Shaping a Nation (Hardback)

It was in 1869 that Bradford MP Edward Miall who, standing alongside that champion of Elementary Education, William Edward Forster, proclaimed that without the influence of women, men were naught. ‘Happy will be the day throughout the whole world,’ he said, ‘when woman takes up her real and proper position.’ It was a good point. Women have influence over their offspring from the day they are born, whether that is in lessons in morality, support in adversity or counsel in decision making. Not only that – the voluntary elementary schools that were educating children at Miall’s time were mainly staffed by women. And the situation was about to improve; women’s influence was to expand further. A year after Miall’s speech, Forster’s Elementary Education Act didn’t just pave the way for compulsory and free education for all, it also gave women their first real opportunity to have their voices heard politically by being elected to school boards. And, with their significance in educating future generations from their earliest schooldays, women’s soft power was to be the bedrock of developing hearts and minds for ever.

Although education management, methods and styles continue to evolve, education is always a key concern for any government. It was future prime minister Tony Blair who, almost 130 years after Forster’s Act, stated his three main priorities for government were ‘Education, Education and Education’ and restated them when campaigning for his second term in office. He wanted to make Britain a learning society, he said, to develop the talents and raising the ambitions of all young people, for them to gain the basic tools for life and work. ‘They ought also to learn the joy of life: the exhilaration of music, the excitement of sport, the beauty of art, the magic of science. And they learn the value of life: what it is to be responsible citizens who give something back to their community.’

What he didn’t acknowledge was that it was women who would continue to be at the forefront of all that. Today more than 80 per cent of primary school teachers are women. Children taking their first steps on their learning journey mainly do so under the guidance of nurturing and influential women.

As well as the educators, Shaping a Nation looks at the work of the women who strived for improvements in education ­– whether that be for the benefit of the children, other women, or that of the educators ­– the challenges they faced and the enormous impact they made for future generations.