The social world of the school: Education and community in interwar London

By Hester Barron

This book shows why the study of schooling matters to the history of twentieth-century Britain, integrating the history of education within the wider concerns of modern social history. Drawing on a rich array of archival and autobiographical sources, it captures in vivid detail the individual moments that made up the minutiae of classroom life. It focuses on elementary education in interwar London, arguing that schools were grounded in their local communities as lynchpins of social life and drivers of change. Exploring crucial questions around identity and belonging, poverty and aspiration, class and culture, behaviour and citizenship, it provides vital context for twenty-first century debates about education and society, showing how the same concerns were framed a century ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526150745

Book preview

Introduction

In 1932, the American sociologist Willard Waller began his classic study of schools and teaching by suggesting that

What this book tells us is what every teacher knows, that the world of school is a social world. Those human beings who live together in the school, though deeply severed in one sense, nevertheless spin a tangled web of interrelationships; that web and the people in it make up the social world of school. It is not a wide world but, for those who know it, it is a world compact with meaning. It is a unique world. It is the purpose of this book to explore it.¹

I can remember the moment when I read this passage. I was in the Social Sciences reading room at the British Library, at the beginning of a new project examining schools and schooling in interwar London. I decided there and then that this was the quotation with which I would begin my own eventual book, for Waller’s ambition to explore the social world of the school, was – at that point – my ambition too. I wanted to chart the lived experience of the classroom and I saw its everyday interactions as being at the heart of my research.

The quotation survived to make it to the opening, but, several years later, my ideas around it have changed. Slowly, I realised that the ‘social world’ of the school was much wider than the passage allowed. The ‘tangled web of interrelationships’ in my own book stretches outwards to include families and the wider local community and economy; the chronological focus widens to encompass past scholars as well as the future parents, workers and voters that pupils would become. It has become a story of the social relationships that shaped interwar Britain: the overlapping interests of children, parents, neighbours, teachers, school managers, inspectors, welfare workers, medics, clerics, local businesses and local government officials.

And so this book turned out not to be a microhistory of the classroom after all, although much of the source material is beautiful in its ability to conjure up particular moments of classroom life. In fact, it could claim to be the opposite: about what happens if we refuse to let the history of the classroom be constrained by the walls of the school.

My first book, stemming from my PhD, explored meanings of community in the Durham coalfield during the 1926 miners’ lockout.² In the years following its publication, my attention increasingly turned to the history of schooling and childhood and I lost count of the number of academics who commented that this was a big shift in direction. There were new historiographies to get to grips with, of course, but I wondered why it was seen as a greater change than any other. In fact, one of the chapters in my first book had been on education: about how schools functioned during the strike, the messages that miners’ children received, and the relationship between school activities and what pupils learnt at home. One reviewer specifically noted that ‘the chapter on education is perhaps unexpected in a study of 1926’.³

In his recent book on education after 1945, Peter Mandler argues that the best social, economic, cultural and gender histories too often ‘relegate education to an afterthought’.⁴ Regarding the interwar years specifically, historical accounts were once dominated by assessments of employment, living standards, and arguments over the 1930s as either ‘healthy’ or ‘hungry’. More recently, historians have been better attuned to the complexities of the period, continuing to acknowledge the importance of class but also sensitive to the ways in which experiences were fractured by race and gender in particular. But despite an ongoing concern with issues of community and identity, most social, cultural and political histories of interwar Britain pay scant attention to children’s experiences or the social history of schooling.

Jon Lawrence has argued that the concerns of interwar social inquiry, rightly dominated by the challenge of combating the misery of poverty and chronic unemployment, have continued to contour studies of the period, encouraging a ‘tendency to see social change from above rather than below – as a result of shifts in state policy, rather than as the product, at least in part, of democratic impulses from below, including rising expectations and subtle shifts in social norms’.⁵ In righting this balance, an examination of educational institutions – from below – is critical. To quote Mandler again, schools and universities in the twentieth century were ‘not only motors of economic growth and cockpits of citizenship but also the most important theatres of socialisation outside the family. They stand, therefore, on the front line of social change.’⁶

This book argues that the school is an essential lens through which to view the social history of interwar Britain. Education now mattered more than ever in ordinary people’s lives. When the 1918 Education Act abolished exceptions to the compulsory school-leaving age, all children aged 5–14 received a standardised experience of schooling for the first time. It may only have been one way in which parents and children were becoming familiar with a more visible and interventionist state, following welfare reforms in the years before 1914 and a vast increase in state power during the First World War. Yet for many people, whose interactions continued to be informed by the local, the experiential and the quotidian, it was the most important. Schooling – or a son or daughter’s experience of schooling – was now a constant of everyday life.

Expectations of state institutions had also changed. The relationship between citizens and government had been altered by war service and was further transformed by the suffrage reforms of 1918 and 1928. Schools were places where parents might exercise increased power as ratepayers, voters and consumers. The extension of the franchise suggested new, democratic and egalitarian concepts of citizenship and social inclusion, which competed with an older, anxious rhetoric that valued state education for its ‘civilising’ benefits to the urban masses.

By the interwar period more attention was being given to the individual child and particularly to children’s emotional development and welfare. Scientific, medical and educational groups were moving away from a primary focus on children’s bodies to an increasing concern with the ‘management of minds’, as Harry Hendrick puts it.⁷ By the 1930s, child-centred education had ‘become the intellectual orthodoxy of the primary school and of the training college’, even if it was not yet practised in every classroom, and many young teachers were drawn to the ‘romantic excitement about … psychologically informed pedagogy’.⁸ Schools were increasingly credited with a more formative role in the creation of adult citizens.

Meanwhile, young people themselves responded to a changing world. David Fowler has suggested that these years saw the emergence of the ‘first teenagers’, as school-leavers enjoyed higher levels of affluence than earlier generations and spent more on leisure. Pamela Cox quotes an MP who worried that ‘girls are getting better wages, they dress themselves rather more flashily … One can hardly ever go down a street without seeing girls of 13, 14, and 15 with powder on their faces and rouge on their lips.’⁹ Younger children enjoyed less disposable income, but their habits remained concerning to the political class. In 1931 an MP cited a questionnaire which asked Birmingham schoolchildren for their impressions upon leaving the cinema. ‘What a very good time a girl can have’, was one of several replies to alarm him.¹⁰ Nowhere might children be better placed to take advantage of new opportunities for leisure and consumption than in London, with its proliferation of chain stores and picture palaces. Yet the new consumerism of the interwar period sat alongside instances of appalling deprivation; contrasts of socio-economic wellbeing that were accentuated by the common experience of the classroom.

Schooling mattered in the interwar years. Educational experiences were not background noise; they were drivers of significant social change. What happened inside schools affected not just children (not that children’s experiences are any less valid than those of other historical groups) but also the broader working-class communities around them. Telling the story of the interwar period through its schools therefore changes the way we think about modern Britain. It challenges accepted chronologies of social change and questions a narrative that privileges the Second World War as the transformative moment that changed public perceptions of the possible. This book argues that the genesis of attitudes and ideas more often associated with the era of the welfare state lies in the interwar period, influencing and influenced by the generation of schoolchildren who would vote for change in 1945.

For many decades, histories of education were dominated by discussion of political and administrative change, with attention given to the 1918 and 1944 Education Acts in particular as ‘major signposts along the road to the English welfare state’.¹¹ Studied in this way, the interwar period was an uninspiring one, a time of ‘much talk, many plans, and little effective legislation’.¹² But, from the late twentieth century onwards, historians became increasingly wary of ‘official’ sources – the parliamentary reports, education committee accounts and textbook evidence on which much earlier work had been based. Several began to explore the ‘silences and images’ of lived school experience.¹³

Many turned to written testimony and oral history, allowing them to challenge historical interpretations based on traditional sources. Following an extensive analysis of memoirs, for example, Jonathan Rose was able to contest an image of working-class schooling as miserable and oppressive, suggesting that schooldays were more commonly remembered as happy and fulfilling, while Philip Gardner’s interviews with ex-teachers provided a different perspective on corporal punishment, arguing that, for teachers themselves, ‘even the landmark 1944 Education Act often appears as a marginal moment against the more intimate rhythms of daily life in schools’.¹⁴ The use of memoir also allowed a turn to topics that were otherwise virtually invisible. Jacob Middleton explored schoolyard fights, which barely register in official sources in contrast to autobiographies that ‘frequently pay more attention to playground battles than to what occurred in the classroom’.¹⁵

Other historians sought different approaches. Ian Grosvenor made a plea for a widened research agenda ‘to embrace the grammar and the choreography, the routines and the rituals, and the symbolic events of everyday schooling’.¹⁶ He and others welcomed the ‘pictorial turn’ in histories of education; the ‘spatial turn’ which gives attention to the physical materiality of the classroom; or have called for a ‘sensory history’ of schooling.¹⁷ Several historians have engaged with approaches from the history of emotions, overlapping with exciting work being done by historians of childhood and youth.¹⁸

New methodologies allowed a fresh return to earlier themes. Schools have long been seen by historians – and either praised or feared by contemporaries – as powerful socialising agents. In his seminal account of turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, Eugen Weber credited nineteenth-century French schools as ‘a major agent of acculturation’.¹⁹ In the British context, Brian Simon’s four-volume history of the English education system quoted the Labour intellectual R.H. Tawney, writing of the expansion of education in the 1870s: ‘The elementary schools … were intended in the main to produce an orderly, civil, obedient population with sufficient education to understand a command.’²⁰

As long ago as the late 1980s, Marjorie Lamberti, in her study of German education, was already describing the concept of the ‘school as an instrument of social control to train the lower classes to be obedient and loyal … industrious and contented’ as a ‘belabored theme’.²¹ The role of the school in the transmission of values has nonetheless continued to be important to historians across different geographical and temporal settings, though the trend has been towards a broader emphasis on national identity rather than class conformity: of Austrian schools in which ‘the impressionable young – the future of the nation – learn the national history, the national literature, and civic values’; Hawaiian teachers appointed because they were ‘effective Americanizers’; ‘learning to be loyal’ in schools in Alsace and Lorraine; or the ‘learning to forget’ done by Italian immigrant children at school in New Haven, to give just a few examples.²²

However, the turn towards spatial and material analysis persuaded some authors to return to Foucaultian ideas of discipline and social order, arguing that school buildings themselves were appropriated for this purpose:

School was a universalised space specifically designed to hold children … Control was in the buildings, the space created, and in the material contents of this space – furniture and equipment. Under the influence of school architecture the child was transformed into a schoolchild, into a subject of school culture. Children were segregated with their peers according to age and levels of attainment, and sequentially progressed through regulated structures. The school day was structured into timetabled units and cultural knowledge orientated towards the values and norms of society at large was transmitted. In sum, the school was an instrument of social order, regulating the body and social relations.²³

Meanwhile, a bottom–up approach gave visibility to resistance. ‘As anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in a classroom will know’, commented the editors of one collection, ‘human beings who populate those spaces refuse, subvert, invent, negotiate, and resist the terms of their subjectification in pedagogical practices and discourses.’²⁴ In 1981, Stephen Humphries’ study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British youth provided an early example of children and young people rebelling against the ‘control and manipulation’ faced in the classroom.²⁵ In the introduction to their edited collection, Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon concluded that, across Europe, state objectives in education were disrupted by (among other factors) ‘parental indifference or cunning’.²⁶ Dina Copelman, writing about schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, included teachers’ resistance to goals articulated by educational administrators as another factor in the ‘contested world’ of the school and the ‘classroom struggles’ therein.²⁷

Numerous works have engaged with this theme, emphasising – often in nuanced and sensitive ways – the acts of resistance, subversion or opposition to the imposed values of an education system; the ways in which historical actors ‘attempted to resist the narrow, unequal and unjust offerings of education’.²⁸ These mirror a similar trend among historians of childhood and youth, who have, in recent years, been rightly keen to stress the agency of children against the adults whose voices are almost always privileged in the sources.²⁹

It is in this context, however, that Mona Gleason has warned against the ‘agency trap’: ‘confining historical analysis to a binaried interpretive framework, perhaps too simplistically juxtaposing adult actions and perspectives against those of children and youth’.³⁰ I do not want to deny that tensions existed between formal educational institutions and children, parents and other local interests; they clearly did in interwar London as elsewhere. My evidence reveals a tone among officials that was often condescending to working-class families; disagreements between teachers and parents over issues such as the acceptance of scholarships or the teaching of domestic subjects; and anger over, for example, the excessive use of corporal punishment. But the following chapters also foreground the dynamic, fluid and negotiated nature of the relationship between schools and their communities: the tailoring of lessons to the needs of local employment firms, the working-class parents who helped out, and the children who felt grounded in their schools and retained an attachment to them long after they had left.

The focus of this book is London, which has always claimed a unique place in the national imagination. ‘London is not so much a county or a town as a small state – its population is as large as that of Belgium’, stated an interwar history of the London County Council (LCC).³¹ The London Teacher, the journal of the London Teachers’ Association, simply declared that ‘London is a microcosm of the world’.³²

Contemporary and historical analysis has often focused on the East End, ‘Britain’s most famous urban neighbourhood’.³³ From the fascination of late Victorian ‘slummers’ to the interwar photography of Edith Tudor Hart, by the 1920s and 1930s the poverty and suffering of many East Enders had long been documented.³⁴ But the East End did not have a monopoly on suffering. In 1930, as the national economic crisis deepened, it was Bermondsey, south of the river and dependent on casual dock labour that had the highest percentage of unemployment at nearly one fifth of adult men.³⁵ In 1932 Cyril Garbett, the Bishop of Southwark, published In the Heart of South London, describing ‘the wretchedness, the discomfort and the suffering’ of the ‘large population – possibly a quarter of a million – living in overcrowded or insanitary houses’.³⁶ Similarly appalling levels of congestion could be found in parts of north London such as Finsbury and Paddington. Indeed, Londoners across the capital might fall in and out of poverty. Sally Alexander has noted that ‘London’s poor were not a class apart. Few working people in London could remain confidently above the poverty line for long in the twenties and thirties … The rhythms of London’s seasonal and casual labour markets threw many close to destitution at intervals, throughout those decades.’³⁷

Yet if poverty could be overwhelming in certain places and at certain times, a study of London benefits from its variety. While boroughs dependent on dock and port labour suffered, Greater London became Britain’s principal manufacturing centre across the same period. Alexander suggests that by the late 1920s the image of the metropolis, capital city of Empire, was of a vital economic force, ‘risen from the ashes of the Great War’. She points out that the New Survey of London Life and Labour at the end of the decade recorded higher incomes, a shorter working day, improved health and literacy and reduced poverty compared to Charles Booth’s survey of forty years earlier, while Labour’s 1934 victory in the municipal elections promised a new progressive impetus in local government.³⁸

My focus is on London’s elementary schools, which were the Council’s ‘largest responsibility’, according to the LCC inspector P.B. Ballard writing in 1930:

It is the largest from every point of view. In the mere tale of human units the elementary schoolchildren stand supreme: they vastly outnumber all the other schoolchildren put together. Nine children out of every ten receiving full-time education in London are attending elementary schools … [they] are destined to form the vast bulk of the citizens of London. They are at this moment 600,000 strong – enough to fill the whole of London as it was in the days of Wren, or the whole of Sheffield as it is today.³⁹

Elementary schools provided compulsory education for children aged 5–14. Around a third of London’s elementary schools were ‘non-provided’: maintained by the LCC, but with site and fabric not provided by the authority. Most were Anglican, but there were several Catholic schools in interwar London and one Methodist.⁴⁰ Two schools were reserved for Jewish children; several others had a majority of Jewish pupils.

For most of the population these elementary schools were the only schools they would ever know; only a minority accessed a more advanced education in central or secondary schools, available from the age of 11 to fee-payers or scholarship holders.⁴¹ The experience of children in these selective schools goes beyond the remit of this book, as does schooling for physically disabled children and schooling within the penal system: in addition to the ‘ordinary’ elementary schools, the LCC also maintained over one hundred special schools, for the mentally and physically ‘defective’, plus several residential reformatory or industrial schools for delinquent youth.⁴²

However, I have included schools for the ‘mentally deficient’ in the analysis. ‘Mentally deficient’ children made up about one per cent of London pupils in the mid-1920s, and ‘mentally deficient’ schools taught a special curriculum in smaller classes until the age of 16 (rather than 14).⁴³ Pupils might move between these schools and the mainstream elementary schools according to the most recent assessment of their ‘backwardness’ – a backwardness which a modern audience would recognise as often due to poverty and circumstances, and which some contemporaries, too, acknowledged was hard to diagnose. ‘It has always been a difficulty … to say which boys should be presented to the doctor [for assessment and possible referral to special school]’, wrote the headteacher of a mainstream elementary school. ‘There were always as many near the margins, some of whom did eventually make it good.’⁴⁴

London’s schools reflected its diversity. The Gordon School at Eltham had an average attendance of nearly 1,700 in the mid-1920s, for example, whereas St Bride’s and Bridewell in the City possessed just one schoolroom and at times served as few as twenty children. It was periodically threatened with closure but survived owing to its natural boundaries of river and busy roads.⁴⁵ Nor was size constant; fluctuations were a symptom of the changing city. Inner parts of the capital saw a drop in population in the 1920s as residential areas were taken over by businesses, while elsewhere, particularly in the 1930s, boroughs were swelled by migration. The London Teacher disliked the processes of ‘re-re-reorganisation’ of schools that followed, though acknowledged that ‘in former days it took from ten to twenty years for the character of a neighbourhood to change or for movements of population to become noticeable. Now these things happen in the course of a year’.⁴⁶

LCC officials bemoaned the mobility in parts of the capital that meant children never settled within a school and so was ‘spoiling much of the very best work done by teachers’.⁴⁷ In South Kensington, schools ‘wedged in among mansions’ were attended ‘by the most migratory child population of London, the children of chauffeurs, gardeners, and domestic servants’.⁴⁸ One headteacher, whose pupils came largely from these groups, estimated that only 55 per cent of them remained on the roll throughout the year.⁴⁹

And yet other parts of the capital were characterised by immobility. As the headteacher of Cubitt Town School explained:

Our school is situated in an isolated area of the Metropolis. The Isle of Dogs is one of London’s pockets, and Cubitt Town lies at the bottom of this deep pocket … Needless to say, visitors seldom make their way in this direction, so that Cubitt Town remains a self-contained little corner with the characteristics of a village in many respects. The stationary population consists mostly of old scholars now become parents and grandparents.⁵⁰

She was not the only headteacher to feel a sense of detachment. A report in the London Teacher noted the isolation of schools hemmed in by factories, cut off by poor transport links or situated ‘in a backwater’.⁵¹ A handful of schools, from such varied parts of the capital as Greenwich, Streatham, Hackney and Lewisham, had special permission to finish their schoolday earlier, as their ‘isolated position’ left children at risk of ‘accidents and molestation’ when travelling to and fro.⁵² The Redriff School in Rotherhithe was judged so inaccessible that extra pay was allocated to its teachers.⁵³

A London study cannot encompass the experience of the tiny rural classrooms in parts of England and Wales, but not all of the capital’s schools necessarily felt part of an urban metropolis; their histories are a reminder of London’s growth. Burnt Ash Hill School in southeast London was opened in 1914, ‘almost on the outskirts of the county in the midst of fields, orchards and hedgerows’. Within twenty years, the spread of housing required the building of a second school in the area.⁵⁴

Despite the poverty that blighted parts of the capital, some schools served relatively prosperous areas. London’s wealthiest children were educated at prep schools followed by grammar or public schools, but elementary schools included those such as the Sudbourne School in Lambeth where children were ‘not only well clothed and well-fed, but accustomed to the luxury … of separate cots or beds and even separate rooms of their own’, or Craven Park School in Hackney, whose inspectors reported on parents who are ‘distinctly well-to-do and some send their children in private cars’.⁵⁵ Affluence could even be a source of concern, as in the case of Peckham schoolboys on a trip to the Isle of Wight. They came from good homes, wrote an inspector, who worried that ‘many of them seemed well provided, perhaps too much so, with pocket money’.⁵⁶

The particular circumstances of London meant that different social conditions often existed side by side. ‘London is such a thing of shreds and patches that striking differences may be observed in the schools of even the same borough’, commented one report.⁵⁷ In Islington, a school inspection noted the relative prosperity of its intake while another school ‘within a stone’s throw [faced] … the problem of acute poverty and squalor’ among its pupils.⁵⁸ Significant variety could exist within individual schools: differences were physically visible in a Fulham school where ‘some of the girls are strikingly tall and well-nourished, many are under-sized and obviously in poor health’.⁵⁹

The size of the London education service meant that it could offer facilities and organisation that were unmatched across most of the rest of the country. As the president of the London Teachers’ Association commented in 1928: ‘The size of the problem in London is vast, but our resources are also vast. It is easier to provide a variety of opportunity in London, and to do the thing well than it would be in a lesser city.’⁶⁰ London’s education service had long been self-consciously progressive. The capital had made elementary education compulsory in 1871, when it was still only discretionary to do so; offered free elementary education from 1891, five years before it became a national requirement; and committed to a ‘40 and 48’ scheme in 1912 (aspiring to a maximum of 40 senior pupils or 48 infants per class).⁶¹ Over three-quarters of London classrooms were judged compliant by the mid-1920s, even if large numbers continued to characterise the remainder.⁶² The LCC became one of the first authorities to experiment in the reorganisation of elementary schools into junior and senior departments with a break at the age of 11. By December 1926, when the Hadow Report advocated national restructuring, eighteen London schools had already been reorganised and reform thereafter proceeded rapidly and more swiftly than elsewhere.⁶³

Young Londoners further benefited from the length of their schooling. A child was required to attend school from the age of 5 but was permitted to attend from the age of 3, dependent on local provision. By its own estimate, London was ‘exceptionally generous’.⁶⁴ Over one-third of London children aged 3–5 were enrolled in school in 1923; at one infants’ school in Bethnal Green, nearly half the scholars were under 5 when it was inspected in 1928.⁶⁵ At the other end of a school life, options were also less limited than elsewhere. In addition to secondary schools, the LCC established central schools in 1911 to provide four years of instruction with a commercial or industrial bias. Following the 1918 Education Act, the LCC had also set up day continuation schools, providing part-time education to children aged 14–18, before most were discontinued in 1922 following the financial crisis and subsequent spending cuts.⁶⁶

The LCC was keen to publicise its achievements. A jubilee history of the Council in 1939 contrasted ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of schoolchildren, with boys in ragged clothing replaced by smart classes of uniformed pupils; serried ranks of girls practising drill replaced by active children in gym kit; and rows of infants in dark rooms replaced by small groups working in the open air.⁶⁷ The President of the London Teachers’ Association echoed the sense of pride and ambition: ‘We have justifiable claim to be in the service of the leading educational authority in the country – maybe the universe!’⁶⁸

This book is less concerned with the progressive pedagogies increasingly promoted by educationalists in this period, and the extent to which they were (or were not) beginning to affect classroom practice. Laura Tisdall has recently completed an examination of this, although her case studies do not include London.⁶⁹ She is one of a number of historians to have lately turned their gaze away from the capital, aware that attention elsewhere is overdue.⁷⁰ Certainly, the progressive nature of the London education service was unusual. Other authorities also aspired to innovation, such as Glamorgan, Bradford and Manchester, but were stymied by the economic misery of the interwar years that hit their regions particularly hard.⁷¹ London’s economic fortunes were more mixed; and so it is in the capital, then, that we can perhaps see most clearly the changing attitudes and practices that would be adopted more commonly by local education authorities only when national state investment after the Second World War made them possible.⁷²

Julia Laite has written about the challenges and rewards of writing ‘global microhistory’.⁷³ I cannot claim a global, or even national, perspective, but London’s scale allows the construction of a mosaic of evidence that criss-crosses the capital and cuts back and forth across the period. It allows the capture some of the individual moments that made up the minutiae of classroom life, amidst the diversity of the largest city in Europe.

Some of the sources used in this book have been used by historians of education for many years – the ‘official’ documents of LCC minutes and Board of Education reports. In his study of teachers in the first half of the century Gardner argues that most ‘professed no interest and little knowledge of governmental educational policy’.⁷⁴ But some, at least, were not only receptive to official pedagogy but involved in its creation. One London headmaster was a member of the committee responsible for the 1921 report, The Teaching of English in England. It is fortunate that, a few years later, inspectors were impressed with his school’s English lessons.⁷⁵ Another headmaster was on the editorial board of History, the journal of the Historical Association, which was, as Laura Carter has shown, part of ‘a lively debate’ within the history profession after 1918.⁷⁶

A dismissal of textbook research as ‘top–down’ also assumes too strict a division between their authors and the teachers. Some books were written by teachers and placed on LCC requisition lists, such as the Reading Charts and Primers by the headmaster of a St Pancras school, or the four geography books authored by a headmaster from Fulham.⁷⁷ Other teachers wrote books not necessarily intended for schoolchildren but which reveal interests that – it can surely be assumed – would have influenced school life. One headmaster had edited and annotated The Songs in Shakespeare’s Plays; another was the author of A Hundred Chess Problems.⁷⁸ Perhaps the best reminder of the overlap between classroom practice, pedagogy and even the writing of its history can be seen in the career of H.C. Dent, who taught in secondary and grammar schools between 1911 and 1931, became a journalist, then editor of the Times Educational Supplement, and ended his career as Professor of Education. Over his lifetime he experienced schools as a London pupil, a teacher, a prominent advocate of educational reform and, finally, as their historian.

However, such teachers were in a minority, and in an attempt to get closer to a greater number of classrooms I have drawn upon over one thousand individual school inspection reports. These include reports by His Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) – praised by the Norwood Report in 1943 as ‘the eyes and ears of the Board’⁷⁹ – and those of the LCC’s own inspectors, who acted independently. As with textbooks, the value of inspection reports has also been doubted. David Cannadine et al. argue that, though valuable, they remain ‘official accounts of teaching as pedagogy, and do not get close to the experience of being a pupil in the classroom’; they also point out that inspectors in this period were overwhelmingly male, public school and Oxbridge-educated.⁸⁰

Cross-referencing the reports of visiting inspectors with the accounts of teachers who inhabited the school daily can certainly illuminate disparities. The logbook of a Shoreditch school, for example, contains references over a period of years to the difficulties caused by the open layout of the girls’ hall, which meant that noise echoed through the building and disturbed lessons in the boys’ department. ‘A very unsatisfactory morning owing to friction with headmaster re. use of hall’, is a typical comment by the headmistress. Yet inspectors saw only the good intention, noting the ‘advantage of a large and lofty hall which runs up through the boys’ department to the roof of the building’.⁸¹

Teachers also knew their children better than these infrequent visitors. When one