A history lesson for Tristram Hunt

After Tristram Hunt’s comments on BBC Question Time about the inadequacy of sisters as teachers, I wrote to him and sent copies of the letter to David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan.

The Shadow Education Secretary noted that sisters were not all trained as teachers. These days I would not expect politicians, especially Tories, to have any knowledge of the history of state education. But I was surprised that Hunt, as a member of the Labour party, was ignorant too.

So I’ve provided him with a brief history of Catholic teacher training in England and Wales in the nineteenth century, which has provided the foundation for twentieth and twenty-first century developments.

Until the Elementary Education Act of 1870 there was no state education in England and Wales. Before then, the Anglican Church – and from the 1850s by the Catholic Church – ran parish schools, many of which charged a few pennies a week. The Catholic Church was concerned to provide schools for the poor, and these schools were under supervision of the Privy Council.

My congregation, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, was founded in 1805 in France and Belgium for the education of the poor, and it taught nuns to teach in and run schools.

We came to England in 1845 to Penryn in Cornwall and moved to Clapham a few years later. Communities were started in towns and cities, Liverpool being one of the first outside Cornwall and London. Notre Dame started training lay women as teachers at Mount Pleasant in Liverpool from 1856. (In 1980 the college joined two others in an ecumenical federation that’s now Liverpool Hope University.)

Meanwhile the Vincentians had established a teacher training college for laymen – St Mary’s – in 1845 in inner London. This moved to Twickenham after World War I and is now St Mary’s University.

From about 1858, increasing numbers of 18-20 year-old Catholic women and men left Mount Pleasant and St Mary’s, taking up posts for a pittance in the new Catholic parish schools.

The first Notre Dame principal, Sr Mary of St Philip, kept in regular contact with her former students through her newsletters – a nineteenth-century form of in-service training. These documents show the poverty, squalor and violence in the neighbourhoods of the schools, and recognised the heavy responsibilities these young people carried.

Several other women’s orders established teacher training, though not all of these initiatives exist today.

In 1870 Parliament belatedly recognised that England had totally inadequate education for most of its children and passed the first Education Act. By then, the beginnings of a Catholic school system with trained teachers within the rudimentary state system, despite this being based on different religious traditions, already existed.

This Catholic system would have been impossible without the Sisters of Notre Dame and the Vincentian Fathers. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 decreed that all children between the ages of 5 and 12 should go to school; that school boards set up by towns and counties/shires should build non-denominational schools; that church schools, mostly Anglican with a few Catholic, could be part of the state provision.

So, whereas some private convent schools might not have trained their sisters, the majority of English sisters working in Catholic schools in England, Wales and Scotland were trained teachers.

Sr Maura O’Carroll SND, BA PGCE PhD was the last principal of Mount Pleasant before it merged with two other colleges to form Liverpool Hope. This blog does not reflect the views of her order

Top: Ms Odone's exchange with Tristram Hunt (second from right). Above: Sr Mary of St Philip with students in 1884. Photo: SND