The States and Secondary Education, 1560-1970

By Rose-Marie Crossan

A study of secondary education in Guernsey from 1560 to 1970 charting the precocious involvement of the insular government, the evolution of the 11+ system, and the persistence of funding biases towards 'elite' over 'popular' schools.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mor Media Limited
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781919637167

Rose-Marie Crossan

DR ROSE-MARIE CROSSAN is an independent social historian. She was born in Guernsey and has lived most of her life in the island. After finishing her secondary education, she took a degree in Modern Languages at Oxford University, followed by a postgraduate Diploma in Translation at Kent University, and - after a twenty-year break from academia - a PhD in History at Leicester University under Professor Keith Snell. Dr Crossan's previous publications include 'Guernsey, 1814-1914: Migration and Modernisation' (Woodbridge, 2007), 'Poverty and Welfare in Guernsey, 1560-2015' (Woodbridge, 2015), 'The States and Secondary Education, 1560-1970' (Guernsey, 2016), 'A Women's History of Guernsey, 1850s-1950s' (Benderloch, 2018) and 'Criminal Justice in Guernsey, 1680-1929' (Benderloch, 2021).

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The States and Secondary Education

1560–1970

Rose-Marie Crossan

MÒR MEDIA LIMITED

© Rose-Marie Crossan 2016

First published in Guernsey, 2016

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the author.

Rose-Marie Anne Crossan has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Mòr Media Limited, Benderloch, Argyll, Scotland

www.mormedia.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-9196371-6-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Front cover: L. Haghe, Elizabeth College, 1830

(print in author’s possession)

Table of Contents

The States and Secondary Education, 1560–1970

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Conventions

Introduction

1 Middle Ages

2 Reformation to 1820

3 1820s to 1870

4 1870s to 1890s

5 1900 to World War II

6 1945 to 1970

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to the States’ Education Department for permission to access their records, to the staff of the Island Archives, Priaulx Library and Greffe for their assistance with my research, and, last but not least, to my husband Jonathan for his patience and support.

Rose-Marie Crossan, MA (Oxon), PhD

Guernsey, January 2016

Abbreviations

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¹ Billets d’Etat, which contain the agenda and supporting material for States meetings, will be referred to by the date of the meeting for which the Billet was compiled, and will be found in the bound volumes held at the Priaulx Library. ↑

² Records in the custody of the Island Archives will be referred to by the date of the relevant entry followed by the Archive reference code for the document concerned. ↑

³ Orders in Council issued prior to 1950 will be referred to by their date, and, unless otherwise stated, will be found in the published volumes held at the Priaulx Library. Post-1950 legislation will be found online at www.guernseylegalresources.gg. ↑

Conventions

Dates before 1752 are Old Style but adjusted to a year beginning 1 January. Translations from the French of Guernsey’s pre-twentieth-century records are my own and are provided without reproduction of the original. Guernsey parishes are referred to by the English version of their names, and those prefixed ‘St’ are rendered with a terminal ‘s’ unpreceded by an apostrophe.

Introduction

Guernsey has always enjoyed full autonomy in educational matters, and although not immune from wider influences, the island has evolved a unique education system of its own. Like Guernsey’s built environment, this system has developed incrementally, for the most part under social and economic conditions very different from those of today. The present is formed by the past, and just as the physical legacy of our forebears still influences the lives we lead today, so their institutional legacy also continues to impinge on us. For this reason, an accurate map of the past is crucial to a complete understanding of the present. This essay focuses specifically on the role of the States in the development of secondary education in Guernsey. It will set out a chronological account of the evolutionary process, beginning with the start of States’ involvement in the 1560s and ending with the Education Law of 1970, which governs insular education today. In order to set the scene, we will look first at the pre-sixteenth-century situation.

1

Middle Ages

For medieval Guernsey, little evidence survives of schools as such. The bulk of the population had no need for literacy. Printing and books, as we now know them, did not exist until the mid-fifteenth century. The largest class needing to access and compose written documents were lawyers and clerics. In Guernsey, as elsewhere in Europe, it is likely that those requiring instruction in reading and writing would have been catered for in small schools attached to religious institutions (such as the Priory of St Michel du Valle or the Cordeliers’ Friary in St Peter Port), with individual Catholic clergy also educating a few pupils of their own.1 Such tuition would probably not have provided more than literacy and numeracy skills, and it is likely that anyone requiring a more advanced level of education would have had to leave the island. Most numerous among this group would have been aspirants to the priesthood, and evidence suggests that many such aspirants, as native Norman-French speakers, completed their education in Normandy.2

During the northern Renaissance, which took hold in the late fifteenth century, education came increasingly to be seen not just as a means to a practical end but as intrinsically valuable in the formation of rounded human beings. As a result, large numbers of new schools were founded as acts of civic or religious piety. In Jersey, two grammar schools were founded by private individuals in 1496.3 In Guernsey, the first record of the founding of a school dates from 1513, when Thomas Le Marquand and his wife charitably established and endowed a school at Glategny in St Peter Port.4 This school, later known as la Petite Ecole, became St Peter Port’s parish school. The parish schools of St Peters and St Martins also appear to have been founded at this period.5 Inasmuch as they were open to all comers, these parish schools were ‘public’ schools. Unlike the Jersey foundations of 1496, however, they were not grammar schools. Grammar schools dispensed advanced tuition in the classics and mathematics, while Guernsey’s parish schools probably taught no more than the rudiments of reading and perhaps writing. These establishments, together with the pre-existing church schools, constituted the likely extent of the island’s educational estate on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.

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¹ P.J. Girard, ‘The history of education in Guernsey, part 1’, TSG, 20 (1977), p. 220; D.M. Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge, 1996), p. 24. ↑

² T. Thornton, The Channel Islands, 1370–1640: Between England and Normandy (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 58. ↑

³ C. Le Quesne, A Constitutional History of Jersey (London, 1856), p. 138. ↑

⁴ Ogier, Reformation and Society, p. 31. ↑

⁵ Girard, ‘Education in Guernsey, part 1’, p. 222. ↑

2

Reformation to 1820

Guernsey’s Reformation was not substantially complete until the reign of Elizabeth I, who ascended the throne in 1558.1 Because of the island’s proximity to Catholic France, its religious complexion was a source of concern to Elizabeth’s ministers, and, in the 1560s, they despatched to the island a number of official Commissions among whose purposes was the local consolidation of the Protestant faith.2 The fifth such Commission, appointed in May 1563, was charged, inter alia, with founding a grammar school in the island, ‘where the youth of the same may be instructed in good letters and virtue’.3 As well as educating ministers to serve the new Protestant congregations, the grammar school was probably also intended to prevent the sons of the old Catholic elite from being educated in their parents’ religion. By a deed dated 27 September 1563, the new school (to be known as ‘Queen Elizabeth School’) was assigned land and buildings formerly owned by the Cordelier Friars, who had been expelled from Guernsey in 1536. The deed stipulated that the schoolmaster’s remuneration was to be funded by an endowment of 80 quarters of corn rentes previously due to Catholic fraternities, together with the sequestered revenues of Masses at St Peter Port.4 The deed further specified that only boys who had already mastered reading might enter the new school, and it also set out in detail a classics-based curriculum similar to that used in English grammar schools of the time.

Guernsey’s new grammar school was one of more than a hundred such schools established during Elizabeth’s reign, about a quarter of which were royal foundations.5 Many of these were very small, often situated in ‘a little building in some churchyard’ and intended for no more than a dozen boys.6 They were usually managed by one of three types of governing body. Some were governed by non-incorporated trustees or feoffees, others by incorporated trustees, and a third group by bodies of men especially incorporated as school governors. Governors’ duties included the care and repair of school property and the appointment and oversight of the master.7 In Guernsey’s case, perhaps due to legal differences with England, the Commissioners omitted to specify any form of governance.

Five years elapsed after the issue of the original deed without Guernsey’s new school coming into existence. At this point – 1568 – a further grant of a house and land was made. While the grant of 1563 had been made merely ‘for the youth of the island’ with no particular recipient named, that of 1568 was made explicitly to the States.8 This seems to have sufficed to make the school a reality.

Over the next two centuries, the school pursued a faltering existence. Although it was seldom without a master (the mastership, with attached income, was a valued sinecure), it was intermittently without pupils.9 The school building, entrusted to the care of no one in particular, suffered from endemic neglect. Until the mid-1700s, the