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This paper firstly presents Statement Archaeology, an innovative and rigorous method devised to systematically operationalise the approach to historical exploration used by Michel Foucault in pursuit of the question "how do certain practices become possible at particular moments in history?" Drawing on an analysis of the theoretical basis of Foucault's broad – and arguably equivocal – approach, a series of methodological procedures by which it can be systematically operationalised are set out. These focus on the interrogation of "statements", through a series of questions, against three criteria: Formation, Transformation, and Correlation. Secondly, through the use of a specific policy development in English Religious Education as an exemplar, the paper establishes the potential of the approach. Deploying Statement Archaeology in relation to this example reveals that the change under investigation became possible at a nexus of changes in the rules of what is thinkable and unthinkable within different domains of discourse, and complex and messy processes of changing legitimacies and normalisations, with previously unacknowledged policy-influencers playing an important role. Many existing accounts of this change have overlooked these matters. The paper concludes by arguing that Statement Archaeology has potential significance in any domain of enquiry that seeks answers to the question "how did this particular practice become possible at that particular moment?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to examine how students in Greek supplementary schools in England develop their identities within a period of structural and inter-generational change in the Greek community due to the recent migration waves from Greece and Cyprus to the UK. This is undertaken with a review of sociological theories and studies around identity construction, complemented by data drawn from the quantitative and qualitative phases of the research, under the prism of critical realism philosophy. The paper examines and discusses how archetypal notions of culture and ethnicity influence pedagogic practices and students' identity development. The findings call for a revisiting of policies, curricula and pedagogical practices in Greek supplementary education, in order to allow students to negotiate their identities within a period of extensive migration waves and a constantly changing context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though there is a well-established body of research in the field of teacher professional development, it is characterised by a real dearth of any detailed historical analysis. This paper seeks to address this gap, by offering a new historical analysis of a case study of the evolution of organised teacher professional development in England and Wales during the twentieth century. Its approach is hoped to open up the wider debate and to contribute to a fuller understanding of the basis for those questions and dilemmas about teacher professional development that have long exercised teachers, professional educators and policy-makers – questions which turn on fundamental issues of priorities and purpose, funding, scale of teacher engagement, control and reach. The paper is in three main parts. Firstly, the scope of the case study is outlined with key stages in the evolution of teacher professional development in England and Wales identified. Secondly, four themes from the data which characterised this evolution are discussed. These include the restricted engagement of teachers relative to the whole teacher population; limited funding; the highly centralised control over provision for teacher professional development through Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI); and a highly selective and restrictive access to provision by teachers. It is argued that these key characteristics helped to shape a particular culture and ideology of teacher professional development which was dependent on a select cadre of elite teachers for the dissemination and modelling of what was regarded as good practice, so as to improve their colleagues’ performance – the elite excelled while the majority needed to be saved from mediocrity. The particular ideology underlying this model is conceptualised as one of ‘excellence and salvation’. Finally, it is argued that the key issues identified in this story (the restricted engagement of teachers; limited funding; highly centralised control; and ideologies of excellence) raise important generic questions for the field of teacher professional development more widely as well as framing future historical analysis of teacher professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In October 2010 the government confirmed it would introduce a “pupil premium” payable to schools with disadvantaged pupils. This shift towards resourcing by group rather than area may mark the closing of another chapter in efforts to produce a more meritocratic education system utilising what might be termed intermediate institutions. Their predecessors opened more than 3500 Children’s Centres to develop new strategies for working with the families of preschool children in order to alter long-term educational trajectories. This paper reflects on an earlier chapter in public efforts to secure greater educational equality, the first three years of the Red House Education Centre in Denaby Main, a mining village in Yorkshire’s West Riding, in the period 1969 to 1972. Red House was the most significant development arising from the West Riding Educational Priority Area (WREPA) Project and was an example of area-based positive discrimination. The paper explores two key questions. Can schools be re-positioned so that they offer the community an opportunity to develop as active participants in reshaped democratic processes, or are new institutional forms required? Did Red House offer parents and professionals the opportunity to improve educational outcomes in a neutral space where both felt a sense of ownership? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses biographical approaches to recover the contribution of hitherto neglected figures in the history of education and the political history of the Left in London. Place and location are important since it is important to grasp the uniqueness of the London County Council within the framework of English local government and of the London Labour Party within the framework of the Labour Party. In the 1920s and 1930s, under Herbert Morrison's leadership, the London Labour Party made a deliberate policy of encouraging able women to run for election to the London County Council, particularly those who had received a good education. By the 1950s Labour women were well represented in this public-sector site and the Education Committee was dubbed “the Shrieking Sisterhood”. By this time, three women had been appointed to the chairmanship of the Education Committee (one Conservative and two Labour) and women formed the majority of its membership, although they later lost ground. When a biographical approach is adopted a more spacious idea of politics emerges to accommodate hitherto neglected figures. This article tells the stories of two Labour women whose participation in English educational policy-making has been missed: Helen Bentwich (1893-1972) and Eveline Lowe (1869-1956). It is based largely on a new source of manuscript material, personal papers in the Women's Library at London Metropolitan University and the archive of Homerton College, Cambridge, and is part of a larger project examining the role of Labour women in London government. It contributes to revisionist debates about the place of women in the history of education, by providing new interpretations of urban education evolution that begin to appreciate the significance of women's political journeys and the impact of their involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses some fundamental aspects of the circulation of knowledge connected with the spread of the first global model of school management and classroom organisation in the early nineteenth century: the so-called “monitorial system of education” or, as it was named after its “inventors”, the “Bell-Lancaster Method”. By looking at the communication of educational ideas between England and the early British possessions in India, this paper first analyses the actors involved in this process, especially their agendas and means. Inspired by the widespread belief in the powers of education to improve both society as a whole and individuals, educational activists gathered in a number of committees and organisations - among whom the “British and Foreign School Society” proved most influential. Protestant missionary societies also became active in the field of popular education. The monitorial system of education attracted social reformers, British as well as Indian, and missionaries to whom it appeared to be a technology with civilising powers, a rational instrument to morally uplift and, at the same time, subject individuals “to their respective places” in society. Second, the paper looks at the processes of hybridisation and transformation of the pedagogical knowledge that was communicated between India and England: the origins of the monitorial system in an orphanage school at Madras, its export to London, where it was developed into a standardised model, and its subsequent “re-import” into India. Finally, reports about the implementation of the monitorial system in India again had an impact on English public discourses on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address the role of early-modern (1550-1800) English servants in the training and education of the children residing in the households in which these servants worked. Some resident servants were employed primarily, if not solely, to educate the children of their masters and mistresses. These tutors, governesses and chaplains are more visible to the historian than their ubiquitous fellow servants and apprentices, who also played an important, if more obscure, role in the education and training of children. The duties of both servants and apprentices, who to their contemporaries were another form of servant, were seldom recorded. Instruction that such servants provided was certainly only one of their many functions. Evidence for their teaching role appears incidentally in diaries, letters and other personal accounts, few of which servants themselves wrote. The paper will discuss the two groups of resident servants: the relatively small group of professional teachers and the much larger group of servants who were occasional teachers and whose educative function was reported sporadically in both pre-literate and literate English society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1773, the educational work of the largest and most powerful teaching body then in existence was brought to an abrupt end. The order Pope Clement xii for the total and universal suppression of the Society of Jesus resulted in the summary closure of 728 Jesuit establishments responsible for the education of some 250,000 students. The prohibition on the existence of Jesuit schools and colleges, engendered intense political pressure on the papacy for a variety of reasons, was to endure for more than forty years, until 1814, with massive repercussions for education worldwide. The effects of the suppression on education have been the subject of numerous national studies, with one important exception - the fate of the educational work of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. With members in England, Wales, Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as in educational outposts in continental Europe, the English Jesuits were to prove a unique body. Unlike their counterparts in every other country, the Russian Empire excepted, they were to retain their corporate identity throughout the suppression period, as a result of quirks both of history and of geography. The English Jesuit college founded in exile at Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands in 1593, because of the penal laws against Catholics in England and Wales, moved to Bruges in the Austrian Netherlands in 1762 when the Paris Parliament dissolved the Society of Jesus in France. At the time of the universal suppression in 1773, the prince-bishop of Liege, François-Charles de Velbruck, invited the English ex-Jesuits to consolidate all their educational activity in the principality of Liege, where they had operated a house of studies since 1614. The suppressed English Jesuit developed and furthered their educational activity, first at the newly formed Académie anglaise at Liege, from 1773 until 1794, and thereafter in England at Stony hurst, in Lancashire, developing their curriculum in important new ways, beyond the confines of the Ratio Studiorum. Despite a series of major calamities, they were able to use their educational successes as a springboard for the further development of Jesuit education, not only in England and Wales but also in the early United States of America, at Georgetown, where they created a secondary-level academy that led on to the foundation of the present-day university. The aim of this paper is to indicate how the suppressed English Jesuits succeeded in their educational work, against all the odds. From research undertaken in surviving, hitherto largely unexplored, archival sources in Britain, continental Europe and the United States, the paper aims to throw new light on this significant but neglected period of educational history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to shed some further light on the people and the processes involved in the identification of mental deficiency in children and young people.∗∗ In order to do this, it turns away from the themes that have been most prominent in the historiography to date: elite and professional ideas, parliamentary and public debates and the formulation of policy. Instead, the paper is concerned with a single instance of diagnosis of imbecility in an 11-year-old schoolboy in a rural village in the English county of Hertfordshire. As far as is possible it reconstructs this diagnosis and charts and explains a remarkable and successful challenge to it in the High Court. In doing so, it draws on a variety of documentary records – educational, legal and medical – as well as the testimony of some of the surviving members of the family concerned. In employing these sources particular attention is paid to the actions of the people involved in diagnosis, and it seeks to explain and understand those actions with explanatory tools taken from cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the urban landscape; institutions which were designed to discipline, control and shape urban bodies - the prison, the workhouse, the asylum, the reformatory, the children's home and the school. This paper focuses on one of these sites of childhood control: the school. Historians of education and childhood have to date paid little attention to the sensory worlds of schooling and childhood. This study focuses on one sense - hearing. Hearing, sound and aurality have been shown to be deeply implicated in modernity's daily elaboration. The study explores the sounds of modern schooling; the culture of listening in modern schools; the materiality of the modern school 'soundscape'; and the influence of architectural acoustics on the culture of listening. In doing so, the study addresses the problems, sources and methodologies involved in writing a history of the hearing school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the theoretical argument of anthropologist Tim Ingold, that the denial and subsequent encasement of bare feet in footwear was a critical characteristic of the development of modern societies, in exploring three aspects of feet, footwork, and footwear in the history of the modern school. First, the material conditions of feet and footwear are considered towards a sensory, social, cultural, and symbolic understanding of the significance of these body parts and the technological and relational forces at play in the development of modern school systems. Second, the act, experience, and pedagogical intention of walking to and from school is examined through the memories of ex-pupils recounting informal incidental learning experiences as well as through a progressive ideology of urban anarchist pedagogy. Third, the promotion of modern dance and movement in postwar primary education in England is examined with regard to the significance attached to bare feet and the sense of touch in modern school environments. Finally, the article concludes with some observations regarding the historical significance of a shift of focus to the feet of school children in twentieth-century progressive educational agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Joseph King (1860–1943), known as the “Mad Hatter” because of his appearance and eccentric manner, was a man who cared very much about education in a wide range of arenas. He was a founder of Mansfield House University Settlement in London and of the peasant arts movement, both philanthropic organisations which aimed to improve the lot of the poor, in part through increased educational opportunities. He was a member of his local education committee during the stormy period around the introduction of the 1902 Education Act and a member of the UK parliament between 1910 and 1918, in which role he made many contributions to political debates about educational matters. He was not an original or a great thinker but he was an enthusiast who allowed ideas to take hold. This article examines his work in all these spheres, building a picture of how one man sought to influence the world around him. Using psychologist David G. Winter’s broad-based definition of “personality”, it asks how the unique characteristics of Joseph King impacted on what he could achieve. It concludes that his connections and his money, the privileges of his class and gender, were significant factors in his successes. However, his distinctive traits were also important, for better and for worse. His forceful manner and pomposity were limiting factors, but his impressive energy and powers of persistence enabled him to make a contribution in his own time and to leave a legacy which can be felt today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the 1930s and 1940s art increasingly came to be used as a therapeutic tool with children who were perceived as damaged by their experiences of war or displacement. This article explores two related exhibitions –Children’s Art from All Countries (1941) and The War as Seen by Children (1943) – which provided a platform for children’s impressions and experiences of war as seen through their drawings, whilst also raising money and awareness for refugee children’s causes. Although supported by an influential network of British educators and cultural figures, the exhibitions were conceived and organised by displaced German, Austrian, and Czech artists and cultural educators who were members of the Free German League of Culture in London during the Second World War. The exhibitions are considered as sites of educational and political interventions by adult refugees in the context of therapeutic interventions with refugee children in British educational settings. In so doing, this article argues that the exhibition organisers conceived of cultural and creative learning as a transformative vehicle for supporting and re-forming personal identities, and for the re-imagining of collective democratic futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article approaches debates about how the history of the post-1945 English welfare state might be written. It argues that professionals' interventions on immigrant children can serve as a prism for understanding the crafting of the modern English welfare state. In this sense the article engages with the narrative concerning the resilience of a post-war British history that sees 1945 as a moment of profound rupture symbolised by the demise of Empire, the development of a universal welfare state, and the coming of mass immigration that brought with it social problems whose management presaged a distinctive British multiculturalism. Due to its influential impact on the development of immigrant education policies in England and because of its extensive education archive the article uses the Birmingham Local Education Authority (LEA) as an empirical and historical case. The significant British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Immigration Act of 1971 serve as demarcations of the period treated. The article concludes that the immigrant child and the child's background were consistently presented as educational problems and as the cause of both poor academic attainment and a more intangible unwillingness to assimilate. In this lens the crafting of the post-war English welfare state was a continuation of an imperial project shoring up imperial boundaries within as the former colonised appeared on English soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When historians discuss the impact of examinations on elementary education in mid-Victorian England and Wales they typically focus on the Revised Code of 1862. The Revised Code is famous for instituting a policy of "payment-by-results" for teachers in state-supported voluntary schools. "Payment-by-results" made government grants to schools -- and, by extension, for teachers' salaries -- contingent upon student attendance and pass rates in reading, writing and arithmetic. As this article emphasises, however, "payment-by-results" was not the first, or even the most significant, instance in which competitive examination was used by the state as an instrument for establishing the pedagogical fitness and salaries of teachers. Less often explored by historians is the formative role that state-mandated competitive examinations for teachers played in developing a professionally aspirant body of schoolteachers and, consequently, the schoolteachers' later role in developing competitive examination as a broad-scale national accreditation apparatus. But while the use of competitive examinations came to shape modern British academic and professional life in fundamental ways, the strengthening effects that they had for certain occupations and institutions, such as physicians, civil servants and middle-class secondary schools, were in fact ultimately denied to state teachers and the elementary education sector generally. With the introduction of "payment-by-results" in 1862, competitive examinations were converted into an instrument that weakened rather than strengthened teachers' professional identity and policy influence. This article explains how the nineteenth-century English state structured examinations and examination results to manipulate the professional status of teachers in order to suit state priorities during different stages of national development. This historical narrative is framed in reference to present-day examination-based reforms of teacher compensation systems such as performance-related-pay and value-added modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the rise of popular education have often emphasised the role of national governments as sources of funding. However, for the case of England work by W.K. Jordan among others with probate records suggests that by the English Civil War substantial philanthropic funding was available for education. The presence of this philanthropy suggests a blurring of the line between private and public and the presence of both top-down and bottom-up forces at work. Moreover, parliamentary inquiries into educational charities in the early and mid-nineteenth century indicate their persistence as a source of funding for popular elementary schools. Counter to literature emphasising the importance of landed elites, both early modern and nineteenth-century evidence indicate the importance of other groups including merchants and clergy as sources of educational philanthropy. The formation of a national, government-funded system of elementary schooling in England during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century incorporated elements of funding deriving from philanthropic sources with origins in earlier times. While there are parallels with other European countries, the extent of English educational philanthropy may be distinctive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article investigates the spread of one of the first pedagogical concepts available worldwide during the first half of the nineteenth century: the monitorial system. Its wide diffusion depended, to a considerable extent, on the work of voluntary organisations. The article investigates the work of the two most important of these, the British and Foreign School Society and the National Society. It focuses on the strategies these two charities employed in acquiring donations in a voluntary sector that was densely populated and highly competitive. Drawing on modern marketing concepts as analytical tools, the article argues that the monitorial system’s wide diffusion was to a considerable extent the result of early forms of marketing. By introducing marketing concepts in the history of education, the article seeks to broaden the debate on the diffusion of educational concepts and, moreover, to contribute to the relatively new field of (nonprofit) marketing history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The historiographical tradition which developed within the history of education from the 1970s regarded religious organisations as distractions from the “real” task of developing state-funded universal compulsory education. Despite more positive evaluations of voluntary agencies within the history of social policy, since the 1980s, the schools affiliated to the national co-ordinating religious societies are still regarded as potential agents of social control, inadequate in numerical terms, with poor standards, dull curricula and brutal discipline. This article seeks to redress the balance of this historiography by means of a case-study of part of the London hinterland. It will show how voluntary schools attached to national and international “modern” co-ordinating bodies might provide sufficient school places, a curriculum which was structured, with results evaluated positively by inspectors, and could operate systems of rewards rather than corporal punishment. Comparisons with the period after school boards were founded indicates that attendance rates stayed about the same, that the curriculum initially narrowed in one area, and that corporal punishment increased. While these factors were due partly to population increase, the evidence nevertheless demonstrates how voluntary schools could provide adequately, even well, for local populations, and that rate-aided school provision might have negative consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, successive presidents and officials at the Board of Education made it clear that they believed there were three types of children in Britain - those who needed nursery schools to rescue them from degradation, those for whom a less expensive nursery class would do the job adequately and those who would be better off staying home with mother. However, by the time the 1944 Education Act was framed, national policy towards pre-school provision had undergone a major transformation: nursery schools could provide the best start in life for everyone, should be available for every child from three to five and, crucially, should be the only form of childcare provision available. This change of direction was initiated by the government's inspectorate, and heavily promoted by members of the civil service. Professional bodies, such as the Nursery School Association and teaching unions, had very little influence over the decision-making process. The needs of working mothers, who were likely to be adversely affected by the closure of wartime childcare facilities, were inadequately considered. Local Education Authorities, who generally favoured nursery classes, were, however, able to wring a last-minute compromise from central government so that classes could be provided where schools were 'inexpedient'. The fact that the new policy had been written in such isolation, without consideration for potential users, and had been messily hamstrung at the last moment meant that it was never implemented and must ultimately be considered a failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years following the Second World War, there were efforts in several European countries to grasp the opportunity to re-imagine school created through the need to rebuild on a mass scale. This article examines in detail an episode in the exchange of knowledge between English and Danish architects and educators during a period of intensive activity. Through a micro-study of documents that have survived in archives in both countries, the study tour is revealed as a key agent of exchange and as such a mapping of sites of specific interest in two countries is discussed. The origins of English-Danish exchanges are explored in the context of the rise of the modernist movement and its relationship with progressive education. A prosopographical perspective is used to understand the complexities of the social and professional relationships underpinning these exchanges. This is pursued through a detailed discussion of the meetings and site visits made during the study tours in Denmark and England during 1954. Finally, the impact of the various exchanges is assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Spanish American independence movements are reflexively assumed to have been inspired by the American and French Revolutions, the patriot leaders actually looked toward Great Britain for much of their inspiration and material support. One of their most cherished social goals was to reform and uplift their education systems and to that end they looked to the mutual education model popularised by Joseph Lancaster. This article discusses the experiences of the approximately 20 Spanish American children of patriot leaders who attended the famous Hazelwood School in Birmingham, England which was run by the radical Hill family and linked to the Bentham circle. At Hazelwood, the youthful patriots were trained in habits of self-government, self-directed acquisition of practical knowledge, and the virtue of serving their fellow citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the possibility that one of the defining characteristics of the New Education, as it related to children in their early years, was its epistemological break with rationalist forms of knowledge and its embrace of empiricism and positivism. It considers, briefly, social theories that identify a similar process at a societal level before examining some of the polemics directed against theories of education based on rational forms of knowledge and, in particular, Froebel's system. This theme is then pursued through a detailed consideration of the child study movement in England and its promotion of an empiricist project concerned with the production of knowledge about the child which drew upon the emergent fields of physiology, educational psychology, education and statistics. It is argued that child study helped to create the conditions for these sciences to distinguish themselves from the older philosophical currents from which they emerged. Consideration is then paid to how these transformations reacted on child study and on the Froebel movement. The article concludes that a break did indeed occur in the ways in which education was legitimised and that through the arrival of a new empirically based, scientific approach it became more closely aligned to reforming impulses. Nevertheless, the old philosophical, metaphysical foundations were not vanquished as in a violent rupture but were articulated in a new dialectical synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the European dimension of a collaborative approach to school design through the lives and relationships of a group of key individuals who in England set about transforming school in the post-war era. The philosophy and practice of this group of architects, educators, designers and policy makers, who regarded the school environment as reflecting the essential humanity of children and their teachers is explored through archival documentation as well as oral testimonies. The notion that teachers might be spacious in their thinking is traced through the personal histories of HMI, architects and artists who collaborated during the years 1945-72 within a culture of commitment to public service. Design from the 'inside out' is explained as a process that was rooted in the development of a common vocabulary generated by research through practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses events in May 1985 surrounding the de-selection of the Conservative chair of the Wiltshire Education Committee and her role in the campaign for comprehensive education in Salisbury, England, to pose questions about the representation of women who championed causes deemed to be progressive and to raise issues about how gender analysis is dealt with in such accounts. The article develops a frame of analysis that moves beyond the “heroic fairytale” in ascribing agency to women, while also revealing the operation of power structures in which they manoeuvred. A frame of analysis is outlined, based on Bourdieu's thinking tools of fields, habitus and capital. These are linked with the notion of gender scripts to demonstrate the complexities and contradictions of the story of Joan Main, chair of Wiltshire education committee, and her simultaneous location inside/outside the Conservative political field and the field of local government. Bourdieu's thinking tools and the notion of gender scripts are also used to demonstrate ways in which gender was an unspoken power relation in the events surrounding Main's de-selection and in her ability to gain re-election as an independent candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the process by which different elements of the material culture of educational settings, including learning tools, classroom design and other aspects of the physical environment that embody a particular educational philosophy, become transmuted when taken over by those with very different pedagogical aims. The article focuses on the adaptation of Froebel’s kindergarten pedagogy for the Babies’ Classes and Infant Schools established by the London School Board from 1870 to 1904 and opens with a brief historiography of infant education in London in this period. The development of infant education in the UK was underpinned by a very different approach to the education of young children from that evident in the Froebelian kindergarten and the article identifies the role played by Samuel Wilderspin in shaping practice in London’s Infant Schools and the control exerted by the Education Department through Her Majesty’s Inspectorate. Key aspects of Froebel’s educational philosophy are described, suggesting how the physical environment, the learning materials (the Gifts and Occupations) and elements of the curriculum embodied his ideas. An account of the reception of Froebel’s kindergarten pedagogy in the UK precedes an interrogation of practice in London’s Babies’ and Infant classes, demonstrating the hiatus between the aims and intentions of Froebel and those of the School Board and central government, which funded the provision of infant education. However, tensions arose between those infant teachers seeking to introduce less rigid methods drawing on Froebel’s pedagogy and the Inspectorate. Reference to visual evidence from schools and kindergartens, together with committee minutes and logbooks, is used to support the argument. The changing emphasis in Froebel’s writings between free play and creative activity and a more prescriptive, adult-led model of practice provided grounds for differing interpretations of his ideas, exemplified by the revisionist debate within the Froebel movement at the turn of the century, which reveals dissenting voices concerning orthodox practice within the Froebel camp itself. The conclusion suggests that, despite the limitations in the interpretation of his educational philosophy, Froebel’s pragmatism may have led him to approve the use of his materials in London’s Babies’ Classes and Infant Schools [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of both education policy and knowledge creation, this article explores the historical dimensions of two key features of the ‘new information age’. In the field of education, it documents the development of a progressive education policy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Birmingham, UK. This policy extended access to schooling, attempted to ameliorate the effects of poverty and ill health and made important innovations in school curricula, architecture and administration. These were real and important achievements, but they were also in many respects ambiguous ones. These ambiguities can be read in the vast set of educational records that the innovators were both responsible for and dependent on. For the knowledge created and stored as a result of educational progressivism was also used as a means of surveillance and as a method for monitoring and disciplining urban populations. Based on a critical reading of Foucault, the article presents evidence that helps illuminate processes of knowledge creation, storage and exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the respective roles of the training of teachers and educational studies at the London Day Training College (LDTC), 1902-1932. Following an introduction that indicates different models within the United Kingdom and summarizes the subsequent history of the LDTC's successor, the Institute of Education of the University of London, three major themes are examined. These are control and status, staffing, and students and courses. Conclusions are drawn concerning the nature of educational studies in England and the relative contributions of different groups of staff to the development of educational studies in this period. Future developments in respect of disciplinary dimensions are noted. Although the Institute of Education is now a research-led postgraduate institution it remains committed to the initial training and education of teachers at primary, secondary and further education levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a comparative analysis of lay boarding schools for girls in France and England in the first part of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that the character of school life in the two countries differed markedly. Contemporary observers such as Matthew Arnold, Henry Montucci and Jacques Demogeot visited boys' schools on either side of the Channel and contrasted the "barrack-life" of lycées in France with the more domestic arrangements of English public schools, but they did not visit the private boarding schools for girls that were multiplying in both England and France in the first half of the nineteenth century. Evidence collected from inspection records, school memoirs and pedagogical treatises, however, reveals differences between female establishments on either side of the Channel that echoed, but were not identical to, the contrasts between English and French boys' schools. Different ideas on the nature and role of women interacted with the separate educational traditions of the two countries to construct two distinct institutional models of female schooling which could be termed "domestic" for England, and "conventual" for France. The article compares female institutions in the two countries to uncover some of the key features of these distinct models of schooling. In highlighting the way ideas about gender shaped school communities, it points to differences in the prevailing conception of femininity on either side of the Channel. English girls' schools tended to be small in size and self consciously familial and homely in atmosphere and organization. Many schoolmistresses deliberately limited the number of pupils they would accept in order to preserve the intimate and domestic character of their establishments. This reflects the influence of a conception of femininity emphasizing women maternal nature and domestic role, and women teachers' need to conform to this ideal in order to preserve their middle-class status. French schools, by contrast, were more often large, hierarchically organized establishments. Unlike their English counterparts, they tended to be housed in buildings specially adapted as schools. The institutional character of French schools owed much to the educational patterns of convent schooling and to the powerful position occupied by women in religious orders. The differences between these two conceptions of the school affected the conditions of school life and relations between pupils and teachers in concrete ways. In England, schoolmistresses tended to cultivate warm relationships with their pupils, and often characterized their role in maternal terms. Naturally, in practice not all relationships between teachers and their charges were as harmonious as the language of motherhood might suggest, yet at a time when spinsters might be labeled "redundant" or "unnatural" drawing on a maternal metaphor was one of the ways in which schoolmistresses, who were for the most part unmarried and childless, could reconcile their situation with prevailing ideals of femininity. At the same time, motherhood was the only socially legitimate position through which a woman could exercise authority. In keeping with the familial atmosphere, warm relations between pupils were also encouraged in English girls' schools, and girls often enjoyed considerable liberty in the collective "room of one's own" that school could offer. In France, schoolmistresses tended to maintain more distant relations with their pupils, drawing on the precedents established by women in religious orders to develop authoritative public personae. At the same time, pupils were strictly supervised and attempts were made to limit the intimacy of friendships between schoolgirls. Schoolgirl memoirs are peppered with references to "the school walls" that heightened pupils' sense of enclosure and contained them within a rigid system of discipline and order. In practice, girls at school were often able to establish warm friendships with their peers and to circumvent the rules, yet such intimacies and rebellions went against the grain. The school regulations preserved in the archives evoke strictly ordered days and continual supervision of pupils; they reveal a preoccupation with order and discipline and the same suspicion of female autonomy that Bonnie Smith and Gabrielle Houbre have identified in the work of Catholic educators whose central concern was the preservation of a feminine innocence. The interaction of differing ideas about the nature and role of women with distinct inherited educational traditions and with contrasting ideas about the state's role in education resulted in the construction of two distinct models of female schooling in England and France. The effect was that if in both countries, the stated aim of the education provided by girls' boarding schools was to educate girls for motherhood, behind the school walls the character of daily life in English and French establishments differed in significant ways. Comparing the structure of schools and experience of schoolmistresses and their pupils in these different institutions highlights the ways in which ideas about gender helped shape the school community and uncovers the roots of the contrasting evolution of female education on either side of the Channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]