Schools and School Registers

My latest feature for Who Do You Think You Are? magazine focuses on school registers, which are a wonderful resource for tracing your ancestors' childhood. Until fairly recent times, parents paid for their children’s education.  Admission registers were essential so that schools could check how many children attended, their parents’ contact details, and whether school fees were up-to-date. 

Upper class children, and middle class children whose parents were well-off, were usually taught by tutors or governesses at home during their early years.  When they were about ten years old, boys went to schools like Eton and Harrow to prepare them for university. Girls like Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to a ‘honest, old-fashioned boarding school… where girls might be sent to …scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies’ (Jane Austen, Emma, 1815).  Most boarding schools taught a smattering of ‘ladylike’ accomplishments rather than a good, all-round education.  Alternatively girls attended a local day school or a seminary if affordable.

Working class children (if their parents were prepared to pay for their education) attended ordinary day schools for a few pence per week, unless they obtained a charity (‘Blue Coat’) school place or a free scholarship. Thousands of poor children had no education at all, or perhaps just went to Sunday school.

Middle-class parents in straitened circumstances who did not want their children to mix with working-class children at ordinary day schools, tried to get them a place at a charity school where education was free or subsidized.

The Revd. Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) had a very limited income. He sent his four eldest daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily to the Clergy Daughters’ School, Cowan Bridge after their mother Maria’s tragic death.  The fees for this school were subsidized by a charity.  The school’s regime was spartan, with poor quality food, and the two older Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, whose health was not robust, died in 1825. Charlotte later immortalized her experiences in Jane Eyre (1847). 

Some public and grammar school registers are available in large reference libraries, and free on Google Books and the Internet Archive.

Images:

A class of school girls with their teacher, postcard circa 1910.

Charlotte Brontë.

Plaque marking the location of the Oliver Whitby (Blue Coat School), Chichester.  © Sue Wilkes.

When Did Your Ancestor Leave School?

The school leaving age in the UK has changed to 17 years; there's more info here.  The age when your ancestor was allowed to leave school and start work was critical for working-class families if they were on the breadline, because then young people could earn a full week's wage for the family. Boys from more affluent homes could go on to university if their parents could afford it; it was not until the late 1870s that the first women were permitted to study for a degree.

If you are trying to trace your ancestor's childhood, then it's a good idea to check what the school leaving age was at the date you are interested in, because that will determine whether you should look for school records such as registers, or employment records, e.g. wage books.

But there may be a period of overlap because children who reached a set educational standard were allowed to work part-time, and you may find school exemption certificates (above) amongst family papers or in local archives.

You may be surprised how young your ancestor was when they began full-time work; the 1918 Education Act raised the school leaving age from 12 to 14.  As late as 1861, although the minimum age of starting work in a coal mine was nominally age twelve, ten- to twelve-year-old lads were permitted to work underground if they had a school certificate to prove that they had reached a sufficiently high standard of literacy.

Images:

Section of a school exemption certificate dated 4 April 1894 permitting a Manchester schoolchild to work one day per week. 

Girl with slate and schoolbook.  Early twentieth century postcard.  Author’s collection.

Collier’s phthisis. A Manchester doctor’s sketch of ‘black lung’ from a 65 year old collier. Reports of the Factory Inspectors, 31 October 1871.