Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

132 there was much agitation for a tidier national coverage. This was provided by the famous 1870 Elementary Education Act, one of the many reforms introduced by William Gladstone’s fruitful Liberal ministry 1868-74. The minister responsible was William Forster whose wife and adviser was Jane Arnold, daughter of Thomas Arnold and an advocate of his ‘broad’ Anglican principles. Forster engineered a ‘hard compromise’ in a complex situation where he was beset by a quagmire of warring sectarian groups. While he maintained support for the Voluntary sector, he legislated for elected and rate-aided School Boards to ‘fill the gaps’ wherever there were local deficiencies. Board schools would have some bible-based Christian teaching without any sectarian flavour. Within a few years there were over 20,000 schools and registrations had shot from 1m to 5m. Very soon there was further legislation, building on the potent momentum of the seminal 1870 Act, the general effect of which was to create a public elementary service which was universal, compulsory and, by 1918, free. The 1918 Act also tentatively raised the slowly rising school- leaving age to fourteen. There was much talk at the time and since of illiteracy before 1870, but, more recently, this has been shown to be mythical. The exceptionally dedicated researches of WB Stephens and others have demonstrated that primary reading skills among the working classes were probably as high as 90% by 1870. Many children had mastered the basics in the spread of schools that did exist or through family, workplace and other communal facilities. As well as this clinical evidence, there was also the circumstantial testimony of the millions of letters, newspapers and, as we have observed, children’s literature, annually flying across the country and being diligently read. There was also considerable anxiousness expressed about the need to educate children for the work-place, although its previous neglect has not halted Britain from becoming the world’s first industrial nation. This continues today as a political justification for heavy expenditure on schooling, The Educational Effect