Newbolt (1921)

(page numbers in brackets)

Preliminary pages (i-xv, 1-3)
Contents, Membership, Preface

Chapter I (4-26)
General introduction
Chapter II (27-56)
Historical retrospect
Chapter III (57-96)
English at the elementary stage
Chapter IV (97-127)
Secondary schools
Chapter V (128-166)
English in commercial and industrial life
Chapter VI (167-194)
The training of teachers
Chapter VII (195-251)
The universities
Chapter VIII (252-277)
Literature and adult education
Chapter IX (278-347)
Aspects of English teaching
Chapter X (348-360)
Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix I (361-367)
List of witnesses
Appendix II (368-371)
Mother-tongue teaching in France
Appendix III (372-375)
Books in London elementary schools
Appendix IV (376-378)
Standing Committee on Grammatical Reform memo

Index (379-394)


The Newbolt Report (1921)
The Teaching of English in England

Notes on the text

The full text of the report (including the Appendices) is online.

The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser.

I've corrected a handful of printing errors and updated three spellings (timetable instead of time-table, today instead of to-day, classroom instead of class-room). Otherwise, I've left spelling and capitalisation as printed - including various inconsistencies (recognise and recognize, connection and connexion, university and University etc).

I have retained the original paragraphing and footnotes, but I've replaced double speech marks with singles and removed the spaces between them and the words to which they apply. Thus, for example, " secondary " is shown here as 'secondary'.

The printed version of the report contains many misplaced inverted commas - as in:

The East Midland dialect had now become 'the King's English.'

This is rendered here as:

The East Midland dialect had now become 'the King's English'.

And, extraordinarily for a report on English, there is confusion between direct and reported speech, with examples of the latter sometimes incorrectly enclosed in speech marks. I have left these as printed.

I've added explanations to a few archaic words which are no longer in common use. Anything added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets].

Newbolt is one of three reports on the teaching of English available on this website. The others are the Bullock Report A language for life (1975); and the Kingman Report The Teaching of English Language (1988).

Preliminary pages