ABSTRACT
Among the artisan and petty bourgeois class there was more aspiration for their children to do well out of the education system, and the Department of Education responded by allowing the creation of ‘higher grade’ elementary schools after 1870 for pupils prepared to stay on till 14 or 15, offering a Standard 7 or ‘higher tops’ grade. They offered more domestic economy for girls, and literary, commercial and scientific subjects for those destined to become skilled artisans and office workers.1 Those schools concentrating on science, known as ‘organized science schools’, received additional funding from outside the mainstream education system. The Science and Art Department of South Kensington, formed after the Great Exhibition of 1851, funded technical courses till it was subsumed within the Department of Education in 1899.2
Pupils were entered for the Science and Art Department examination. Around the turn of the century there were some 200 organized science schools. Their fees were higher (in the 1880s Manchester was charging 9d a week) and this effectively excluded the lower working classes, though a few free scholarships were available on the basis of a competitive entry examination. (By 1904 he LCC were offering scholarships to pay for university tuition.) In 1899 a court ruling, the ‘Cockerton judgment’, declared that departmental funding of schools beyond the basics under the Education Acts was unlawful. This prompted the 1902 Education Act expressly providing for the creation of secondary ‘grammar’ schools to which elementary school children could go on if they paid the fees or passed a scholarship examination for a free place.3
These new local authority grammar schools aped the syllabuses of the public schools and the old endowed grammar schools with arts
and classics, as well as science subjects. From 1911 local education authorities were to start developing intermediate schools, the central and technical high schools concentrating on science and vocational subjects, and halfway between the elementary schools and grammar schools in status. Even before the 1902 Act the endowed grammar schools had been increasingly making free scholarship places available, and one exceptional school, a National school at Kenning ton, in 1890 achieved 23 such scholarships. From 1907 25 per cent of all places at local authority grammar schools had to be free scholarship offers.
