ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century saw greater changes in history teaching and laid the foundations for the twentieth-century development of the subject to a far greater extent than is commonly recognised. The Report of the Clarendon Commission on the nine 'great schools' assessed the situation in 1864 in these terms: The importance of some attention to history or geography is recognised more or less at all the schools though in general there is little systematic teaching. The specialist history teachers produced by the university departments of history and the day training colleges established in 1890 at seven of the universities were entering the schools and training their pupils in hitherto unknown dimensions of the subject. Reports on the teaching of history were prepared for local education authorities, teachers' groups were organised to discuss history teaching, and the subject was given a firm place in Board of Education handbooks.
