Shaping Ideas.... Shaping Lives

Upwardly mobile John Dunford	Expectations: The impact of current educational policies on vulnerable young people Cynthia Bartlett	A Quiet Revolution: placing positive values at the heart of the curriculum Dr. Neil Hawkes
New routes to headship Maxine Evans	Childhood is safe in our schools Roy Blatchford	Aspiration 'on the slate' Sir Iain Hall
Pedagogy and Values David Taylor (HMI)	Twenty-first Century Schooling Sir David Winkley	A new alignment for secondary schools and colleges Dr John Dunford
Celebrating the profession of teaching Keith Bartley	The 3Es Ian McNiff	The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Bill Laar
Making Choices Sir Iain Hall	After OFSTED Mervyn Benford	Postcard From New York Roy Blatchford
A Vexing Question Sir Iain Hall	Training teachers Geoff Barton	Take your partners for the Ruskin Waltz Mervyn Benford
Foundation stones for the next Prime Minister Roy Blatchford	A fleeting history of happiness: children's perspectives Professor Cedric Cullingford	SMSC - Optional extras or hidden opportunities? Dr Tony Eaude
The new school leader Sir Iain Hall	Are there words to describe the best teaching? David Shakespeare	What is education for? Dr Nicholas Tate

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I am sure that all of us are aware that slavery was abolished in this country in the early 1800s. Some may even be able to quote the actual date of the Act of Abolition as being 1833. But how many of us are aware that another defining moment in our country’s history happened in the same year?

It may come as a surprise but that year Parliament also passed the ‘Mills and Factories Act’. This Act restricted the hours that children could work and introduced the concept of compulsory schooling.
Prior to the passing of this Act, there was little restriction on employers insisting on children working long hours and no concept of educating the poor. It seems somewhat ironic that we did not see child labour for what it really was, another form of slavery, nor education as emancipation.

With the passing of the Act, children under the age of twelve were restricted to working no more than twelve hours per day and nine hours on a Saturday. This was to sit alongside the concept of compulsory schooling for all young children. However, this was not to be supplied by the state but through both the church and children’s charities.

Whilst the sons and daughters of the rich had home tuition, education was seen as a charitable act for the poor! A grand sum of £20,000 was produced to implement this initiative. Young children, if the Act were to be implemented, had to attend school for at least two hours on six days each week. Holidays were to be Christmas Day, Good Friday and eight half days distributed throughout the year.

The introduction of this Act produced great tensions between employers and children’s charities, especially in North Wales. The major industry in the area, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was slate mining which was not mentioned in the legislation.

This produced a continual clash between the education charities’ desire to see children in school and the need for employment in cash-strapped families. Child labour was still rampant and although a later Mines Act in 1860 prohibited the employment of boys underground between the ages of ten and twelve, they could still be employed if they could produce a certificate from a 'competent schoolmaster' confirming that they could read and write, or, failing this, that they were attending school for not less than three hours a day during two days in each week.

Evasion was practised on a large scale. Sadly, the situation was not helped by the both the charity’s and church’s insistence that schools were to be fee paying, despite the hardship, with each child being charged a half penny per week for tuition.

School log books still exist showing entries very similar to the following extracts:

‘Several children have left school during this quarter. This is due to some extent to the School Fees Regulations, and partly also to the improved condition of the collieries in the neighbourhood which makes it easy for boys to obtain employment.’

‘The attendance has been unsatisfactory all through the week. Several children are ill (especially infants) and others are absent on the plea of poverty....’

However, the tightening of legislation did produce changes in working conditions. The majority of mines quickly restricted their total working hours to twelve hours per day, and nine on Saturdays, to allow child labour to continue to be used. Lunch times became a compulsory thirty minutes to keep within the Act, and to ensure that a surprise visit by the Factories Inspector would not cause problems.

Working practice in slate mines was very much a family business. Not so much in that the mines were usually owned by rich English families but that, once underground, huge caverns were tunnelled out from the main access tunnel by the one extended family who then earned their money from the amount of slate that their cavern produced each week.

A cavern rich in slate could mean that as many as six people could mine it, whilst the poorer caverns had to limit or cheapen their labour thus increasing the demand for child labour to cut costs. These slate miners were proud ‘Chapel’ going men who wanted their children to be ‘schooled’ and used the compulsory thirty minutes for lunch to ensure that it happened.

The first fifteen minutes of this break was designated as eating time and the second fifteen minutes was for ‘cavern business’. During this brief period all of the workers in the cavern met formally to discuss important matters such as collections for injured workmates, families in the village who were struggling financially, or how to pay the school fees of the poorest of the village’s children.

Each meeting had a chair who was usually the senior member of the cavern’s family and a secretary who was the person most skilled at reading and writing. The minutes of these meetings still exist in the libraries of local universities. The young children who were working in the cavern had to attend the meeting and sit, with a slate, alongside the secretary watching how he formed his letters.

They were expected to copy his letters and show them to the cavern’s chair at the end of the meeting. Specific improvement targets were set each week and children were expected to show ‘on their slates’ that they had met them. Failure to improve could mean either additional duties in the afternoon shift or a decrease in their wage at the end of the week.

It may seem rather primitive but it did show a determination on behalf of the miners to increase the literacy skills of these working children. They realised the benefits of education and were determined that, as far as they were able, every child would matter and that none would be left behind. It is no surprise that the people of Wales have always been renowned for valuing education.

All of this happened some 150 years ago but, at times, I wonder how far we have progressed.

School rooms look little different from those in the early chapel schools. Desks still sit in rows and invariably face the front. We do see computers and whiteboards, but little else is different. Fees have gone, except in the independent sector, and education is quite rightly recognised as a right rather than a charity.

Yet what we seem to have lost is that determination in too many of our young people to understand the benefits of school in terms of their own personal growth and progression.

As a young teacher, I taught mathematics and physics to crowded classes at night school to those young adults who wanted to improve both their qualifications and career prospects. Now, forty years later, such classes have long since gone.

It could be that our schools have improved so much that we have eradicated the need but it might be that we have also, for many of our children, eradicated their aspirations as we have improved their lives and personal comfort.