[This article first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine in 2022]
Off Sick ?: School Records and Our
Ancestors
By Ruth A. Symes
Earlier this year, a highly infectious wave of Covid brought huge numbers of absences of students and staff in schools up and down the country and with them, lots of anxieties: worries about staffing, concerns about students’ achievement in forthcoming exams, questions about the role of parents, and concerns about the physical and mental health of the non-attendees themselves. Even in better times, school attendance has often been in the news with parents facing being sent to parenting classes, fined, or even sent to jail if they don’t make sure that their children are getting an education.
For our ancestors similarly, the issue of school
attendance was a hot topic in Parliament and the Press. Forster’s Education Act
of 1870 set the framework to make education compulsory for all children aged 5
to 12. The tenets of this Act were
better enforced by The Elementary Education (Lord Sandon’s) Act - Jan 1st 1877 – which stated that it was the responsibility
of every parent to see that children received sufficient elementary
education in the 3-Rs (Reading, ‘Writing, and, ‘Rithmetic).
From this point, School Attendance Committees were
set up in every area of the country to ensure children were actually turning up
to learn. Moreover, students could not leave school at age 10
unless they had reached a certain academic standard (thereby gaining a School
Leaving Certificate aka Labour Certificate), and unless they also had also met
certain attendance requirements. Additionally, in 1878, via the Factory and
Workshop Act, the government introduced the so-called ‘Half-Time System’
whereby children aged between 10 and 13 could be excused from school for half
of every day, or for alternate days of the week, if their family needed them to
work. Further Acts towards the end of the nineteenth century reinforced
government responsibility for children’s school attendance.
Key to this new educational ethos was the belief that
the improvement of children depended upon their regular attendance at
school. This meant that over the following decades, increasingly stringent
measures were taken by government and schools themselves to monitor attendance
and describe absence. In time, these measures came to include the use of
School Registers and Logbooks, the introduction of School Inspections by
external officers, parental penalties for non-attendance and School Inspection
Days.
The Case of Margaret Woodburne
In July 1879, a widow named Margaret Woodburne, in her
early forties, from Lindal-in-Cartmel in Lancashire, was hauled in front of the
local School Attendance Officer because she had failed to send her (9-10 year
old) daughter to school for the past three months and had also failed to fill
in the requisite ‘excuse papers’ for the local School Board. Margaret argued
that she needed her daughter to stay at home and look after the baby, whilst
she herself worked. The local newspaper, Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser and
General Intelligencer, argued that although education had recently been
‘deemed essential to the well-being of the offspring of even the poorest in the
land,’ the prosecution of this particular poor widow was a particularly hard
case to justify. It was no good providing an education for children, the paper
argued, if families were, by that means, ‘unable to put breads in the mouths of
their children’.
Margaret Woodburne, herself commented that she could
not afford to lose her wages even for the one day that she was required to
appear before the Attendance Committee, she further stated that she did not
understand the papers she had been sent, and that, if her daughter went to
school as the Committee suggested, she herself must stay at home, and her
family would starve. To underline its
condemnation of the case against Margaret, the paper pointed out a shocking fact.
Three out of every one hundred persons in England and Wales (out of a
population of approximately 25 million) were currently in receipt of Workhouse
Relief: this number might confidently be expected to increase to four or even
five in the hundred ‘by too great
severity and harshness on the part of the School Board Committee (s).’ In other
words, forcing all children to go to school could overwhelm the relief system,
and worse, cause terrible human suffering.
Furthermore, the paper continued with some gusto, if
older children were compelled to go to school, and parents still had to go out
to work, terrible accidents might befall the babies and toddlers left at home.
In such cases, would not the School Board Committee or Attendance Officer be
responsible for the fatalities? For our ancestors it seems, school attendance
was a matter closely intertwined with both the economic stability and the moral
well-being of the country.
Finding Your Ancestor’s School
Of course, many of our ancestors enjoyed school,
understood its benefits and kept up a regular attendance. Schools rewarded
compliance with the rules with incentives such as medals, certificates and
books with inscribed bookplates. You may already have come across such evidence
of your ancestors’ educational experiences amongst family memorabilia; indeed,
for many of us, these items may be what piqued our interest in family history
in the first place!
Bookplates can provide very direct information about
which school your ancestor attended, but sometimes locating the exact
establishment can be more of a challenge. Fortunately, this is an area about
which there is plenty of historical documentation. Most ‘ordinary’ children in
the late Victorian period would have attended the Church or Board school
nearest to their homes and a local librarian should be able to name the
school(s) that your ancestor potentially attended. Commercial trade directories
for the area (available in local libraries and on the commercial genealogical
sites) should also list local schools.
Some school records, including the Registers and
Logbooks concerned with attendance, have been scanned and made available online
for a fee by the commercial genealogical sites (see Sources below for more
details). Records of many more schools might today be found in County and Local
Record Offices. You can search for the location of these at www.discover.nationalarchives.gov.uk
before making an appointment to view on site.
The records for ancestors who attended still-existing grammar and public
schools might be found in the schools themselves.
Excuses and Penalties
Many people objected to the directive to attend school
every weekday believing that such nationally imposed measures did not recognise
the specific circumstances of their particular area. Spokesmen of farming
localities complained that local children should not be forced into schools in
the harvesting times of July and September when fruit and hops needed to be
gathered; representatives of poor urban localities argued the need for older
children to bring in a wage or help with childminding duties whilst parents
worked. And, a large and diverse number of other reasons were recorded by
teachers and Inspectors for children’s non-attendance at school. Some of these
were immediately plausible: sickness, bereavement, or inclement weather, for
example, but other excuses were more unusual and sometimes more spurious: ‘recovering from vaccination,’ attending
local ‘festivities,’ or ‘curling hair
for confirmation!’ for example.
In the early days of ‘universal education,’ rules for
attendance were not strictly enforced. Moreover, penalties for non-attendance
were neither uniform nor consistently applied across the country; rather they
depended upon local bye-laws put together by the newly-created and local School
Attendance Committees. There were many loopholes in the system with some
exemptions from schooling allowed because of long-term illness, juvenile
employment and the long distances in some places from some homes to schools. In
short, towards the end of the nineteenth century, there were plenty of reasons
why your ancestor might not have attended school every day.
Those who did skip school and incurred the penalties
might well have found their way into local newspapers. Accounts of such cases
(which can be searched for a fee by keyword at the British Newspaper Archive
online www.britishnewspaperonline.org) make fascinating reading, focusing as
they do on the half-baked excuses given by parents for their children’s no-show
at school. In 1882, for instance, on
being hauled before a School Attendance Board, Londoner Martin Connelly stated
that his son had been absent from school because he had been ‘bitten by a dog,
and was getting spiteful as the weather was becoming warm.’ The boy’s sister
argued in her father’s defence that, ‘her mother thought that the boy was
getting dangerous and might turn on the other children, if he went to school,
and bite them.’ Mr Connelly’s excuses held no water with the Inspectors and he
was required to pay the full five shilling penalty. St James Gazette, 03
August, 1882.
Despite the actions of School Inspectors and
Attendance Boards, the system of school attendance remained far from watertight
for decades. One Inspector, H. M. Seymour Tremenheere, wrote in 1884, of the
situation in the District of Kendal, that 1,000 eligible local students were
entirely missing from the school registers and another 1,600 were not regular
attenders. He advocated more accountability on the part of School
Inspectors and harsher penalties for parents. The local practice of giving
parents a month’s warning before fining them, for example, meant that they had
to face nothing worse than six warnings a year (interspersed perhaps with
bursts of short-term attendance by their children) if they were really set on
keeping their children away from school.
Genuine incapacity,’ throwing a sickie’ or just plain
‘bunking off,’ all played their part in absenteeism at schools in the past, but
sometimes school attendance was beyond the control of individual families. During the First World War (1914-1918),
farmers and parents could apply for Certificates of Exemption for children to
allow them to miss school and pick fruit and vegetables - gathering berries for
jam-making for the soldiers on the Western Front was particularly popular.
During the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, many schools up and down the country
were closed entirely although there was no national imperative to do so.
In the Second World War (1939-1945), schooling was
first interrupted by mass evacuation in September 1939. This meant that, by the
end of that year, 1 million children had had no schooling for four months. Later many classes were brought to a
premature end by air-raids. In other cases, school buildings were requisitioned
for the War Effort. Viewed against this background, the interruptions to
childrens’ schooling in our twenty-first century due to Covid - mitigated in
part by online teaching - perhaps appear
less dramatic. Whilst we worried whether
our children would ever catch up on the work they had missed, our ancestors
could not be confident that the education of their children would continue at
all. Perhaps we should think ourselves lucky!
Boxout: Attendance Medals
School Boards across the country often rewarded good
attendance with tangible tokens: medals, books and (during some periods such as
during the second half of the first World War, where metal was harder to come
by) paper certificates. From 1887-1920, The London School Board used a system of
awards known consecutively as ‘The
Victoria Medal,’ ‘The King Edward VII Medal’ and then ‘The King’s Medal’
according to the reigning monarch.
The London Metropolitan Archive (www.search.lma.gov.uk)
explains how different coloured ribbons were used at different times. The rules
were strict, allowing only for a couple of absences that had been clearly
flagged up by parents in advance. As well as punctuality at the twice-daily
registrations (9am and 2pm), the children had to have exhibited ‘cleanliness,
tidiness and good conduct.’
Other schools, especially independent ones such as
Manchester Grammar School, struck their own distinctive medals. You can sometimes
see what they looked like by searching online, where they often come up for
sale.
Exceptional examples of medal acquisition might be
mentioned in local or even national newspapers. On 4th July 1894,
the Dundee Evening Telegraph reported the remarkable case of schoolboy
George Eves, who at the age of 14 ‘has not missed a day of attendance since he
was three years old.’ He had received a plethora of different medals in
recognition of his achievement.
Timeline - 10 Events in the History of
School Attendance
1.
1870 Elementary Education Act
(Forster’s Education Act ) sets the framework to make it
compulsory for children to attend school between the ages of 5 and 12, or until
they attain the ‘educational standard’ – a basic level of education.
2. 1876 Lord Sandon’s Education Act places the responsibility firmly on parents
to ensure that their children attend elementary school. All School Boards are
now required by central government to set up School Attendance Committees.
3.
1878 Factory and Workshop Act states that Children under 10 are no longer allowed to work in
factories. Those between 10 and 13, who are employed, are required to attend
school half-time (i.e. half of each day or every other day.)
4. 1880 Mundella’s Act makes schooling
compulsory for those aged 5 to 10 in England and Wales. Most exemptions are
revoked and School Attendance Officers are now forced to take action if
children do not attend school.
5. Elementary Education Act 1891 abolishes fees
for elementary schools making them free for the first time.
6. 1893 and 1899
The Elementary Education (School Attendance) Acts increase the school leaving age first to 11 and then to 12.
7. 1902 Balfour’s Education Act puts elementary
education under the control of local education authorities (LEAs). All School
Attendance Committees are abolished. School attendance now lies within the
jurisdiction of County Councils.
7. 1918 Fisher Education Act raises
school leaving age from 12 to 14
following the First World War.
8. 1944 Butler’s Education Act (Act for
Scotland 1945) establishes a Ministry of Education, and the tripartite
system of elementary, secondary and further education is formalised. The
compulsory school leaving age is raised to 15
Schooling in Numbers
2.2 million
– number of children of elementary school age not receiving any schooling
according to the 1861 Census.
10 – Number of shillings
needed to fund an individual child for one year when central government rather
than parents first become responsible for Elementary Education in 1891.
82 Percentage of children
regularly attending elementary school in the early 1890s.
300,000 – Number of
children working in employment outside school hours in 1901.
328 – Number of Local
Education Authorities (LEAs) established by the Balfour Act, 1902.
325 – Number of pounds per
annum earned by a School Inspector (Mr J. H. Morris) in Sheffield in 1903.
5,384,152 - Number of children in average attendance in
elementary schools in England and Wales in 1910.
8.4 - Percentage of children
absent from school in Aberdeen, June 1917.
673,000 Number of
children evacuated from British cities in the first three days of September
1939.
27,700 - Number of state
primary schools in Britain in 1951.
Sources
·
Books and Family Papers
Look out for bookplates in books given as prizes,
certificates of attendance, medals, newspaper clippings, school reports, exam
certificates and the like.
·
School Registers and Logbooks Online
You can search some school registers and logbooks by
name at Find my Past (fees apply to view), www.findmypast.org.uk. These include
records from church, board, elementary and some secondary schools.
Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk)
and The Genealogist (www.thegenealogist.co.uk) also have many school registers
and rolls. Again fees apply to view.
·
Miscellaneous Attendance Records
You can search for records relating to individual schools at
www.discover.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Relevant documents include: School Registers, School Logbooks, School
Absence Inquiry sheets, Absence Notes, Absence Reports, Staff Absence Books,
Staff Absence Registers, Reasons for Absence Books, Masters’ Absence Register,
Certificates of Absence for Epidemic Illness, Medical Certificates, and School
Inspection Reports. View the material onsite in County Record Offices by
appointment. [CUT AS NECESSARY]
· Parliamentary
Papers
You can search the Parliamentary debates on school
attendance at https://archives.parliament.uk/online-resources/parliamentary-debates-hansard/
Precis of actual School Inspections Reports from 1840
to 1899 – can be viewed in (Proquest) Parliamentary Papers onsite
at some subscribing institutions.
·
Newspapers
www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
Search millions of pages of British newspapers to understand how people in
particular localities reacted to the legislation on school attendance, and for
accounts of cases where penalties were issued to named parents for the
non-attendance of their children.
·
Records of Public Schools and
Colleges
Public schools such as Bedford
School, Rugby, and Winchester College kept their own records of attendance and
many of these remain in school archives and libraries. Refer to the website of
the school in question for more information.
·
Oral histories
At the British Sound
Archive (www.sounds.bl.uk) you can search by keyword and find interviews with people
speaking about their experiences at school over 100 years ago.
·
Autobiographies
See, in particular, accounts of
schooling in a host of working-class autobiographies at Writing Lives:
Archive of Working Class Writing Online, www.writinglives.org.
Resources
Books
·
Robert Elverstone, Absent Through Want
of Boots: Diary of a Victorian School (The History Press, 2014)
Based on the headmasters’ first-hand
accounts in the school log books of Albert Road Board School in Leicestershire
(opened 1878).
·
A Susan Williams, Patrick Ivin and
Cartoline Morse, The Children of London: Attendance and Welfare at School
1870-1990, Institute of Education, (2001)
Charts the development of the School
Attendance Service and Care Committees.
Websites
·
www.writinglives.org
Writing Lives: Archive of Working Class Writing Online
·
Fully searchable digital archive of
British working-class writing since 1700 including many accounts of schooling.
·
www.sounds.bl.uk British Library Sounds Archive
Recorded oral histories of experiences at
school.
Societies and Museums
·
History of
Education Society
Promoting
study and teaching of the History of Education in the UK
Dr Susannah Wright, Secretary of the History of Education Society (UK),
School of Education, Oxford Brookes
University, Harcourt Hill Campus, Oxford, OX2 9AT
·
www. nationaleducationmuseum.uk Ongoing
project to set up a National Museum of Education for the UK based in Portsmouth
·
London Metropolitan Archive
View
school attendance medals deposited in the archive by appointment.
a: 40 Northampton Road, London, England
ECIR DHB
t: 02073323820
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