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Tunstall High School – Pioneering girls’ eduction in The Potteries

February 26th, 2013

Tunstall’s Jubilee Buildings

In the early 1920s, Stoke-on-Trent councillors accepted the view of leading educationalists that selected entry grammar schools would give academically gifted working class children an opportunity to make their way in the world.

Hanley and Longton already had grammar schools and the council made plans to build two girls’ grammar schools, when it had the money.

As a temporary measure, Tunstall High School for Girls was opened on January 1st, 1922. Housed in the Jubilee Buildings in Station Road (The Boulevard), the school had 90 pupils whose parents had to pay for their education.

The fees charged were three guineas a year for a girl living in Stoke-on-Trent and five guineas for one living outside the area.

Many working class parents in The Potteries could not afford to pay for their children’s education or to keep them at school when they could be going to work earning money.

Poverty was frustrating the local authority’s scheme.

In June, 1922, the council introduced exhibitions which enabled it to pay the school fees of elementary school pupils who had been awarded grammar school places and give them maintenance grants and travelling expenses.

Financial help was given to 45 children attending local grammar schools – 23 of whom were girls at Tunstall High.

Girls wore a uniform consisting of a brown pleated tunic, a shantung silk blouse, a brown blazer and a brown hat with a metal badge illustrating the tree of knowledge below which was printed the school’s motto, “I serve”.

The school hymn “Pioneers” showed that the headmistress, Miss Wilmott, and her staff believed they were embarking on an educational experiment – an experiment that would challenge accepted ideas and enable working class girls to go to university or teacher training college.

From 1925 onwards, pupils were entered for external examinations.

Tunstall High School’s pass rate was much higher than the national average. It quickly became recognised as a centre of excellence. Betty Johnson was the first pupil to obtain a degree. She read English at Manchester University and graduated in 1929.

Copyright Betty Cooper – The Phoenix Trust 2013

Photograph © Copyright Steve Lewin and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

PH/BC

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Plans to give the Potteries a University were frustrated by “Federation”

May 8th, 2011

Trentham GardensTrentham Gardens which could have been a University Campus

On February 12th, 1890, Francis Elliot Kitchener, the headmaster of Newcastle High School, attended the North Staffordshire Chamber of Commerce’s annual dinner at the North Stafford Hotel. While proposing the toast to “the staple trades of Staffordshire”, he suggested establishing a University College in Hanley which specialised in chemistry and engineering. Both the Sentinel and Thomas Turner (Staffordshire County Council’s director of technical education) supported the idea.

However, nothing was done until 1900 when a Council for the Extension of Higher Education in North Staffordshire was set up to help finance Oxford University’s Extension Courses in the region.

Taking up Kitchener’s idea, the council launched a public appeal to build a North Staffordshire College in the Potteries. The proposed college, which would have had University status, was going to run:

  1. Full-time day and part-time evening courses providing degree level vocational training in mining engineering, iron and steel production, mechanical and electrical engineering, ceramic technology, brick making, tile manufacturing and industrial chemistry.
  2. Commercial courses including foreign languages.
  3. Full-time teacher training courses and part-time courses for pupil teachers employed in elementary schools.
  4. Full-time and part-time degree courses.

The estimated cost of the college was £20,000. There was wide spread support for the project. By the end of 1904 local pottery manufacturers, colliery owners, professional bodies and town councils had promised to give between £10,000 and £11,000 towards the cost. Staffordshire County Council offered to give £12,500 if matching funding could be raised. Needing to raise less than £2,500, the Council for the Extension of Higher Education in North Staffordshire made plans to launch a final appeal. Before the appeal could be launched, the Duke of Sutherland stepped in and offered to give Trentham Hall to the county council if it agreed to establish the college there.

Believing its objective had been achieved, the Council for the Extension of Higher Education in North Staffordshire disbanded and the county council made plans to transform the hall into a regional college. While these plans were being made, a campaign to reform local government in the Potteries by replacing its six local authorities with a county borough council was gaining momentum.

Realising change was inevitable and that responsibility for education in the district would be taken from it and given to the new county borough council, Staffordshire County Council withdrew its support for the North Staffordshire College. Hanley, which was already a county borough, refused to take over the project. The county council erected temporary buildings to house a mining school and a pottery school on land near Stoke Station. At the end of the First World War another attempt to give the Potteries a  University College failed. The temporary mining school and the temporary pottery school became the Central School of Science and Technology, one of the technical schools in the region from which Staffordshire University can claim its descent.

(Copyright Betty Cooper/David Martin – The Phoenix Trust)

Photograph © Copyright Kevin Rushton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

 

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Education in Newcastle from the middle ages to the 19th century

January 17th, 2011
Orme’s English School 

During the Middle Ages the church provided education. Doctors and lawyers were trained in monastic colleges. The sons of noblemen and wealthy merchants were sent to boarding schools attached to abbeys. Parish priests taught in village schools and every town had a grammar school. In Newcastle-under-Lyme the Dominican Friars ran schools for girls and boys.These schools closed when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Church of England clergymen, who replaced the Catholic priests, refused to reopen them. The few schools opened in Elizabethan England were established by merchant guilds, town councils or private citizens.

A trust was created by Thomas Alleyne to build schools at Stone and Uttoxeter. Newcastle’s borough council erected a boys’ school where fee paying pupils were taught reading, writing and arithmetic. On April 9th, 1602, Thomas Clayton founded a charity that enabled the school to employ a graduate with a bachelors degree from Oxford or Cambridge to teach 30 poor boys free of charge.

During the 17th century James Cowell founded a Dame School where the schoolmistress, Jane Fernihough, taught 80 poor children.

In 1692, the boys’ school became a grammar school when William Cotton gave it the money to pay a teacher to teach Latin and Greek. Thirteen years later in 1705, Edward Orme, a clergyman who had been headmaster of the grammar school, established a charity school where boys received an elementary education before being apprenticed to skilled craftsmen. The school, which had 30 pupils, was housed in the Presbyterian Meeting House near St. Giles’ Church.

After rioters attacked and set fire to the meeting house in 1715, a school was erected on land adjacent to the churchyard. Orme’s School was the only school opened in Newcastle during the 18th century. When the Charity Commissioners visited the town in 1825 they found all the schools run down and neglected.

There were only 20 pupils attending the Dame School where 75 year old Mary Fox was the teacher. Too old to teach, Mary looked after the children while their parents were at work. The school closed when she died in 1827. The grammar school was housed in a small badly ventilated building between Hassell Street and Brunswick Street. When they visited Orme’s school, the commissioners discovered inefficient administration and financial irregularities. They closed the school and its trustees became involve in Chancery litigation that lasted 20 years. New trustees were appointed in 1845. The old school was sold and an elementary school for 150 boys, called Orme’s English School, was erected, at Higherland.

Copyright Betty Cooper 2010

Photograph © Copyright Kerry Widdowson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

 

 

 

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Staffordshire schools welcome Chinese delegation

December 10th, 2010

A group of teachers and education officials from Pudong in China visited Staffordshire schools this week to establish working links with them.

An area link agreement was signed by Staffordshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Schools Liz Staples and Mrs Wu Yan from the Pudong New Education Bureau.

The link will establish a long-term partnership between Staffordshire and Pudong, a district of Shanghai, providing intercultural and professional development opportunities for young people and teachers.

It means young people in Staffordshire and Pudong will be able to communicate with each other and learn about each other’s country, culture, language and economy. This will expand intercultural understanding, raise aspirations, broaden horizons and improve linguistic skills.

During the visit to Staffordshire, the Pudong headteachers spent time visiting their Staffordshire partner schools – meeting staff, getting to know the schools, working with students and making plans for joint curriculum-based activities.

Seven Staffordshire high schools are involved in the first round of school linking: Moorside High School in Werrington, King Edward VI High School Stafford, Rawlett Community Sports College Tamworth, Chasetown Specialist Sports College, de Ferrers Specialist Technology College Burton and Wolstanton High School Newcastle.

The area link between Staffordshire and Pudong has been developing for over two years with the support of the British Council Anglo-Chinese and Connecting Classrooms programmes.

It is hoped that the partnership will facilitate more school links in the future, involving primary schools as well as secondary.

 

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POTTERIES SUNDAY SCHOOLS (1780-1840)

October 17th, 2010

Burslem Sunday School (Hill Top)

Towards the end of the 18th century, churches and chapels in the Potteries established Sunday schools to give children who worked during the week religious instruction and an elementary education.

Burslem industrialists built an interdenominational Independent Sunday School where boys and girls were taught to read and write. Soon it had over 700 pupils and branch schools were opened at Longport and Norton. The Wesleyan Methodists started a Sunday school in America Street, Tunstall and in Hanley the Methodist New Connexion erected a small school next to its chapel in Albion Street.

During 1816, the Church of England established a school in Lichfield Street and in 1819 the New Connexion built a new school in Bethesda Street, which could accommodate 800 pupils – 400 boys and 400 girls.

School discipline was strict. Teachers demanded unquestioning obedience from pupils who were taught to obey the Laws of God and accept their station in life. Corporal punishment was used extensively and at the New Connexion School one teacher, Joseph Bullock, had a reputation for brutality. His lessons started with a prayer meeting at six o’ clock in the morning. Boys who misbehaved were beaten or made to hold a heavy brick above their heads for hours on end. Pupils who fainted or put the brick down were caned. The class was delighted when a boy dropped the brick on Bullock’s foot seriously injuring his toes, which kept him away from school for several weeks.

Churches began to open day schools where parents paid for their children’s education. Often using the same premises as the Sunday schools, the day schools taught reading writing and arithmetic. Many pupils left and started work when they were seven or eight years old. Although a few continued their education at night school, most remained semi-illiterate for the rest of their lives.

During 1828, a major row broke out inside the Wesleyan Methodist Church when church leaders ordered Sunday school teachers to stop teaching academic subjects. Wesleyans in Burslem claimed the Independent Sunday School belonged to them and told it to take writing off the curriculum. The teachers ignored these instructions and the Wesleyans seized the school, renaming it the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School. Denied use of the premises, the teachers, supported by the parents, launched a public appeal and raised enough money to build their own church and Sunday school at Hill Top.

(Betty Cooper – The Phoenix Trust)

Photograph © Copyright Dave Bevis and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

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