Hidden history: York's Victorian schools

FROM the founding of a cathedral school in this city in the seventh century to the modern Science Park at the University of York, our city has had the enviable reputation of being a continuing centre of learning and research rivalling that of Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Bologna.

Today, York can boast two universities, an agricultural college, schools of art and design, and a school of jewellery, until recently a College of Law, and is a popular centre for international English language study.

Memories of Victorian education can still be found in the city. At least one of them, however, is best forgotten. Ghost Walk guides often tell the story of a Victorian establishment known as the York Industrial Ragged School.

It was more of a workhouse than a place of education and its pupils were orphans, waifs and strays who lived in the school.

The building was situated in Bedern on the site of modern city-centre apartments. George Pimm was the cruel workhouse master who received grants from the city council according to the number of pupils he housed.

Deprived of adequate food and heating, many of them died.

The infamous Pimm secretly buried them on the premises of the school but continued to receive grants from the city council. Pimm was an alcoholic who ended his days in a lunatic asylum. But it is said that the screams and wails of children can still be heard in Bedern today.

Fortunately, the traces of other Victorian school establishments are more benign. If you cycle or walk around York today, you can see the evidence of Victorian education which still exists in its school buildings. St Peter’s School in Bootham has its Grade II listed buildings in its Hall Range: the school hall and chapel date from 1861-2.

Like many towns and cities in Britain, York has its fair share of Victorian primary schools, whose fabric, both interior and exterior, has been upgraded to correspond with social change and changing ideas about education.

Walter Henry Brierley was a Victorian architect who designed Scarcroft Road primary school in 1896.

He also designed other primary schools in the city including Heworth (1873), Fishergate (1895), Park Grove (1895), Haxby Road (1904), and Poppleton Road (1904).

The Scarcroft Road building is considered by English Heritage to be an example of the best of Victorian architecture.

In their guidance document they claim that Yorkshire was ‘at the forefront of progressive education attitudes in the late 19th century’.

Progressive attitudes to education change from generation to generation, of course. A visit to any one of these schools will illustrate with how different they are now organised from 130 years ago in being more tailored to the needs and well-being of individual children and the use of groupwork to promote autonomous learning.

Some York primary schools such as Haxby Road are called primary academies which gives such schools more control over how they teach and organise their school day and term times as well as their finances.

The most striking evidence of how school education has changed is seen during a tour of the York Castle Museum’s Victorian schoolroom, where visitors can be taught by a ‘strict Victorian teacher’ who leads groups of ten or more adults in drilling them in their three R’s – no slouching or talking allowed!

Fishergate school - 100 years ago (Image: Supplied)

In this schoolroom, as in most Victorian primary schools, the windows were built high up to dissuade pupils from looking out and neglecting their lessons.

Lit by gaslight, the schoolrooms were gloomy, and there was generally a coal fire in each room. Pupils sat at iron-framed desks bolted to the floor facing the front of the classroom.

The teacher sat at the front on a large desk placed on a dais. Unlike the Castle Museum schoolroom, the floor was often tiered, so that all the pupils could see the teacher, and more importantly, the teacher could see all the pupils. Different classrooms were sometimes divided from each other simply by curtains.

The toilets were outside. And there were separate entrances into the school for boys and girls.

Over a hundred years ago, education and schools in York were closely linked with religion.

Churches subsidised much educational provision.

According to The Rowntree Society, “one man in five and one woman in three could neither read nor write in Victorian York”.

The Adult School Movement was started by Jospeh Rowntree and the Quakers to teach literacy.

Initially aimed at young men, it eventually developed to make provision for people of every age.

The first adult school was based in premises in Hope Street in 1848, and the Movement eventually moved to rooms in Lady Peckitt’s Yard opposite the modern-day M&S Food Hall.

The face of education in York, as elsewhere, has changed considerably in the last 130 years.

Unlike Victorian Britain where people were largely schooled in the values of conformity and obedience, the best of modern British education values diversity and the cultivation of self-esteem and self-development.

With the rise of online virtual learning, students are, in many cases, no longer even constrained by buildings or the need for physical presence in a classroom to access all their learning.

But York’s educational heritage and provision continue to flourish.