An East Oxford Education: A history of East Oxford School

By Russell Kaye

East Oxford Primary School has been serving the local community for almost 150 years. Its story mirrors the development of the education system in the United Kingdom, as the school both responded to and shaped changing national policies.
Drawn from the school's extensive log books, photographic records, and interviews with past pupils, this publication provides a rich and colourful insight into the school's journey from a chapel school-room on Oxford's bustling Cowley Road to a diverse, modern primary school.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784421946

Russell Kaye

Russell Kaye is the current headteacher of East Oxford Primary School.

Book preview

CONTENTS

1882–1900: ‘THE BLESSINGS OF EDUCATION’

1900: ‘A SPACIOUS SCHOOL FOR BOYS AND GIRLS’

1908–1911: THE EAST OXFORD SYLLABUS

1908–1944: HALF A LIFETIME – E.A. GREENING LAMBORN

1939: HANDKERCHIEFS AND SHORT TROUSERS

1939–1945: TAKING SHELTER

1944–1948: WOODEN DESKS AND INKWELLS – EAST OXFORD BOYS’ SCHOOL

1920–1971: MAY DAY CELEBRATIONS

1948–1960: BOYS AND GIRLS – EAST OXFORD SECONDARY SCHOOL

1954: HMI REPORT FOR EAST OXFORD INFANTS’ SCHOOL

1960–1990: DIVERSITY AND CHANGE

2016: EAST OXFORD TODAY

1882–1900: ‘THE BLESSINGS OF EDUCATION’

IT IS , perhaps, hard for the modern mind to perceive just how different life was 140 years ago. When East Oxford School was founded, in a chapel schoolroom on the Cowley Road, there were no cars, and no aeroplanes in the sky; it took two days to travel by road from London to Leeds, and advances in medicine remained limited: as late as 1902, an influenza epidemic in London claimed fifty lives a day.

East Oxford, like the suburbs of many British cities, experienced transformational change during the nineteenth century. In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, Oxford remained very much a university town, largely untouched by the industrial revolution. As country folk gradually began to move towards urban areas, the fields around Cowley Road – where land was in the hands of private owners, rather than the University – became a natural place for the first homes to be constructed, street by street.

In 1851, around 50 per cent of Oxfordshire’s children were not registered with any school, and as late as 1866 some 20 per cent of brides and grooms couldn’t write their own names in the parish registers. Those who did receive an education were either the very wealthy, or those fortunate enough to have access to schools established by the Church, or by reformers, such as Lord Shaftesbury’s ‘Ragged Schools’ or Joseph Lancaster’s ‘British Schools’, which were opening in deprived communities across the country. Although, from the 1840s onwards, the state began to recognise a need to commit funding to education, this was vigorously opposed by some MPs. In 1857, questions were asked in Parliament as to whether the £541,233 spent nationally on education represented value for money. As a comparator, the Crimean War cost the country around £78 million (and didn’t seem to generate quite as much debate).

It was in 1870 that the state made its first unambiguous commitment to the education of all children, through Forster’s Elementary Education Act, which required the establishment of local ‘School Boards’ to provide places, although attendance did not become compulsory until a subsequent Act in 1880. In Oxford at this time, around 15 per cent of children were still not in school, with parents either indifferent to their education or relying on them as wage-earners (the employment of children under the age of 10 continuing to be lawful until 1878). Oxford’s School Board, established in 1871, was made up of members elected by both the City and the University, with the purpose, as reported by Jackson’s Oxford Journal, of extending ‘the blessings of education to the lower strata of society – to that large mass of poorer children who are allowed to wallow in the gutters and alleys of our populous districts, and to grow up in dense ignorance, and feed the ranks of the pauper and criminal classes, because their parents are unwilling, or unable, to send them to school’.

Postcard showing the Cowley Road c. 1900.

It is against this backdrop, then, that East Oxford School opened in temporary accommodation on the corner of Union Street and the Cowley Road, at some point between 1876 and 1882, depending on which source is to be believed. Its rather cumbersome title was ‘The British and Foreign School Society for the Education of the Labouring and Manufacturing Classes of Society of Every Religious Persuasion’. The Society (BFSS) had been founded in the late eighteenth century by Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker who believed that poorer children needed better educational opportunities. Since the prohibitive cost of schooling predominantly consisted of teachers’ salaries, he developed a model in which one master was responsible for large numbers of children, all within a single schoolroom. The teaching of the youngest children was undertaken by the older ones in small groups. The society sought to avoid affiliation to any particular doctrine, whilst still providing teaching of the Bible on a daily basis, providing East Oxford with an alternative to the established church schools in the area. The first headteacher was Thomas Coles, and Henry Nettleship, professor of Latin Literature at the university, was chair of the board.

Henry Nettleship was Chair of the Board of Governors until his death in 1893. Portrait from Imagines Philogorum, Alfred Gudeman, 1911.

East Oxford British School quickly grew from 52 pupils to 278, no doubt as a result of the diligence of the School Board in implementing the 1880 Act. One can only imagine the difficulties involved in convincing local parents, many of whom were unschooled themselves, who still saw their children as income-generators, and who remained a transient and mobile population. Until the early 1890s, the Board had also to convince the parents to pay a school fee to supplement the grant the school received. Particular difficulties in Oxford included the challenge of providing a suitable education for the canal boat children, who spent most of their lives plying between Oxford and Coventry.

The Conscience Clause was displayed in all elementary schools.

The 1870 Education Act also introduced what became known as the ‘Conscience Clause’. Required to be displayed in every school, it established a framework for Religious Instruction, which in many respects remains in place today. The Act prevented schools from requiring religious observance by