Neither the 1870 Education Act nor the corresponding Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 specifically included disabled children among those for whom provision was to be made, but in 1874 the London School Board established a class for the deaf at a public elementary school and later began the training of teachers. By 1888 there were 14 centres attached to ordinary schools, catering for 373 children. A few other boards did the same, but most made no specific provision for the deaf.
It was much the same in respect of the blind. In 1874 fifty blind children were being taught in ordinary classes in Scottish schools, and in 1875 the London Board made the first arrangements for teaching blind children in its elementary schools. By 1888 there were 23 centres attached to ordinary schools, where 133 children were taught part-time by teachers who were themselves blind. The children received the rest of their education in ordinary classes. A handful of other boards made some arrangement for the blind.
These first efforts by a few school boards to cater for some handicapped children owed nothing to educational legislation. Concerns for the plight of the disabled, and especially of the blind, had first been expressed in the mid-19th century but these had been mainly about the relief of distress rather than about education.
But once the 1870 Act had established the principle of universal elementary education, the needs of handicapped children could no longer be ignored. The Charity Organisation Society began campaigning for the right of blind children to receive education and the duty of school boards to provide it, and later applied the same arguments to the education of the deaf. Other organisations, like the Society for the Training of the Deaf, joined the campaign.
As a result, the Royal Commission on the Blind and Deaf was constituted in 1886 and published its report in 1889. It recommended the introduction of compulsory education for the blind from five to 16. Pupils would receive elementary education to the age of 12 and then follow either a technical or an academic course. At the elementary stage, children would mostly be taught in ordinary classes by ordinary teachers, but there would need to be special boarding schools for pupils who were delicate, neglected or lived too far from the nearest day school.
The Commission also recommended compulsory education for deaf children aged 7 to 14 in separate schools or classes. Teachers of the deaf should be paid higher salaries than ordinary teachers, their training should be under government supervision, and they should have qualified as ordinary teachers before beginning their special training.
The Commission's report was followed a year later by the 1890 Education of Blind and Deaf Mute Children (Scotland) Act, but England had to wait a further three years for the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act (12 September 1893), which sought 'to make better Provision for the Elementary Education of Blind and Deaf Children in England and Wales'.
Download the Elementary Education (Blind and Deaf Children) Act 1893 (pdf file - image only - 820kb).
The Act required school authorities (boards, district councils or school attendance committees) to make provision for the education of blind and deaf children resident in their area who were not receiving suitable elementary education. As the Commission had recommended, blind children were to receive education between the ages of 5 and 16 and deaf children between 7 and 16. Parliamentary grants were available for certified institutions which were open to inspection. In most cases the extra places were provided by the extension of existing schools.
The larger school boards made real efforts to maintain good standards in their own schools, but many of the smaller boards struggled, and there was also the problem of the 20,000 voluntary schools over which the boards had no control. These difficulties persisted until the creation of local education authorities in 1902.
Provision for the physically and mentally handicapped
There was even less provision for the educational needs of physically and mentally handicapped children. Those who attended elementary schools profited as best they could from the ordinary teaching, while the more severely handicapped received care - and sometimes education - in institutions.
Before the 1870 Education Act the needs of mentally handicapped children were mostly ignored. The demands of everyday life in a largely uneducated and relatively uncomplicated world meant that mental disability was not seen as a substantial handicap, and there was institutional provision for those who needed looking after.
But as a result of the 1870 Act, large numbers of children of poor intellectual ability began entering the public elementary schools. This posed a range of problems:
- many of the children made little progress and their presence hindered normal teaching;
- there were no systematic means of assessing their capabilities and needs;
- the range of disability was very wide and there were unresolved questions of definition;
- instruction was based on the official Code for normal children; and
- classes were large so there was little opportunity, even if teachers had the skills, to devise a differentiated curriculum.
Furthermore, unlike the blind and deaf, the physically and mentally handicapped had no organisations to plead their cause. Isolated examples of private provision existed in London, but across the country little had been achieved when the Royal Commission on the Blind and Deaf reported in 1889.
The Commission (whose remit covered special needs in general) had distinguished between the feeble-minded, imbeciles and idiots. It argued that the feeble-minded should receive special education separately from ordinary children in 'auxiliary' schools; and that imbeciles should not be in asylums or workhouses but should attend institutions where they could, if possible, receive an education concentrating on sensory and physical development and the improvement of speech. The last group, having the greatest degree of intellectual deficiency, were considered to be ineducable.
Following the Commission's report, the Charity Organisation Society campaigned for educational provision for the mentally handicapped and in 1896 sponsored the National Association for Promoting the Welfare of the Feeble-Minded.
The campaign was supported by the findings of Dr Francis Warner, who investigated 100,000 children in district poor law schools and the London Board Schools in the early 1890s and concluded that about one per cent of the children required special care and training in separate schools on the grounds of their mental and physical condition.
Further support came from the the Metropolitan Poor Law Schools Committee, whose Report in 1896 called for separate provision to be made for feeble-minded children.
In 1892 the Leicester School Board established a special class for selected 'feeble-minded' pupils, and the London Board opened a school for the special instruction of physically and mentally detective children. The emphasis was on occupational activity rather than formal education.
By 1896 there were 24 special schools in London attended by 900 pupils and by the end of the century schools for defective children had been established by six other boards.
Provision for defective and epileptic children
A Committee on Defective and Epileptic Children, under the Chief Inspector of Schools, was established by the Education Department in 1896 and published its report in 1898. Like the earlier Royal Commission, the Committee had to grapple with definitions. It concluded that schools would need to exercise their own judgement as to whether an individual child was capable of receiving proper benefit from special instruction. Dr Warner's study had suggested that the children could be assessed by physical examination, so the Committee recommended that a medical officer appointed by the school board would decide whether a particular child should be educated in an ordinary school, in a special school or not at all.
The Committee classed the feeble-minded with physically handicapped children under the general description of 'defective'. It recommended that, where possible, defective children of normal intelligence should attend ordinary schools and receive an ordinary education.
School authorities should be required to make special provision for defective children in their area who needed it, and should be empowered to compel attendance between the ages of 7 and 14 (16 in some cases). Classes in special schools should be small, all headteachers should be qualified, and the majority of assistant teachers should not only be qualified but should have additional training. There should be a varied programme of activities with an emphasis on manual and vocational training for senior pupils.
With regard to epileptic children, the Committee proposed that where attacks were relatively rare, children should attend ordinary classes; otherwise school authorities should be required to provide places in residential special schools or pay for places in voluntary institutions. Attendance should be compulsory.
The Committee's proposals were far ahead of contemporary thinking, made heavy demands on the school boards and were costly.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the Elementary Education (Defective and Epileptic Children) Act of 1899 empowered - but did not require - school boards to provide for the education of mentally and physically defective and epileptic children. Although an enhanced rate of grant was payable for this special provision, ten years later only 133 out of 327 local education authorities had used their powers under the Act.
The Act (9 August 1899) empowered school authorities to make arrangements for identifying defective and epileptic children (Section 1) and to provide for their education:
(a) by classes in public elementary schools certified by the Education Department as special classes; or
(b) by boarding out ... any such child in a house conveniently near to a special class or school; or
(c) by establishing schools ... for defective children (2).
Parents were obliged to ensure that children over seven years of age attended such classes or schools (4).
At an international conference of socialists in 1896 delegates from Europe and the US argued that all working people should receive a full education. Britain's Keir Hardie (pictured) argued that this meant an education that was 'free at all stages, open to everyone without any tests of prior attainment at any age - in effect, a comprehensive "broad highway" that all could travel' (reported in the Westminster Gazette 1 August 1896, quoted in Benn and Chitty 1996:3).
