Joseph Chamberlain was a British statesman who was first a radical Liberal, then a Liberal Unionist after opposing home rule for Ireland, and eventually was a leading imperialist in coalition with the Conservatives. He split both major British parties in the course of his career. He was the father, by different marriages, of Nobel Peace Prize winner Austen Chamberlain and of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Robert William Dale was an English Congregational church leader based in Birmingham.
The School Board for London, commonly known as the London School Board (LSB), was an institution of local government and the first directly elected body covering the whole of London.
The Education Act 1944 made major changes in the provision and governance of secondary schools in England and Wales. It is also known as the Butler Act after the President of the Board of Education, R. A. Butler. Historians consider it a "triumph for progressive reform," and it became a core element of the post-war consensus supported by all major parties. The Act was repealed in steps with the last parts repealed in 1996.
The Elementary Education Act 1870, commonly known as Forster's Education Act, set the framework for schooling of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 in England and Wales. It established local education authorities with defined powers, authorized public money to improve existing schools, and tried to frame conditions attached to this aid so as to earn the goodwill of managers. It has long been seen as a milestone in educational development, but recent commentators have stressed that it brought neither free nor compulsory education, and its importance has thus tended to be diminished rather than increased.
The Birmingham board schools were set up very rapidly after the Forster Elementary Education Act 1870 was enacted, covering England and Wales. Over forty were created in Birmingham.
School boards were ad hoc public bodies in England and Wales between 1870 and 1902, which established and administered elementary schools.
George Dixon was an English Liberal Party then Liberal Unionist politician who was active in local government in Birmingham and sat in the House of Commons in two periods between 1867 and 1898. He was a major proponent of education for all children.
Jesse Collings was Mayor of Birmingham, England, a Liberal member of Parliament, but was best known nationally in the UK as an advocate of educational reform and land reform.
The Education Act 1902, also known as the Balfour Act, was a highly controversial Act of Parliament that set the pattern of elementary education in England and Wales for four decades. It was brought to Parliament by a Conservative government and was supported by the Church of England, opposed by many Nonconformists and the Liberal Party. The Act provided funds for denominational religious instruction in voluntary elementary schools, most of which were owned by the Church of England and the Roman Catholics. It reduced the divide between voluntary schools, which were largely administered by the Church of England, and schools provided and run by elected school boards, and reflected the influence of the Efficiency Movement in Britain. It was extended in 1903 to cover London.
The history of education in England is documented from Saxon settlement of England, and the setting up of the first cathedral schools in 597 and 604.
Francis Schnadhorst was a Birmingham draper and English Liberal Party politician. He briefly held elected office on Birmingham Council, and was offered the chance to stand for Parliament in winnable seats, but he found his true metier was in political organisation and administration both in his home town as secretary of the highly successful Birmingham Liberal Association from 1867 to 1884, and nationally as secretary of the newly formed National Liberal Federation from 1877 to 1893. He was famously described as "the spectacled, sallow, sombre" Birmingham draper who within a short period of time was to establish himself through the Birmingham Liberal caucus as one of the most brilliant organisers in the country.
A National school was a school founded in 19th-century England and Wales by the National Society for Promoting Religious Education. These schools provided elementary education, in accordance with the teaching of the Church of England, to the children of the poor. Together with the less numerous British schools of the British and Foreign School Society, they provided the first near-universal system of elementary education in England and Wales.
A voluntary aided school is a state-funded school in England and Wales in which a foundation or trust contributes to building costs and has a substantial influence in the running of the school. In most cases the foundation or trust owns the buildings.
The Civic Gospel was a philosophy of municipal activism and improvement that emerged in Birmingham, England, in the mid-19th century. Tracing its origins to the teaching of independent nonconformist preacher George Dawson, who declared that "a town is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man's moral nature", it reached its culmination in the mayoralty of Joseph Chamberlain between 1873 and 1876. After Dawson's death in 1876 it was the Congregationalist pastor R. W. Dale who took on the role as the movement's leading nonconformist spokesman. Other major proponents included the Baptist Charles Vince and the Unitarian H. W. Crosskey.
George Dixon Academy is a secondary school located in north Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. Former names of the school include George Dixon Higher Grade School, George Dixon Grammar School, George Dixon Community School, George Dixon Grant Maintained School and George Dixon International School. The current headmaster is Tutvinder Mann. Former heads include Robert Dowling and Anthony Hamilton, a double gold medal paralympian.
A community school in England and Wales is a type of state-funded school in which the local education authority employs the school's staff, is responsible for the school's admissions and owns the school's estate. The formal use of this name to describe a school derives from the School Standards and Framework Act 1998.
Elementary schools were the first schools in England and Wales intended to give a basic education to the children of working class families. At the start of the 19th century, the only schooling available to these young people was run by private concerns or by charities, and was often of a very poor standard. In the first decades of that century, a network of elementary schools was established by societies backed by the Christian churches. In an effort to expand this "voluntary" system, the government made grants available to these societies, initially for new school buildings but later towards their running costs. It became apparent that although this system worked reasonably well in rural communities, it was far less successful in the rapidly expanding industrial cities, and that Britain was falling behind the rest of the developed world. In 1870, an act of parliament established elected school boards throughout England and Wales, which were empowered to create secular "board schools" funded by local taxation where there was no provision by the church societies. Further legislation made school attendance compulsory, and eventually free of charge. The problem of how the education of older pupils should be managed was solved by abolishing school boards in 1902 and passing responsibility to local councils. Elementary schools were eventually replaced in 1944 by the system of primary and secondary education.
The three decades before the passing of the Elementary Education Act 1870 saw a national education campaign in the United Kingdom, carried out by a wide range of activist groups. In this period the debate on education was usually framed in terms of "national education" and its characteristics: fee-paying or free, compulsory or voluntary, religious, non-denominational, or secular, inspection. A committee of the Privy Council on national education was set up in 1839.
William Harris was a Liberal politician and strategist in Birmingham, England, in an era of dramatic municipal reform. On his death, he was described by one obituary-writer as "one of the founders of modern Birmingham". J. L. Garvin called him "the Abbé Sieyès of Birmingham" ; and Asa Briggs "a most active and intelligent wire-puller behind the scenes". He was dubbed the "father of the Caucus", the highly organised and controversial Liberal party machine that had its origins in Birmingham, but was afterwards introduced at national level to the National Liberal Federation. He served as the first Chairman of the National Liberal Federation from 1877 to 1882. By profession he was an architect and surveyor; and he was also a prolific journalist and author.
