ABSTRACT
The 1890s was a decade of major developments in which the Department of Science and Art, the Charity Commissioners, and the new county and county borough councils all played an active part. The annual DSA reports of the later 1880s had already referred to the effort to create organized science schools, to the growing involvement of school boards in DSA work, to improved laboratory provision and better standards of teaching, and to the increased number of science and art scholarships awarded. For some boys these provided important career openings. The higher-grade school at Cambridge, for example, had several successes of this kind, like the scholar of 1879 who had gone to the Perse Grammar School, then to St John's, and had become senior wrangler and a college fellow (DSA 38th Report PP 1890–1 XXXI:22–3). After 1890 the reports make frequent reference to the provision of facilities by the new local authorities with the local taxation grants at their disposal. The county boroughs tended to limit themselves to the purely technical field, but many of the counties gave money to endowed schools to provide better laboratory accommodation and to pay science teachers (BC I:32–9). These new activities made some of the more elementary DSA work unnecessary. After 1892 the payments for second class examinations, elementary stage, were discontinued, and the grants for advanced work and for honours raised (DSA 39th Report PP 1892 XXXII:57–8).
