A brief history

In the early 1870s, schooling became compulsory for all children up to the age of 13 in England, Wales and Scotland. With mass education came literacy, learning to read and write, and also learning the rudiments of arithmetic. Literacy brings a shift in the way of viewing and interacting with the world. Learning to read ‘is in part learning to cope with the unexpressed’. With writing, a dynamic relationship is set up between written and spoken language, turning aspects of language into ‘objects of reflection, analysis and design’. Becoming literate enables us to participate in the dominant institutions of society, for example, the legal, the scientific and the religious. The communities that we participate in become textual as well as oral.

It is difficult for me to imagine what life would be like without being able to read and write. My six-year-old twin grandsons are learning these skills at school. They live in a world where everyone around them can read and write, in a world where their parents and grandparents have been reading to them from a very young age. Only four generations ago, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides of my family (from rural Norfolk and industrial Yorkshire) could not read or write. They did not live in families where everyone around them was literate. Nowadays, we are hardly aware of the fact that we live in a ‘textual’ world, a world where everyday transactions – from ordering shopping online, to filling in a form for a passport, reading road signs and voting – involve interacting with text. With mass schooling, everyone should have the opportunity to learn to read and write.

Schools and the buildings that house them are part of the everyday fabric of our world. In cities across the UK, we can still see the Victorian school buildings that were built in the second half of the 19th century, and many of these continue to be used as schools. The imposing Victorian architecture of large inner-city primary schools is somewhat daunting, suggesting discipline and tradition. By contrast, rural Victorian primary schools were much smaller, often only housing two or three classrooms.

Since the building programme of maintained schools at the end of the Victorian era, there have been three waves of school building in the UK.