ABSTRACT
By the mid-l 830s the infant school was firmly established on the educational map of Britain. The pattern had been developed by Buchanan, Goyder and Wilderspin, and the Infant School Society, in endorsing this type of school and employing Wilderspin to popularise it, had given a powerful impetus to its diffusion throughout the British Isles. Even the growing number of infant schools organised by Evangelicals, and those sponsored by High Church clergy, were recognisable as greater or lesser modifications of the generally-accepted model. By 1836 Wilderspin estimated that no fewer than two hundred and seventy infant schools had been established in Great Britain - a hundred and fifty in England, seventy in Scotland and fifty in Ireland.I The greatest concentration, he stated, was in the large cities and the manufacturing districts and it was here also that there existed a recognition of the need to increase the provision still further.2
