The Impact of Subsidies to Elementary Schooling on Enrolment Rates in Nineteenth-century England

Abstract

Considerable controversy exists about the role of public elementary schooling in the development of mass education in nineteenth-century England. Some recent accounts continue to support the long-standing view that the development of a public system of elementary schooling was the central force behind the rise in working-class educational attainment during the nineteenth century. Other accounts have suggested instead that this rise can be attributed to the growth in working-class demand for education and that this demand could have been met by private schooling. However, little attempt has been made to assess directly the effect of public elementary schooling on working-class educational attainment. Much of the debate has focused on the extent and quality of the private provision of working-class schooling in the first half of the nineteenth century. West and Laqueur have argued that an active private market financed in large part by fees was present. However, Hurt and Kiesling have argued that many of the schools West and Laqueur consider private were dame schools primarily providing childcare not instruction, or were aimed at a middle-class clientele, or were financed in part by subsidies from religious, philanthropic, or government sources. Although the state of the private schooling market in the first half of the nineteenth century is of interest as an indicator of the potential for the growth of working-class education under the circumstances of the time, it does not establish how much of the actual rise in school enrolment rates observed in the last half of the nineteenth century can be attributed to the development of a system of public elementary schooling. An initially limited private schooling market could have become much larger with extensive growth in working-class demand for schooling. On the other hand, the extent of education achieved with an initially active private market could perhaps have been markedly increased by the further development of public elementary schooling. 1 Those studies which have considered the relationship between the development of public elementary schooling and the rise of working-class education in the last half of the nineteenth century have tended to rely on post hoc,