Education: late nineteenth-century disparities in provision Bill Marsden, University of Liverpool

The Education Census of 1851 identified, more authoritatively than had been the case before, the demographic imperative which had and was still to plague public educational planning and provision in England and Wales. Its architect, Mann, formulated a base-line for such provision. He suggested that schools were needed for approximately one-sixth of the nation’s population. In the event, it was found that for the rapidly growing towns and cities this was an underestimate, and even a one-fifth calculation hardly enough. Among other achievements the Education Census confirmed also the findings of earlier and less accurate surveys, that blatant regional disparities in educational provision were present,1 and that the large industrial and commercial towns and cities posed particular difficulties.