School, 210


Woolley Hall, 213, 214n4 working-class, 30, 31–2, 49, 54, 71, 215– 16, 227 see also social class and teacher supply Worksop Pupil-Teacher Centre, 217–18, 219, 220, 222 York, 213

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