ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century opened with England at war with France. In the eighteenth century there had been two great changes - the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, both of which strongly influenced the development of education. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the prevailing upper-class view was that education was essentially a private matter and that if any interference by government were undertaken it should be to assist, but not to provide, a deliberately inferior kind of education for the children of the poor. In 1894 a Royal Commission on Secondary Education was set up, chaired by James Bryce. It was recognised that there was a vast gap between elementary schools and universities. Socialists disliked the testing regime associated with payment-by-results because it distorted the true purpose of education as well as teaching methods.
