Postcode Lottery in Victorian Britain [30min]

Jonathan Freedland puts the UK government's current Education Bill in historical perspective by going back to the Victorian Education Act of 1870. The Prime Minister and his Education Secretary Ruth Kelly have been making the case for creating a new landscape of "trust schools" -- state-funded but independent. But in 1870, before state education existed, arguments raged over whether the mixture of church schools, charity schools, and philanthropic schools which the majority of British pupils attended were really doing the job raising standards for all the nation's children. In 2006 the debate between Tony Blair and his sceptics has focused on the proposed reduced role for local authorities. But in 1870 William Gladstone's Liberal government thought it necessary to introduce, for the very first time, local supervision of schools by elected boards. So how much difference has 136 years made in the history of the debate over British education? Jonathan visits a perfectly preserved Victorian school in Hitchin in Hertfordshire to uncover the parallels. Was it a dismal world of Mr. Gradgrind's "Facts, nothing but the facts"? Or was it -- as one of the programme's guests asserts - a flowering private sector full of initiative and rising standards, just as the Prime Minister believes the new Trust schools would be. Jonathan hears about the highs and lows of Victorian Ragged or Dame Schools, and how some children were torn between a Church of England faith school or a Non-conformist faith schools. He even discovers that what today's parents would recognise as the postcode lottery existed in the nineteenth century.