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Fighting the Tide: Church Schools in South Buckinghamshire, 1902–44
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2019
Abstract
In 1902 elementary school provision in Oxford diocese – England's largest – reflected the national picture: 72 per cent were church schools, with total rolls of 54 per cent of school-age children. The bitterly contested 1902 Education Act apparently protected the future of church schools, but in practice its provisions severely undermined them, particularly in growing areas of the country. By 1929, Oxford's assistant bishop reported the schools’ situation as ‘critical’. This article examines the impact on the church schools of one rural deanery in South Buckinghamshire, between the 1902 and 1944 Education Acts. Several schools found themselves under threat of closure, while rapid population increase and a rising school leaving age more than quadrupled the number of school-age children in the area. Closer working with the local education authority and other denominations was one option to optimize scarce resources and protect the Church of England's influence on religious education in day schools: but many churchmen fought to keep church schools open at all costs. This strategy met with limited success: by 1939 the proportion of children in church schools had decreased to 10 per cent, with potential consequences for how religion was taught to the other 90 per cent of children.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2019
References
1 After Bryan Wilson, as quoted in Clark, J. C. D., ‘Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”‘, HistJ 55 (2012), 161–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 178.
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3 Morris, ‘Strange Death’, 964–5.
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5 Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), 6, 118, explicitly links church attendance to ‘endogenous’ factors, that is, the handing down of Christian faith from one generation to the next.
6 Cliff, Philip, The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in England, 1780–1980 (Redhill, 1986)Google Scholar; Orchard, Stephen and Briggs, John, eds, The Sunday School Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Milton Keynes, 2007)Google Scholar.
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10 For example, Oxford, Oxfordshire History Centre (hereafter: OHC), MS Oxf. dioc. c.384, ‘Buckingham Archdeaconry Clergy Answers 1924’.
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13 For example, Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–2000, 4th edn (London, 2000). Elsewhere in this volume, Mark Smith makes a similar point, with other examples: ‘“War to the knife”? The Anglican Clergy and Education at the End of the First World War’, 530–44.
14 Louden, Distinctive and Inclusive, 52.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. 52–64, ‘Rescue for the Voluntary Schools 1900–1945’.
17 For a contemporary analysis, see Report on the Location of Industry (London, 1939), produced by an independent consultancy, Political and Economic Planning.
18 David Feldman, ‘Migration’, in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 3: 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2001), 185–206.
19 Census 1951 England and Wales: County Report, Buckinghamshire (London, 1954), xii. From 1921 to 1951, the three fastest growing counties were Hertfordshire, West Sussex and Buckinghamshire.
20 A. D. K. Owen, ‘The Social Consequences of Industrial Transference’, Sociological Review 29 (1937), 331–54.
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32 OHC, MS Oxf. dioc. c.390, ‘Datchet Clergy Answers 1931’.
33 ‘New Church at Manor Park’, SO, 8 June 1934, 4.
34 ‘Chalvey Schools: To the Parents of the Scholars’, SO, 30 May 1914, 8.
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36 For a detailed review of the 1902 debate , see D. R. Pugh, ‘The Church and Education: Anglican Attitudes 1902’, JEH 23 (1972), 219–32.
37 ‘Religious Instruction in Elementary Schools’, SO, 31 May 1929, 5.
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41 ‘Religious Instruction [1937]’.
42 OHC, MS Oxf. dioc. c.384, ‘Colnbrook Clergy Answers 1924’.
43 Kelly's Directory of Berkshire, Bucks and Oxon, 1891 (London, 1891), 437; Kelly's Directory of Buckinghamshire, 1939 (London, 1939).
44 Part of Bryan Wilson's definition of secularization: Clark, ‘Secularization and Modernization’, 178.
45 See p. 550 above.
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50 Burge, Primary Visitation, 44–5.
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55 Louden, Distinctive and Inclusive, 59.
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59 ‘The Church Schools’, SO, 15 November 1929.
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63 ‘County Education Secretary’, SO, 30 November 1934.
64 Louden, Distinctive and Inclusive, 65.
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67 Green, Passing, 219–21. On the fortunes of Sunday schools during this period, see, in this volume, Caitriona McCartney, ‘British Sunday Schools: An Educational Arm of the Churches, 1900–39’, 561–76.
68 Morris, ‘Strange Death’, 963.