On this day … 20 July 1878

The Preston Chronicle carried a letter from a correspondent complaining about the town’s head teachers organising themselves into a ring or ‘union’ to obtain ‘extraordinary’ salaries for themselves at the expense of the parents whose school fees had doubled or trebled to pay for the increase.

An earlier correspondent went further in investigating the situation at schools in the St Peter’s district, and quoted from figures published for the financing of those schools that showed that the headmaster of the boys’ school was paid £380 a year, the headmistress of the girls’ school, £319, and the headmistress of the infants’ school, £230.

According to the correspondent, the national average salaries at the time were £115 for a headmaster and £69 for a headmistress.

At the St Peter’s schools, the rest of the teaching staff were reportedly badly paid: the assistant teachers getting an average of £38 a year and the pupil teachers, £13 and few shillings.

These figures shocked the correspondent, who commented:

‘… we have the strange anomaly of an assistant mistress being paid £32, or thereabouts, and the head mistress ten times thirty-two, or £320!’

At the same time, according to the correspondent, the fees charged to parents had more than doubled, so that it cost 18s. 2½p. a year to send a child to school: ‘If children come without their pence they are sent home, and the School Attendance Officer soon looks after them’. This was when school attendance had been made compulsory, but not free.

This came at a time when mill owners were cutting wages (the correspondent quotes an example of a mill worker earning just 15 shillings a week):

‘But now that the operatives in our cotton mills have been compelled by the exigencies of trade to submit to a reduction of ten per cent in their wages, a cry is raised – Have we no one who can deliver us from the tyranny of this scholastic “ring”?’

The correspondent then displayed a misogyny so common at the time in singling out the female heads for condemnation, those:

‘… lady teachers rolling in clover, who have been taken from their own rank in life and educated at the expense of the nation. The salaries of these teachers … are most outrageous, especially in the case of mistresses who live in lodgings at a few shillings a week and begrudge the payment to a pupil teacher …

‘They have no capital at stake – no bad debts – and very few tradesmen in these times, with all the cares and anxiety of business, obtain a clear income equal to that of a Preston infant school mistress.’

The girls at the St Peter’s school were certainly not living in clover, to judge by the account of a journalist who visited the school a few years earlier:

‘… a tasteless, neglected brick building … where the girls’ privies are so disgusting that the children are reduced to the necessity of using the paved yard, which is accordingly defiled with pools of urine; further, a channel has been actually made to convey these away past the entrance-door. The state of the windows and of the whole of the establishment, too, would be a disgrace to a community of savages.’

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Sources
For the disgusting state of St Peter’s Girls’ School: A disturbing view of Victorian Preston