Sunday school movement

Many will be familiar with the famous Monty Python sketch, in which a first century Judean crowd is asked, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" The crowd then lists off benefit after benefit of Roman rule until the speaker tells them to be quiet. If someone were to ask, "What has Christianity ever done for us?" one of the answers to that question is the Sunday school movement, the precursor to today's universal schooling. 

In the mid-1700s, it was only boys from wealthy families who enjoyed education. Many were educated at home by tutors, while others were sent to grammar schools. The children of workers had no education. 

The person credited with founding the Sunday School movement was a newspaper editor called Robert Raikes (1736-1811) from Gloucester (although before him, there were Sunday schools before that at High Wycombe and Nottingham). Raikes took an interest in the inmates at Gloucester Prison, and discovered many of them came from very disadvantaged backgrounds. The logic of his thinking was, "Idleness is a consequence of ignorance, Idleness begets vice, and vice leads to the gallows.” He would often be disturbed when working by children behaving wildly under his window. On business about town one day, he noticed a particularly noisy gang of children. He discovered that these children worked 12 hour days six days a week in the local pin factory. Sunday was their only day off and they use it to run riot and misbehave. Raikes asked God in prayer what could be done about them. The answer he heard was, "Try".  

Raikes' first Sunday school began in 1780 with a Mrs Meredith teaching 12 boys in her kitchen. The reward for good pupils was a piece of her famous plum cake. Another appealing factor was the relative spaciousness of the schoolroom compared to their overcrowded homes. The school later moved to a local pub run my Mrs Critchley (this is now known as Robert Raikes Pub). At first only boys were taught, but girls joined later. Children were taught to read and write with the Christian Bible as their textbook. Here is the timetable for the day: "The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church. After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise." The teachers were volunteers, usually women, drawn from church members.

Raikes funded the schools from the profits from the newspaper, and also publicised the schools in the paper itself.  

The movement spread quickly and soon there were Sunday schools all around Gloucester. A national body, the Sunday School Society, was created in 1785, by which time, a mere 5 years later, 250 thousand children were registered with Sunday schools.  

As you travel around the North West you will see buildings marked "Sunday school" with the date they were built. These might be an annex to a church building or in another location. For example, St Matthew's Sunday school in the centre of Manchester built slightly earlier than 1830. The numbers of Sunday scholars was huge; by 1831, 1.25 million children were registered, or one in four eligible children! Even our little Baptist church on Bridge Street (Bury) had something like 200! 

The Whit walks were organised on the back of the Sunday school movement as an annual march to celebrate the schools and their connection with local churches. 

Similar to the Sunday schools, were the later "ragged schools" which catered for more disadvantaged children many of whom were excluded from Sunday schools for bad behaviour. 

While this provision was better than nothing, the nature of the Sunday school movement meant that the quality of teaching and frequency of attendance often left much to be desired. In 1870, the Elementary Education Act legislated for universal education for children aged 5 to 13. The country was divided into 2500 areas, where schooling was to be provided by a combination of voluntary (i.e. church) and board schools.