School Attendance and Literacy: 1750 to the Later Nineteenth Century

Measurement of school attendance before it became compulsory from the 1870s is difficult. A plausible assessment, however, suggests a day-school attendance rate for England and Wales c.1750 of some 4 per cent of total population, while for Scotland an incomplete survey of some sixty lowland and highland parishes points to percentages varying from almost 8 to nearly 13.1 Table 1 shows the proportions of the population at day school in the nineteenth century, deduced from contemporary educational surveys. These figures lack the validity of modern statistics, since a ‘pupil at school’ before the 1870s cannot be taken as a homogeneous unit. Children attended school for periods ranging from weeks to years and then often erratically. Some left at age 4 or 5, others stayed till 10 or over; some might attend for the same number of years as others but at ages at which they may have been more likely to have benefited from instruction. The extent and nature of such variables differed topographically and chronologically, while the curriculum and the quality of tuition also varied considerably. Some pupils, for instance, were taught reading but not writing. Children not recorded as at day school at any particular time included some who had previously attended and others who would attend later.