Examine any census record from 1851 and you will find children listed as scholars and women listed as teachers and schoolmistresses. Indeed it is estimated that even as early as 1816, 58% of England’s 1.5m children ‘attended a school of some kind for some period’ (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961) and by 1835 this had risen to almost 83%. However, the average duration of school attendance was only a year. This had risen to two years by 1851, and by 1861 almost 91% of children received some education, though of very mixed quality. Most left before they were 11 years old.

Women as educators
Women played a key role in the education of both boys and girls, particularly at elementary level, either teaching the children of well-off families at fee-paying schools or home tutoring as governesses. Other women (often unqualified) ran private schools, known as Dame Schools, in their own homes, where they taught rudimentary reading and writing, with perhaps sewing and knitting for girls and other subjects for older children. These were frequently little more than childcare establishments, taking children up to the age of ten and charging as much as 4d a week for the service.

Some private schools, however, definitely aspired to high standards – sisters Mary and Elizabeth Roach ran a girls’ school in Wakefield and in 1851 both grandly described their occupations as ‘Young Ladies’ Luminary’, although this had been changed to ‘schoolmistress’ by 1861. Others were selective about the pupils they wanted to teach, as this advertisement in the Bradford Observer in January 1850 shows:

YORK HOUSE, WAKEFIELD.— The Misses JAGGER and JACKSON respectfully announce that their School duties will be resumed on the 25th of January, 1850, when two Ministers’ daughters can be received at a reduction from the usual charge.

Schooling for poorer and working-class children was often supported by religious organisations, whose aim was education for all. The earliest were the charity schools, such as blue coat and green coat schools (so-named because of the uniform) founded in the 16th century; these provided education and clothing freely or for a small fee. Many were run by husband-and-wife teams, both teachers.

Even with subscriptions from generous benefactors, the high costs of providing education made fees necessary, denying many children the chance of schooling. To counter the expense of teachers’ salaries – one of the main costs – Joseph Lancaster, a Southwark Quaker, introduced a monitorial system in 1798, whereby one teacher was supported by monitors (older children, usually girls) who already had some education. Using limited resources these British or Lancasterian Schools provided cheap, basic, non-denominational education and by 1851 there were 1,500 such establishments in the country. Slightly earlier, Scottish Episcopalian priest Dr Andrew Bell had trialled his ‘Experiment in Education’ – a similar scheme to Lancaster’s – in Madras, and this was adopted by the Church of England in 1811. Teaching at these National Schools, where pupils attended for 1d a week, centred on church liturgy and catechism and by 1851 the Church was providing elementary education in 17,000 schools. The Wesleyans, also committed to the importance of promoting Christian-based education, initially placed most effort in creating Sunday Schools, but in 1836, the Methodist Conference gave its blessing to the founding of ‘weekday schools’. The Wesleyan Education Committee was inaugurated in 1837 and by 1841 was establishing new schools and training teachers. Over a million pounds was raised, funding 600 Methodist schools across the country, adding to 150 other Nonconformist church schools. The money meant they did not need to follow the monitorial system used by the Church of England.

Most schools taught boys and girls separately, by teachers of the same sex – it being widely held that women should not be in charge of boys – and as more girls entered the education system, more female schoolmistresses were required.

For the poorest children, often considered too dirty and rough to attend other schools, the Ragged Schools – initiated in 1818 by John Pounds of Portsmouth – were increased in number when Lord Shaftesbury formed the Ragged School Union in 1844. Thomas Barnardo opened a Ragged School in 1867, before turning his attention to providing homes for destitute children. Eventually there were more than 200 Ragged Schools, heavily reliant on women volunteering to teach.

In 1868, with matters on education moving forward nationally, the Schools’ Enquiry Commission (Taunton Commission) noted that women were being held back from becoming effective teachers. There had been various debates regarding women’s ability to grasp Latin and maths, but even if, as it seemed, arithmetic was a weak point in female teachers, it was generally acknowledged that women were more natural educators than men, due to their careful, patient and persevering qualities. One commissioner (Mr Bryce) pointed out that female teachers having not themselves been well taught, did not know how to teach. A lack of secondary education for girls was the heart of the problem – and the best remedy was to provide ‘all English women of the middle class with the opportunity of a higher liberal education’.

Acting on the report, the Endowed Schools Act of 1869 addressed the situation by allowing endowed schools to reallocate their finances to provide secondary education up to university entrance for girls as well as boys. And within a year, Girton College, the first residential college to offer degree level education for women had opened at Cambridge.

New opportunities were presented for these educated women when the Education Act of 1870, aiming to provide elementary education for all, compelled local authorities to establish school boards. The first new board schools, created to supplement the existing voluntary schools, opened in 1872, and of course they required extra teachers. Prior to the Education Act, girls (and boys) wishing to become teachers usually started as pupil monitors (through the National Schools system) at the age of 13 or 14, before serving a four-year term as a pupil teacher and this continued. They received on-the-job training and special tuition from the head teacher in the morning pre-school and at lunchtime, at a starting salary of £10 a year. Examinations were in subjects including arithmetic, geography, history, reading and needlework and, once passed, candidates spent another year as an ‘ex-pupil teacher’ taking further exams to qualify as a certificated assistant teacher.

In 1902, school boards were replaced by local education authorities, which ran elementary, secondary, and technical education and teacher training, and with these developments came better opportunities for not only ‘English women of the middle class’ but also girls born without privilege into ordinary working families. If they so wished, girls could now train for a career, not just a job. But even for these better-educated girls, opportunities were limited. Teaching provided not only material rewards but also professional status and career security. In the first decade of the 20th century, elementary teaching was the largest single employment for girls leaving secondary school and women teachers outnumbered men by almost three to one. In addition, the teacher-training scheme underwent changes. Instead of a five-year period to qualify, pupil teachers were engaged on a two-year apprenticeship scheme, where classroom time was supported by study at pupil teacher centres in technical colleges.

Equality of opportunity
The opportunity to progress, both financially through regular salary increases and in status through merit-based promotion created some semblance of equality for men and women teachers (although equal pay was some way off). However, one key inequality was the discontinuation of a woman’s employment once she married.

The contrasting careers of two sisters, Louisa and Elizabeth Haliday, who both became infant school headmistresses after training as pupil teachers in a C of E elementary school in Manchester, aptly demonstrates this. When Elizabeth, born in 1850, moved to Yorkshire in 1874, to take the post of headmistress at Moldgreen infants’ school in Huddersfield at a salary of £100 per year, Louisa, born in 1854, joined her as an assistant teacher. Elizabeth wasn’t in her post for long before her contract was terminated when she married the recently widowed head of the boys’ school in July 1875. Like many women teachers who faced the choice of career or marriage, it must have been a wrench to relinquish something she had trained and worked hard for, let alone the status and salary she had achieved. At least Elizabeth continued her involvement in education, writing up the school log on her husband’s behalf and supporting his work in the NUT when they later moved to Great Harwood near Blackburn – as well as raising five children.

On the other hand, Louisa remained a spinster, devoting her life to a teaching career in Huddersfield. In 1879 she became headmistress of Almondbury infants’ school at a salary of £80 per year. Seven years later she transferred to Mount Pleasant infants’ school as headmistress, this time on a salary of £115. There she remained in post for 32 years until her retirement, aged 65, in summer 1919.

Not all education authorities insisted on only single women as teachers – and during the First World War many married women were encouraged back into teaching – nonetheless it was a generally held rule and perhaps one that deterred many women from marrying.

Equality of pay
This notion of women having to give up teaching once married – just at the time when their work was increasing in value – was also cited as a reason for paying them less than equivalently qualified men.

There was an opportunity to bring women’s pay to the same level as that of the men in 1918, when the Burnham Committee put forward its proposals to introduce a uniform scale for teaching salaries, commencing with staff at elementary schools. However, it offered certificated male teachers with two years of college training a starting salary of £160, increasing by annual increments of £10 to a maximum £300, whereas similarly qualified female teachers started at £150, rising to £240. Head teachers were paid according to school attendance numbers, ranging from a grade 1 headmaster paid £330 to a grade 5 headmaster earning £450. Headmistress equivalents were paid £264 and £360 respectively.

There was no justification for this pay differential and understandably it rankled with women. They argued that, because men had a far wider choice of occupation, male teachers were not drawn from the same academic elite as the women. If they were therefore of lower professional calibre, why should men be paid more?

No equal pay for equal work
Without a valid reason for not paying women teachers the same as men, other excuses were cited.

Men had wives and families to support, single women had not. Well-paid ‘bachelor girls’ were led to positions ‘they ought not to occupy’ and this was productive of late marriages instead of early ones.

In June 1923 – when there was already indignation that whilst women teachers could afford holidays abroad, some men had to take additional work, perhaps teaching night classes, to provide for their families – a motion proposed at the annual meeting of the Association of Education Committees, called for an early revision of the Burnham Scale, in view of the ‘disproportionate and unwarranted salaries’ paid to junior female teachers. The proposers believed that paying a young man £172 10s and a girl the same age and scale £160 was grossly unfair to the social system of the country and allowing a girl to be paid double the wages of a skilled ploughman for only half the hours of work was ‘countenancing a state of things which was blot on the social life of the nation’. That the status of a skilled ploughman was held in higher regard, and worthy of higher pay, than that of an educated woman, training and influencing future generations, is quite revealing.

Although the motion failed and women teachers’ wages weren’t reduced, the committee didn’t doubt that the increased cost of education was caused by the increased salaries of women teachers (even though men’s salaries had also been raised) and would need careful consideration at a later stage. In the meantime no support was given to the doctrine of equal pay for men and women.

Another worry was that career-orientated, financially independent women might choose to remain single and eschew motherhood altogether – and even as late as 1940, a Royal Commission on equal pay accepted the view that one of the social reasons for unequal pay for women was to make motherhood as financially attractive as paid work.

Eventual progress
The Education Act 1944 brought in some positive changes for women teachers. It compelled all education authorities to adopt the Burnham Scale and ruled that women teachers would not have to give up their jobs on marriage. A further Royal commission in 1946 recommended equal pay for women teachers, but this was not agreed upon until 1955 – and then phased in over a five-year period. Ninety years after the Elementary Education Act, women’s value as teachers was finally reflected in their pay packet.