ABSTRACT
‘No equally powerful body will exist in England outside Parliament, if power be measured by influence for good or evil over masses of human beings.’ Thus The Times on 29 November 1870, 2 discussing that day's election of the first School Board for London. Certainly the impact of the London School Board, to use its more common name, was very great. Sidney Webb, by no means a friend, commented at the end of its life that it deserved a good deal of the credit for ‘one of the most remarkable chapters of social history’, namely ‘the transformation effected in the course of three-quarters of a century in the manners and morals of the London manual working class’. Webb continued:
Not until the establishment…of the London School Board, was there any systematic attempt to rescue the whole of the children of London…. The voluntary schools stand, numerically, almost precisely where they did in 1870. It is the School Board which has provided the buildings for the half a million additional scholars brought under the wonderful discipline of the public elementary school. These five hundred new public buildings [occupy] 600 acres of valuable land…. And improvement in quality has kept pace with increase in quantity. It is, in the main, to the School Board that London owes the transformation which has, in these thirty-three years, come over its elementary schools – the change from frowsy, dark, and insanitary rooms, practically destitute of apparatus or playgrounds, in which teachers, themselves mostly untrained, mechanically ground a minimum of the three R's required by the wooden old code into the heads of their scanty pupils, to the well-lighted and admirably decorated school buildings of the present day, with ample educational equipment, with pianos, school libraries, extensive playgrounds, etc., served by a staff of trained professional teachers…. 3
