UCL BLOOMSBURY PROJECT

History

It was an Anglican institution, founded in 1836 “for the Improvement and Extension of the Infant School System and Home and Abroad, and for the Education of Teachers”, according to The Times of 21 February 1837

The founders were educationalist siblings Elizabeth and Charles Mayo, J. P. Greaves, and J. S. Reynolds, all advocates of the Pestalozzi method of teaching (Nanette Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery–Infant School: A History of Infant and Nursery Education in Britain, 1800–1970, 1972)

Elizabeth Mayo thus became in 1842 the first woman in England to be employed in teacher training, at the Society in Gray’s Inn Road (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

A further advertisement in The Times noted that Queen Victoria had become its patroness and that it had recently taken extensive premises in Gray’s Inn Road, “where a model infant school is about to be established” (The Times, 19 August 1837)

In December 1837 the school was visited by Mr Frere, who explained his way of teaching the blind by sounds, according to The Times of 27 December 1837; a similar method was in use at the school to teach the infants

According to an article about the school which appeared in The Times on 17 August 1838, J. T. Reynolds was its Hon. Sec.

This appears, however, to have been a misprint, as further items identified him as John S. Reynolds and the Treasurer as John Bridges, Esq., of 23 Red Lion Square (The Times, 16 July 1839)

The Illustrated London News reported in 1843 on an inspection and visit by patrons including the Bishop of Norwich; at the time there were said to be about fifty teachers and three hundred children at the establishment (Illustrated London News, 13 May 1843)

An accompanying engraving showed children playing in the extensive playgrounds (Illustrated London News, 13 May 1843)

One of the trainee teachers was an Indian called Rabee, who was destined to return to her native country as a teacher (Illustrated London News, 13 May 1843)

Rabee was something of a celebrity; orphaned in 1834, she was brought up at the Church Missionary Society station in Burdwan, Bengal, and then travelled to Europe with the Weitbrecht family who ran it (Church Missionary Society, Missionary Register, 1843; Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865, 2007)

The Female Education Society paid for her training at the Home and Colonial School Society, but she died shortly after her return to Bengal, in 1848; Mrs Weitbrecht published a memoir of her life in aid of the Burdwan school (Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865, 2007)

The Times published a letter from J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth to Reynolds, dated 14 August 1847, which dealt with the inspection of schools and the Government’s stipulated minimum training requirements for infant teachers (The Times, 13 September 1847)

After the Society reformed itself along Froebelian principles, links between the two movements seem to have become stronger: “The Home and Colonial Society which had been granting their own Kindergarten Certificates since 1856, asked to join the National Froebel Union and were admitted in 1894” (H. P. J. Liebschner, The History of the Froebel Movement, 1983)

The Model Infants’ School eventually became Highbury Fields School, Islington, a state secondary school for girls with a strong ethos of treating pupils as individuals; its website is www.highburyfields.islington.sch.uk (opens in new window)

It was undergoing a major refurbishment in 2009, scheduled to finish in 2012; its 2009 advertisement for a new headteacher spoke proudly of its roots in the Home and Colonial School Society, with its worldwide influence

John Mann, Highbury Fields: The “Most Interesting” School in London (1995)