schools

schools. From the early modern period, schools were a key element of state policy to spread the influence of the Reformation. Legislation for the establishment of parish elementary schools (1537) and diocesan grammar schools (1570) proved very largely ineffectual. The royal schools, set up as part of plantation schemes, took root, however. The tradition of state provision as an instrument of religious and social change was continued in the 18th century by the charter schools. There were a growing number of charity schools, mainly in cities and towns, while elsewhere ‘hedge schools’ proliferated, and by the early 19th century most Irish children who received an elementary education did so outside the officially regulated, but highly inadequate, parish school system. Prosperous Catholic families continued to evade the prohibition on ‘foreign education’ by sending their children to colleges in France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

The Catholic Relief Acts of 1782 and 1793 largely removed the educational constraints on Catholics, but the problem of the provision of appropriate universal education at elementary level remained to be solved.

The matter was first addressed by John Hely‐Hutchinson, provost of Trinity College, Dublin, whose ideas formed the nucleus of proposals put before the Irish House of Commons in 1787 by the chief secretary, Thomas Orde. He described a complex educational system of restructured parish and diocesan schools, with ‘great schools’, one in each province, teaching ‘technical arts’, ‘mercantile knowledge’, and agriculture, and funded by diverting funds from the charter schools.

Orde left office within months of making his proposals, and nothing came of them. But the need for state‐supported universal education remained. A series of commissions surveyed the scene, one of which, the Board of Education, recommended (in its influential fourteenth report of 1812–13) the setting up of a government body that would regulate and finance schools, and, by respecting denominational differences, be acceptable to all.

The Kildare Place Society (1811), offering combined ‘literary’ education and Bible‐reading ‘without note or comment’ with separate denominational education outside school hours, was successful in attracting state funding for its schools, but eventually fell foul of Catholic opinion. The reports of the Irish Education Inquiry (1825–6) endorsed the policy of ‘mixed’ education with denominational safeguards, and in a letter of 1831 the chief secretary Edward Stanley set out a scheme for schools regulated and financed by a government‐appointed board of ‘commissioners of national education’. In the event, however, pressure from all the major religious denominations ensured that both elementary education in the national schools and teacher‐training should have a de facto denominational character.

The matter of the universal provision of intermediate (secondary) education was not to arise for more than a century. But by the late 19th century there was an awareness on the part of political and ecclesiastical leaders that existing provision was inadequate, even for the children of the middle classes for whom it was considered appropriate. Official inquiries into endowed schools began with the Wyse Committee (1837), whose findings demonstrated the patchy nature of what was available, but whose recommendations of denominationally mixed, state‐funded intermediate schools were far ahead of their time. The proposals of the Kildare Commission (1857–8) were likewise left to gather dust.

The number of secondary schools grew appreciably, such Protestant endowed schools as those of Erasmus Smith and the Incorporated Society being steadily supplemented by the activities of the Catholic religious orders: among them the Christian Brothers, the Loreto Sisters, and the Ursulines. With the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878, government introduced a method of providing financial support for intermediate schools without (at least in theory) infringing its self‐imposed inhibition on supporting denominational education. Commissioners were appointed, and provided with £1 million from the endowments of the erstwhile established church, the proceeds of which were to be distributed to intermediate schools on the basis of the results their pupils gained in examinations conducted by the commissioners. Twenty years later the Pallas Commission (1899) endorsed the ‘payment‐by‐results’ system and further legislation (1900) widened the commissioners' powers and provided for the appointment of inspectors.

In time, a number of prestigious Catholic boys' schools had emerged (Clongowes Wood, Castleknock, Blackrock, for example). Their pupils filled many influential positions in the public service at home and throughout the British empire. Together with boys from the Christian Brothers' schools, they provided the political and administrative leadership of the newly independent Irish state, as their equivalents from Belfast Academical Institution, Belfast Royal Academy, Campbell College, and elsewhere did in Northern Ireland. Alexandra College, Dublin, founded in 1866, pioneered access to secondary and university education for Protestant girls, its example closely followed by schools for the daughters of the Catholic middle classes. The early years of the 20th century saw a beginning made with the training of secondary teachers in the two Dublin universities and Queen's Belfast.

The concept of state‐aided but privately owned and managed secondary schools survived partition. In Northern Ireland Lord Londonderry's attempt to promote non‐denominational primary education was abandoned in the face of concerted opposition. When compulsory education for all children between 6 and 14 years of age was introduced in 1892, the legislators had the universal provision of elementary education in mind. But the implication of raising the school‐leaving age to 15 (Northern Ireland in 1957, the Republic in 1972) was that free post‐primary schools would be available.

Change came first in the north. The 1947 Education Act, closely following English developments of 1944, provided for universal free secondary education. However, selection by examination for grammar or secondary modern schooling, abandoned elsewhere in the United Kingdom from the 1960s, has continued to operate. Twenty years later (1967) fees were abolished in most secondary schools in the Republic where the demand for post‐primary education could only be met by widening the curriculum of the vocational (technical) schools, set up under the Vocational Education Act of 1930, and by the creation of new categories: ‘comprehensive’ and ‘community’ schools.

Technical education was even slower off the mark. The imaginative (if impracticable) proposals from Orde, the inclusion of agricultural and horticultural subjects in the national school curriculum at an early stage, and the establishment of model schools and farms by the national commissioners were not matched by any official intervention at intermediate level. Such initiatives as there were depended on the Royal Dublin Society and the supporters of mechanics' institutes. It was not until the setting up of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, following legislation in 1899, that a start was made at government level, resulting in the emergence of schools specifically devoted to the teaching of technical subjects, and of financial encouragement of such teaching in intermediate schools.

See also monastic schools.

Kenneth Milne