Sidney Webb and the London Technical Education Board

Abstract

swallowing of a multitude of small town and country School Boards was a very different proposition from the consumption of the London School Board. In all, the L.S.B. controlled 1,418 school departments, 550,000 children, 12,000 teachers and 251 groups of managers. This in itself would have been a Gargantuan meal but, in addition, there was the question of the assimilation of the 1,500 departments and 207,000 children of the denominational schools. The total child population of London in 1903 was ten times that of either Birmingham or Manchester, and in fact, exceeded the total population (child and adult) of any town in the country. If the responsibilities of the School Board and the Technical Education Board were to be merged it was clear that municipalisation of the educational services of the Metropolis would involve control of at least two thousand institutions, more than twenty thousand teachers, a million children and students, and an annual expenditure of £4,000,000. It was calculated that the existing work of the Council, already alleged to be excessive, would be doubled. Small wonder then that the Government faltered in its step and asked itself whether it was really worth the candle to alter the status quo, a defeatist attitude which was to show itself periodically during the early months of 1903. – Introductory paragraph.