An infant school is a term used primarily in England and Wales, for the education of children between the ages of four and seven years. It is usually a small school serving a particular area. It is sometimes a department in a larger primary school educating children up to the age of approximately eleven years old.
An infant school forms part of local education provision giving primary education. In England and Wales, children start at infant school between the ages of four and five in a Reception class. They sometimes attend part-time (mornings only or afternoons only) for the first term.
In England, reception is considered part of early years education whilst the following two years are known as Key Stage 1. In Wales, the entirety of nursery and infant school is included in the foundation phase.
Infants is followed by Junior School known formally in both England and Wales as Key Stage 2.
History
The first infant school in England was at Brewers Green, Westminster in 1818 which was placed under the charge of James Buchanan, a weaver. Buchanan had served at what is considered the first infant school in Great Britain, Robert Owen's at New Lanark. The second in England was opened in 1820 by Joseph Wilson in Spitalfields and placed in the charge of Samuel Wilderspin. In 1823, Wilderspin published On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor. In June 1824, Henry Brougham, William Wilberforce, Samuel Wilderspin and William Allen formed the Infant School Society. The purpose of the society was to train teachers and to promote infant school formation. Unlike Owen's school, those opened under Wilderspin's influence placed great emphasis on religious training for the young children of the poor. Dame schools, which had existed long before, had shown the need for childcare of very young children for women who worked outside the home. The new infant schools were to provide a safe environment for these children as well as give them some educational advantages. Wilderspin's schools were based on the reform education theory of Swiss thinker Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. James Pierrepont Greaves, secretary of the Infant School Society, worked with Pestalozzi for several years, as did Charles Mayo, who along with his sister Elizabeth Mayo, worked with the Home and Colonial Institution (later the Home and Colonial Infant School Society) to set up infant schools and train teachers. Historian W.B Stephens was dismissive of the early infant school movement commenting that…[the movement] was strongest in Glasgow and London, but less significant for its immediate impact on the education of the poor than its initial pioneering of progressive pedagogical methods associated with Wilderspin, Stow, Pestalozzi and Froebel. These influenced advanced teaching methods in later periods but in practise the schools themselves failed to replace the dame schools in working class favour and most gradually succumbed to traditional rote-learning and moral and religious instruction, losing any distinctive reason to exist.In 1840, guidance issued for newly-introduced school inspectors in England and Wales mentioned specific questions for them to ask in infants school. For instance, "What amusements have the children?" and "‘Are the children trained in walking, marching, and physical exercises, methodically?". As a state school system was established in England and Wales from 1870, schools were incorporated into the system. The government set standards for pupils attainment in order to prepare them for the next stage of their schooling but from as early as 1893 infant schools were being encouraged to educate children in way that was suited to their development and by the interwar period they adopted a child centred approach. Later, following a 1967 report on primary education teachers were given more freedom to teach as they wished until the 1988 education reform act introduced a more specific subject based curriculum and mandatory testing.