Schools and Schooldays in Nineteenth-Century Harrogate

1 review for Schools and Schooldays in Nineteenth-Century Harrogate

1. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   Brian Barber – 21st July 2026

   This book is a study of the history of education in Harrogate, the author’s adopted hometown, up to the end of the Edwardian era. It examines both the public provision of elementary education for the town’s numerous working-class children up to their very early teens and also the day and boarding schools which catered for the more-prolonged schooling of the far fewer fee-paying middle-class children of the town’s business and professional classes. By the early twentieth century there were around 4,500 children educated in Harrogate within the state system. The numbers of those learning at private expense were less certain but considerably less numerous: by the same date, the town possessed around three dozen, almost all small, private schools of differing sizes in which boarders accounted for around 700 of their number. The explicit aim of the author is to draw the contrasts between the two school communities and to examine the subject through the three perspectives of class, religion and gender, although religion is, in fact, not noticeably taken into account except in the second chapter.

   A short opening chapter briefly surveys the emergence of the town as a health resort whose early prosperity was based on the supposedly therapeutic if repulsive mineral springs that surfaced in the vicinity. Then, with the arrival of the railways, the town expanded further because of its attractions as a commuter town for the businessmen of Leeds and Bradford. It continuous expansion – two thousand in 1801 and more than 33,000 by 1911 – led it to be recognised as a new urban entity with the creation of a self-governing municipal borough council in 1884. (A complementary borough bench of magistrates was gained in the following year, although few of Harrogate’s tradesmen found themselves appointed to it, to their vocal complaint.) The author supplements this with an overview of the town’s middle and working class districts, based in part on his previously-published study of Working-Class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate. Here the book includes its only map, and that of only a small district of the town, which is regrettable.

   Then follows the two longest chapters in the book, the first on schools for the working class-children, the second for those of the middle-class. The former retails a largely familiar institutional narrative of nineteenth century elementary education: first parish schools and the establishment of voluntary schools provided mostly by the Anglican ‘National Society’ and the non-denominational British and Foreign Schools. This is succeeded by an
   account of the three decades of the district school boards and their publicly-funded schools from 1870, then superseded by the regime of the Local Education Authorities in 1902, as the majority of earlier schools for the poor progressively ceded their role to the expanding system of state education.

   Here the author does acknowledge the significance of religion, in the persistent ideological undercurrent of antagonism between the ‘voluntarism’ of Nonconformity with its hostility to a state-sponsored religious denomination and the Anglican suspicion of the school boards, seen as encroaching Anglican hegemony through schools financed by the superior resources of local taxation. This difference of attitude was exacerbated – vociferously in some parts of the West Riding and for many years afterwards through its county council – by the Conservative government’s Education Act of 1902. Harrogate managed to avoid the deleterious effects of the prolonged guerrilla warfare between Church schools and the County Council because responsibility for education in the town was delegated to the borough by the county authority.

   But the history of Harrogate’s ‘Higher Grade School’ and its ambiguous role in a state education system that was intended to provide for only an elementary level of schooling is outlined. For working-class children, education effectively stopped in childhood rather than adolescence. For them, attendance was compulsory only up to the age of ten from 1876, up to 11 from 1893, 12 from 1899 and 14 from 1918. Nor was it initially free of charge. A fee of a penny a week was customary until 1891 when any fee over this sum was abolished at all board schools, which also put pressure on other schools for the working-class to follow suit.

   Chapter 3 examines the variety of educational opportunities provided by the seven-dozen predominantly small fee-charging schools to educate the appreciably smaller number of children of the middle class, in schools for girls, schools for boys, day schools, and boarding schools. For these pupils, education could continue well into their teens, and so could last up to twice as long as that offered to the working class.

   Its cost was calculated in guineas rather than pence. Depending as they did on the financial resources and pedagogic competence of their owners, which determined the supply, and the successive cycles of prosperity and depression, which significantly influenced demand from fee-paying parents, the number of schools fluctuated over time, although the long-term total was upwards.

   At the private schools the boys’ curriculum was intended to equip them for the commercial and professional pursuits which their parents expected them to follow. At schools for girls, the emphasis was on preparing the pupils for their likely roles in family and domestic life. From time to time, the author makes careful note of the fees necessary for the children to enjoy a longer, more varied, and socially-segregated schooling. A charge of up to £26 a quarter for boarders put such schools beyond all but the most affluent of Harrogate parents.

   Chapters 4 to 8 are shorter and treat five aspects of schools and schooling. The first of these chapters, and the shortest, aims to review in some detail the social circumstances of a range of pupils at both elementary and private schools. This is, while ingeniously-compiled, naturally limited to the relatively restricted range of evidence available. There is more to be retailed, in chapter 5, about the teachers, mainly their social origins, training, gender and salaries, with many examples of the experiences of particular staff members in state and in private schools.

   ‘Teaching and Learning’, the subject of chapter 6, examines the inculcation of standards of behaviour in state schools and, in both sectors, the changing content of the curriculum for both boys and girls. In the former, content was determined, in essence, by conditions governing eligibility for grants from central government (the system of ‘payment by results’, introduced in 1862), with its emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy. In the latter, the focus was decided by the need for private schools to teach their pupils to pass examinations for professional, university, and civil service entrance. Curriculum was also crucially influenced by the level of facilities, particularly in the teaching of science subjects. Gradually, in the education of girls, the emphasis on their role in their home was adjusted to provide academic opportunities for those with different prospects. Facilities especially valued by private school as the century progressed were sports fields for cricket, football, and hockey.

   Matters of punctuality, regular attendance, school meals, illness, medical inspection, special needs, discipline and punishment are the principal themes of ‘school life’ in chapter 7. Following this, ‘After School’ treats the world of work for state-school children, and their slight prospect of secondary and adult education, university extension lectures, and other avenues for intellectual curiosity and as means of advancing their careers. To examine the adult lives of those who attended private schools, the author uses the information he gathered, (initially for investigation of their social origins in chapter 4) on 120 boys and 67 girls. The boys entered business and the professions, and the girls mostly became home-makers, although others pioneered the widening of employment opportunities that became increasingly common in later decades.

   Schools and Schooldays in Nineteenth-Century Harrogate is a remarkably thorough and thoughtful enquiry in which the author skilfully deploys a remarkably wide range of diverse archival materials, books, and articles. At times, however, the sometimes excessive degree of detail mutes the impact of the exposition. Nevertheless, the book forms an admirable template for other local historians to follow if they possess the skill, diligence and enthusiasm on display here.