School Board Visitors and their impact on Victorian Britain

Across England and Wales in the late nineteenth century, School Board Visitors had been attributed to monitoring school attendance and the quality of teaching following state intervention. ‘‘The passage of the Education Act of 1870 was the decisive influence upon Poor Law guardians’ and as a result, would revolutionise Victorian Britain as they knew it. However, how effective the School Board Visitors (School Attendance Officer is another popular term) really were at fulfilling their role is questionable, whether at the fault of the individual inspectors or the schools themselves. It is crucial that the impact that School Board Visitors had on school attendance in the late nineteenth century is analysed to understand their true effect on the Victorian working class and slum societies.
Secondary sources based on primary evidence, such as individual school case studies, can generally provide rich sources of information and clarity. However, ‘the primary sources for school attendance figures during this period are based, at a macro or system level, on the findings of Select Committees, statistical societies, census returns and government enquiries.’ It can be suggested that these findings hold an element of doubt within them and wider research should accompany them when making a formal analysis of the circumstances of the period. Due to the notion that teaching academia was a skilled profession and the rise of professional society at the time, it could be strongly suggested that the positions of those professions were extensively filled by the middle class during the late nineteenth century. Initially, a major factor contributing to the attendance problem was the ease of work to children during the period, however, middle class values began to also contribute to the slow response from the state: ‘Attendance registers have always been prone to calculated misrepresentation to suit the interests of a particular school. Hurt contends that that they were obviously falsified on a widespread scale.’ In Line with Hurt’s comments , it can be suggested that on a widespread scale, actions taken by professionals in Victorian England schools delayed the state’s awareness of the actual conditions of the growing attendance problem in Victorian England and the falsification of statistics emphasises the previously stated element of doubt when working with sources and information of this type. Once the state had realised the true extent of the attendance issue they began to introduce policies to tackle the problem and strengthen the educational structure. ‘By 1880 attendance officers had been appointed in most areas’ and provision was given for the appointment of attendance committees in parishes and boroughs. The attendance committees were given the privilege to make their own byelaws however it could be suggested that the School Board Visitors roles remained as equally challenging while being influenced from misrepresented statistics and this may have affected the impact that they had on Victorian society during the period.
The suggestion can be put forward that School Board Visitors often held unexpected prejudices that could sometimes blur what their position and role expected from them. ‘The opinions of the School Board Visitors were cross-checked against those of philanthropists, social workers, policemen and others. The scope for error was considerable.’ Professor Eric Evans takes a critical approach to an 1884 report from government from one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools and emphasised the aspects School Board Visitors were concerned most about were ‘school attendance, the curriculum, the quality of teaching and whether pupils turned up regularly or not. Inspectors frequently also interpreted their role as to draw government’s attention to failures in the implementation of policy, and to suggest remedies.’ This emphasises how the School Board Visitors in regard to fulfilling their role can be portrayed as weak, as prejudices influenced what the inspectors were reporting and also where they reported, with some towns even not having enough officers to inspect all the schools effectively: ‘For the town population of 20,000 only part of one man’s time was engaged for attendance work; that their country officer had not once entered some of the schools under his charge during the proceeding 12 months; that from neither officer did his employers require any account of either his time or his results.’ From what HMI Seymour Tremenheere states, in a governmental viewpoint there are places during the year 1884 that were still of grave concern and he begins to offer opinions as to what he thinks should be done to rectify the issue. This ties into what Professor Eric Evans stated previously about inspectors interpreting their roles and trying to offer solutions based off their own opinions. As a result, this weakens the impact the School Board Visitors had in fulfilling their role due to being more concerned with technical areas of government policy than the attendance, wellbeing and education of the Victorian children.

Ultimately, we can conclude that even though School Board Visitors individually may have been ill-supplied for a variety of their tasks and management capabilities that made their role more difficult; their own attempts to inspire government policy and become part of the policy making for the benefit of themselves, removed the focus and the impact they had on improving Victorian society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; as they would spend most of their time improving the relationship between the civil service and the making of government policy rather than trying to alter individual schools agenda on attendance.

 

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Schools in the Kendal District Report, Tremenheere, S., Parliamentary Papers, Vol. xxiv (1884)

Secondary Literature

Englander. D., Poverty and Poor Law Reform in 19th Century Britain, 1834-1914: From Chadwick to Booth (Longman, New York. 1998.)

Hurt. J., Education in Evolution: Church, State, Society and Popular Education 1800-1870 (Paladin, London. 1972.)

Journals & Articles

Influences on School Attendance in Victorian England A. C. O. Ellis, British Journal of Educational Studies Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct. 1973),

Patterns of and influences on elementary school attendance in early Victorian industrial Monmouthshire 1839–1865, David. C. James & Brian Davies, Journal of the History of Education Society.  Vol. 46, No. 3 (2017)

Web Sources

Evans. E (September 2014) Victorian Classroom Life: School Reports as Source Material – Web Article available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/education_health/classroom_life_print.html