The provision of education for the poor in the City of Worcester up to the end of the 19th century was one of spasms of great individual effort, followed by periods of stagnation and neglect, leading eventually to the acceptance of municipal responsibility for education within the city.
It is certain there had been school's in Worcester since very early days. There is evidence in the Cathedral library that a school was attached to the Monastery in pre-Norman days, but the school and the later Elizabethan Grammar school were not intended for the very poor, since entry to them needed some sort of patronage.
The first beginnings of an education for the poor of the City came in the seventeenth century with the establishing of a small Blue Coat hospital, to be followed later in the next century by two other small charity schools. At the end of the eighteenth century the Sunday school experiment at Gloucester, twenty-five miles away, stimulated the establishment of a number of Sunday Schools in Worcester. These were mainly content to give oral instruction in the catechism and to use the Bible as a reading primer, but the Non-Conformist Church in Angel Street went further, providing evening classes for a 'few deserving boys', where writing and simple numbering were taught.
The Sunday schools showed the way, and a group of Non-Conformist churchmen made the first moves to promote a day school for poor boys, by inviting Joseph Lancaster to lecture on his system of education. The monitorial system offered new hopes for a cheap and efficient system of education and for a while, it appeared as if the new factory methods could be applied with equal success to education. A truly undenominational effort was made, for the Established Church joined Non-Conformists and the Society of Friends to establish the Free Subscription School in Clap Gate. It was the first large scale attempt to provide an education for the poor of the City.
Joseph Lancaster 1778-1838 English Quaker & Public Education Innovator
The quarrels between the British and Foreign School Society and the National Society of the Established Church led to a division in Worcester. National schools were set up to a division in Worcester. National schools were set up in the old riding school in Frog Lane, following the rival monitorial system of Dr. Bell.
Dr. Andrew Bell, Pioneer of the Madras system of Education also known as the monitorial system
The results of the monitorial system were disappointing and by 1828, the answer to the problems of educating the poor cheaply seemed to be in providing infant schools that 'would preserve the children from two to six before becoming contaminated by habits and association of older person's'. To this end a number of infant schools were established in the City, but these ran into financial difficulties.
The 1830's saw a revival of interest in church doctrine and in the claim of the Church of England to be national educator. The new movement favored parish activity and led to the establishment of parish schools, often under extremely difficult and unfavorable conditions. Many of the City's primary schools in existence today date from this phase of educational activity which lasted into the 1860's.
With the coming of universal education in 1870 a new phase in the provision of school facilities in Worcester took place. The now Forester Act did not take over the church school system, but it did fill the gaps . It did not establish free nor compulsory education, but it did set up School Boards and gave the municipal authorities power to levy a rate for school building purposes. In this period two Worcester schools were built by the School Board, one of them, Hounds Lane, which was a fine building of the period, dominating a very poor area. When the 1902 Education Act swept the School Boards away, education in the City was firmly established on a municipal level.
Very few records of the early elementary school were kept, as can be judged from the fact that the result of a number of visits to the Education Office in the City resulted in not one document of pre-1900 being found. The City Archives contained notes of great value made by a former headmaster, Alderman Brotherton, but little else. The Worcester Diocesan Archives could supply nothing. Fortunately, Worcester has had a rich long line of local newspapers, Berrow's Journal, the oldest surviving newspaper in the world , being amongst them. They provide the bulk of evidence of the events in schools that have long since disappeared and as as possible, the contemporary reports and the transcripts l found in Claines School Log book show the education in the City.
Even the sites of some of the early schools are unknown. An interesting part of this study has been the identifying of early school buildings despite the extensive alterations made over many years. In one building, that of the earliest monitorial school in the City, which closed its doors as a normal school over eighty years ago.