ABSTRACT
Manuals for voluntary school managers of the 1890s put forward the need for federation, to safeguard school trusts, to establish and administrate a central fund to help weak schools and to prevent, if possible, the transfer of voluntary schools to school boards. One of the Senior Examiners in the Department, C. L. Kingsford, reviewing the work of the Associations in 1902 remarked “It was never intended that the benefit of Voluntary Schools Associations should be purely financial. The establishment of Associations was devised to promote the better organization of the schools as a whole. In this they have been entirely successful”. The area of the Association was taken to be the diocese or archdeaconry in the case of Church of England, the diocese only for Roman Catholic schools. The Wesleyan and British schools divided their areas into geographical regions of England, and the Jewish schools had a national Association.
