‘1. That a school must be in approved premises.
‘2. That each child must make a certain number of attendances.
‘3. That children must pass individual examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic.’
Thus originated the much praised and much abused system of ‘payment by results,’ about which so many a contest has waged.
Up to 1870, the whole system had grown up out of administrative machinery, without direct intervention of the legislature. Voluntary effort originated the schools, Treasury grants assisted them. The Education Act of 1870 was intended, to quote the words of its author, Mr. Forster, ‘to complete the voluntary system, and to fill up gaps.’ Its object was not so much to create schools as School Boards. Where voluntary effort was, by inspection, proved insufficient, a district could be called upon to elect a School Board, with power to raise a rate. A subsequent Act, by establishing school attendance committees for non-School Board districts, completed the system of local control; and the 1880 Act made attendance compulsory on all children up to ten (since altered to eleven), and forbade the employment of any children between ten and thirteen who had not reached a standard to be fixed for each district by its own local authority. Those who could not reach this by fourteen might claim the dunce’s privilege.
The School Boards found plenty of work before them. For some years they were chiefly occupied in drawing into the schools the great masses of the entirely uneducated; and the three R’s, which was all they could aim at, came to be regarded in many quarters as the ultimate aim of elementary school instruction. But this was a temporary stage, which had to be gone through before the red-brick school-house had become a regular feature of town and village throughout the kingdom. Education was compulsory till the age of ten; children who passed through all the standards would remain at school till about twelve or thirteen. For the masses that might be sufficient; for a select few it was either too little or too much. It served to kindle in their minds a love of knowledge, and to reveal a special inclination for intellectual pursuits, without offering the means of satisfying it. Gradually the need of building a second story on this lower edifice became manifest. A subject much debated during the last few years is the question whether this should be planted on the top of the primary building, or provided by special avenues leading from the elementary schools to existing secondary institutions. But while educationalists were discussing matters in the abstract, the necessities of the case were compelling the existing schools to build their own top story. When the Secondary Education Commission of 1894 came to discuss the best methods of establishing continuation schools, they found that a considerable number were already at work in different parts of the country. The change had come about little by little. Clever children had passed through the standards at an age when it was impossible or inadvisable to set them to work; it was natural that the school should be unwilling to turn them away. Thus originated an ex-sixth standard, and gradually the pressure of the Boards upward brought about the extension of the parliamentary grant to a new standard—the seventh—in which more advanced subjects of study received recognition. Thus while the obligatory subjects still remain reading, writing, and arithmetic, with needlework for the girls and drawing for the boys, the optional and specific subjects—of which, however, no child may take more than a very limited number—now range over several sciences, languages, and mathematics, as well as what are popularly called technical subjects. The great mass of schools are still obliged to confine themselves to elementary work; but with the introduction of other subjects into the code, a new element has entered the schools, and has without doubt ‘come to stay.’ The next development after the seventh standard was a system of ex-standard classes, which in large schools could be worked without a great addition to the staff. In particular, the instruction of the pupil-teachers introduced some more advanced classes; and as time went on, parents who had themselves enjoyed the benefits of education showed themselves more and more willing to leave their children at school as long as the school was willing to keep them. In this way the ex-seventh standard developed into the Higher Grade Elementary school.