The origins of cooptation to membership of local education committees

Abstract

t is still sometimes said that county and county borough councils first entered on the task of running the local education service under the Balfour Act of 1902 as successors to the school boards which were then being abolished. Yet before 1902 these multi-purpose local authorities were engaged in the local administration of education. Some of them had begun to move into this work within a year of their being set up under the County Councils Act of 1888. The Education Act of 19o2 required every county and county borough council to establish a statutory committee through which it was to conduct its educational business. The committee was to be composed of councillors along with other persons coopted from the field of education. This general pattern of composition remains to the present day, having survived local government reform and other hazards of three-quarters of a century. Although it was only following the Act of 1902 that the Board of Education enforced the requirement that the committees should contain both members of the Council and outside persons, the great majority of county boroughs and a significant minority of county councils had already set up committees with their membership mixed in this way to discharge educational functions under the Technical Instruction Acts (1889-91). It is the purpose of this article to examine the composition of these committees in the years preceding and immediately following the Act of 1902 and to give some indication of the degree of continuity which existed between practice under the new measure and what had already become customary. In one sense this is yet another example of the way in which the state has often begun by permitting local authorities to adopt a practice and has then moved on to the next stage of enforcing it on all as a mandatory requirement. Existing facilities for secondary and technical education in this country in the second half of the nineteenth century were generally held to be quite inadequate. The reform of the endowed secondary schools and the work of the Science and Art Department were two ways in which successive governments attempted to meet the situation. The absence of suitable local government machinery at the county level, along with the religious and political controversy which surrounded the school boards, clearly 258