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Education in Victorian England

Introduction.

The Victorian Era yielded great developments in terms of education, and this time period had distinct characteristics in regards to the educational system. Public education evolved significantly at this time primarily because of new laws that were developed to make education compulsory for a wider range of individuals. Though many advancements in the field of education came to fruition in Victorian England, there were still significant gaps between social classes and genders. As a result of all of these multi-faceted aspects of British education, literacy rates among the population increased dramatically by the end of the era.

• Social Class and Education

Ragged and Dame Schools

• Literacy Rates

History of Victorian Schooling

The development of public education in England changed drastically in the Victorian Era thanks to many legislative changes by Parliament. Wealthy parents sent their children to fee-paying schools or employed governess, but gender still affected those of high class: boys’ schooling was considered more important, and they were taught academic and functional skills while girls were taught sewing, needlework, drawing, and music. Teaching was mainly by rote, with children learning things by simply repeating and memorizing what was said by their teachers. There was little room for creativity or developing talents; an emphasis was placed on learning to read and write. (The Victorian School).

In 1833, Parliament authorized sums of money to be provided for the construction of schools for the poor children of England and Wales. A succession of acts that followed hoped to expand the scope of education, but, for the most part, there was no unified education system; it was still in the hands of churches and philanthropists. There was a constant battle between the aim of schools to teach and parents’ need to have their children home to help the family. Parents were often required to pay for their childrens’ school, or at the very least supply ink, paper, and other materials, which was a real barrier for poor students. Then, in 1844, Parliament passed a law requiring children working in factories to be given six-half-days schools every week. In 1870, the Forster Elementary Education Act established partially state-funded Board Schools to be set up to provide primary education in areas where existing provisions were inadequate, but they still charged a fee, which many poor families could not pay. For this there were certain makeshift schools started such as ragged and dame schools, which essentially ended up to be daycares (The Victorian School).

By 1880, additional legislation stated that compulsory attendance at school ceased to be a matter for local option and now had to attend school between the ages of 5 and 10, with some exceptions such as early leaving in agricultural areas . Parents of children who did not attend school could be fined. In 1891, the Free Education Act provided for the state payment of school fees up to ten shillings per week. This was to help poor children attend school. By 1893 the school leaving age was raised to 11 and schools were established for the deaf and blind. The age was later raised again to 13. In 1897, the Voluntary Schools Act provided grants to public elementary schools not funded by school boards, which were typically Church schools. (The Victorian School).

Education at this time varied greatly between both social classes and genders. In the upper class, when children were quite young, they were raised by a governess. After they reached the age of about ten, children would usually go to a public school. Public schools were selective and expensive institutions. The first of these types of schools was Winchester College, which was founded in 1382. Boys in the upper class had the best opportunities for a good education. This idea is evident through the fact that private schools were male-only and they cost money to attend, so poor families could not afford to send their children there. Public schools were essentially used to prepare boys to be gentlemen. There was not a strong emphasis on scholastics. Instead, the education at these schools was heavily focused on sportsmanship, religion, leadership, and even confidence, so the boys would have all of the necessary skills to eventually be legitimate members of the elite class in society.

Upper class girls, on the other hand, were not sent to public schools. They stayed at home and learned skills that would benefit them when they got married, because this was the most common path for women in Victorian England to take. It was imperative that girls knew how to sew, cook, sing, and play an instrument. These were all skills that could be used during a girl’s life, especially to help her husband or make him proud. Eventually, women’s colleges began to open and females had more opportunities for education as they got older.

“Ragged Schools” were set up to provide free basic education to orphans and very poor children. Ragged schools were developed in idea by John Pounds, a Portsmith shoemaker. In 1818, Pounds began teaching without charging fees so that poor children could also learn. Thomas Guthrie helped promote Pound’s idea of free schooling for working class children. Guthrie also started a ragged school in Edinburgh and Sheriff Watson started another in Aberdeen. These schools spread rapidly and there were 350 ragged schools by the time the 1870 Education Act was passed (The Victorian School).

The ragged schools were often run by churches and had a foundation of charity and religion. They were free to attend and many of the people that taught were actually volunteers. At ragged schools, kids had some typical school subjects, but they also learned skills such as knitting and gardening. This was done in order to ensure that children had knowledge about certain trades or types of housework that could be used outside of school and later in their lives.

“Dame Schools” were also set up by women who were most likely themselves poor and were more similar to babysitters than teachers. Oftentimes the school was run right out of the woman’s home, and it was typical for these children to be given household chores to complete. In fact, some dame schools were run by women who were illiterate; therefore they could not teach these young children much where academics were concerned. They looked after the children more than they taught them, but it was a place where poor parents could ensure their children were out of trouble while they made money for their family. While, “ragged schools” were required to be free, “dame schools” were not; this made them a form of a private school (BBC).

At the beginning of the Victorian era, circa 1830’s, the literacy rate amongst Englishmen was hovering just above 60%. The literacy rate amongst women was roughly below half. Decades into the Victorian Era, in the 1860s, the literacy rate amongst women and men finally becomes equal at approximately 90% in 1870. There was a drastic increase in literacy rates during the 19th century. In 1820, the literacy rate was 53%. In 1870 it jumped to 76%. Women had historically high literacy rate spikes in the 19th century. The intense increase in literacy rates is arguably due to increased government involvement in schools and education. SOURCE?

The Enlightenment played a large role in the increase in literacy rates. Although the Enlightenment began to taper off a few years before the Victorian period began, the lasting residual effects of philosophical thinking and reliance on writings by philosophers like John Locke created a steady increase in literacy rates. Nearing the end of Victoria’s reign at the turn of the 20th ceuntry, the literacy rate amongst both men and women in Britain was nearly 100%.

Gender in Education

In Victorian England, women were believed to only need to be educated in “accomplishments” such as artistic talents (singing and dancing), and the languages, essentially anything that would allow them to earn a husband and become the “Angels of the House” (Hughes).

There were many doctors who believed that if women studied too much education, it would stunt their ability to reproduce. Therefore, when universities opened to females, a lot of families did not want to send their daughters for fear no one would want to marry them afterward. However, as time went on and more and more women’s colleges opened, more intelligent women attended to be educated in things other than “fashionable” subjects. In this way, knowledge is power and sparked the want for the right to vote and the creation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage in 1897, wish the Queen could not understand (Picard).

It was not until more than forty years after the Victorian Era began that the Education Act was passed in England in 1870, making it required that both females and males get an elementary education, while secondary education in even upper-class families was not a consideration for females until the 1890s (Demir).

T he Royal Holloway Academy was Britain’s largest all-female college at its time. Thomas Holloway, the school’s namesake, built it after his wife Jane suggested it in answer to his question “How best to spend a quarter of a million or more” (Picard). When it was added to the University of London, it raised graduation rates to 30 percent being women.

Bloy, M. (2014, July 28). Victorian Legislation: A Timeline. Retrieved November 18, 2016, from http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/history/legistl.html

Demir, Caglar. “THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN EDUCATION IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND.” N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.

Hughes, Kathryn. “Gender Roles in the 19th Century.” The British Library. The British Library, 2014. Web. 17 Nov. 2016

Picard, Liza. “Education in Victorian Britain.” The British Library. The British Library, 2014. Web. 15 Nov 2016. https://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/education-in-victorian-britain

The Victorian School. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2016. http://www.victorianschool.co.uk/school%20history%20victorian.html

https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/

“Victorian Britain: Children at School.” BBC, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/victorian_britain/children_at_school/.

“Victorian Era Children’s Education Facts: Schooling, Subjects, Girls, Boys, Rich, Poor.” Victorian-Era.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 15 Nov 2016. http://www.victorian-era.org/childrens-education-in-victorian-era.html

Victorian Children

Victorian Children and Life in Victorian Times

Victorian Schools Facts for Children

Although schools have always been around it wasn’t until the Victorian era that these were improved considerably and available for all children rich and poor. In 1870 a law was passed which made it mandatory for all children aged between 5-10 in Britain to attend school. This was similar to the system we use today of Monday-Friday however the leaving age was far lower.

The leaving age was then increased to 11 in 1893 however parents and employers of working children still prevented some of them from going to school as they were making money in the workplace and this is what they wanted.

Who Went To School?

When Queen Victoria initially came to the throne schools were for the rich. Children of the wealthy would go to fee paying schools where they would learn classical subjects such as Latin and Greek, study classical history such as Greek mythology and classical literature about Roman Gods and Goddesses .

Most children never went to school and struggled to read or write. Children from rich families were typically taught at home by a governess until the age of 10 years old. Wealthy boys from the age of 10 would then go to Public schools such as Rugby. Girls on the other hand continued to be educated at home.

The poor were initially introduced to school thanks to the ‘Sunday school’ introduction by Robert Raikes with about 1,250,000 children gaining an education with this method by 1831.

This was all turned on its head however in 1870 with the passing of the law and schools began to cater for the rich and poor alike. Various names were given to the schools including the British schools and the Ragged schools; the latter getting the name from the poor children attending the school.

An education system had started and what a stark contrast it was to the one we have today.

What Were Victorian Schools like?

Victorian Schools were certainly different to the schools we have of today. Within poor inner city areas there could be anywhere between 70 and 80 pupils in one class!

The schools were imposing buildings with high up windows to prevent children from seeing out of. Furthermore the walls of the schools lacked creativity and were often bare or had merely text for the children to look at.

Village schools typically had smaller classes however the age groups would be varied. It wasn’t uncommon to see a 6-year-old child working in the same classroom as a 10-year-old! Due to the size of the school classrooms it became regimented and adopted a significant amount of repetition. Usually this would consist of the classroom teacher writing on the chalkboard and the children copying this down. Teaching lacked creativity and it was a strict, uncomfortable place for children to begin their life education.

Typical Victorian Teacher:

In Victorian schools there were more female teachers than male ones with women occupying the majority of teaching roles. These women were often very strict and scary. The majority of female teachers were unmarried ladies and they were to be called ‘Miss’ at all times. The reason teaching consisted of mostly ladies was due to the pay scale. The salaries were poor and men could be earning more money elsewhere so this was left to the women. The rationale behind it been mostly unmarried women was that once married the women was expected to take care of the family.

The large majority of teachers did not have a college education. The role of teaching was something they picked up while on the job and every new lesson would be a challenge for them too.

The teaching was also passed on to some of the brightest children in some schools known as ‘Monitors’ where they would be taught by the Headmaster and would then pass this onto small groups of children as another way of educating. The Victorian teaching system was much different to the one we have today.

Victorian Punishment on Children in School:

Discipline was huge in the Victorian times and this was no different in schools. It wasn’t uncommon for children to be beat by canes made from birch wood. Boys were typically caned on their backsides whereas Girls would take the punishment on their legs or hands.

The reasons ranged from truancy right through to laziness in the classroom. The punishments were usually harsh and painful for children aged jus between 5-10.

Children who were slower than the rest within lessons were made to wear the shameful dunce hats and sit in the corner for over an hour. This was not only humiliating for the child but also not helping them get up to speed with the rest of the class. At the time there was no concept of children with learning difficulties and the uneducated classroom teachers would assume it was purely down to the laziness or lack of effort.

Amazingly children were reprimanded for using their left hand to write! This was seen as a punishable offence and they were made write with their right hand!

In terms of lessons they were basic but focused on the 3 R’s of Reading, wRiting & aRtmetic (Maths) with the introduction of religion to make this the not so fantastic four. The intial three were seen as the most important areas of education at the time and a vast majority of school time involved the learning of these.

The lessons were very different to lessons of today and usually involved copying down what the teacher wrote on the chalkboard. Furthermore children were expected to chant things out loud until they did so without mistakes. The times tables were commonly done in this way and children were expected to do this without any mistakes.

The importance of developing a fine hand in writing was high and alongside numbers this was seen as a crucial part of education.

School Hours:

The school days in Victorian times were structured slightly different to those of today. With the morning introduction session consisting of prayers and religious instructions. This was commonly followed by morning lessons running from 9am until 12pm. Following this was a lunch period when children usually went home. Similar to fathers who went home from work within the Victorian period the children would do the same.

Afternoon classes began at approximately 2pm and finished at 5pm. The school day in Victorian times was in the mould of the modern day 9-5pm. Children of a very young age were expected to maintain their best attention at all times and adhere to the rules of the school.

School Equipment:

Unlike today school equipment was very different in Victorian times. The most famous equipment from these times was how children were expected to write on slate instead of paper. The reason for this was simple; it was cost effective!

Paper was expensive so children used slates with slate pencils to complete their work. The letters were scratched into the slate with the pencil. This could be easily removed and usually was at the end of each lesson. It was standard procedure for the teacher to walk around the classroom checking the work of the pupils.

Once this was checked off they cleared their slate for the next lesson. No work was saved and children were expected to memorise the information they had taken in.

Before using slate boards the youngest children would practice writing letters in sand trays. This was a common activity for those in the 5-6 years old age bracket before they were ready to hold a slate pencil and write on a slate board.

For the teachers the most important equipment was the chalkboard and easel. The mainstay of any lesson was for children to copy information from the chalkboard onto slate board. The older children would begin to write in a book using a dip pen with black ink from an inkwell. There was a designated ‘Ink monitor’ whose job was to fill the inkwells each and every morning.

Victorians used a device called an Abacus for arithmetic which was their version of the modern day calculator. This enabled the children to conduct sums quickly and effectively.

Although Victorian schools are different in many ways to today’s classrooms some of the methods used help shape our education system today. Victorian schools are still used throughout Britain and remain an important part of history.

https://www.victorianschool.co.uk/schoolday.php https://www.primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/victorians/children/schools.htm https://primaryfacts.com/9/facts-about-victorian-schools-and-classrooms/

Link / Cite this Page

<a href="https://victorianchildren.org/victorian-schools/">Victorian Schools Facts for Children</a>

Stewart, Suzy. "Victorian Schools Facts for Children". Victorian Children . Accessed on April 10, 2024. https://victorianchildren.org/victorian-schools/.

Stewart, Suzy. "Victorian Schools Facts for Children". Victorian Children , https://victorianchildren.org/victorian-schools/. Accessed 10 April, 2024.

Education in Victorian Britain

[ Victorian Web Home —> Political History —> Social History ]

• Annual Meeting of the British and Foreign School Society
• Harriet Martineau, Economics Educator
• “Parents are not good enough”: Spencer on the Relation of Education to a Flawed Humanity and Its Flawed Society
• The Essential Importance of Drawing in Education and Self-Development
• “So terribly in our education does the ornamental over-ride the useful!” Spencer’s Criticism of Victorian Education
• The Essential Need for Independence, Self-Discovery, and Pleasure in Self-Directed Learning in Education

Primary and Secondary Education

• Primary and Secondary Education in England and Wales, 1850-1876
• Robert Raikes and the Eighteenth-century Sunday School Movement
• Ragged Schools
• William Edward Forster and universal elementary education
• Richard Cobden’s 1851 speech on Secular Education as the Solution to Sectarian Opposition
• The College of Preceptors (aka Society of Teachers)
• Punch on struggle between religious denominations for control of primary education
• The University of London and Its Boys' Schools
• Queen's College and the Ladies' College
• Moses Angel and the Jew's Free School
• E. R. Robson and School Construction after the 1870 Education Act
• Music education after the 1870 Education Act
• First Fruit of the School Board — an 1873 cartoon from Fun
• The First London School Board , a painting by John Whitehead Walton
• State Involvement in Public Education before the 1870 Education Act
• Passmore Edwards Settlement (first classrooms for disabled children)
• Children's Geography Books: Mapping Imperial Hierarchies and Ruling the World
• Primary School Architecture
• The Yorkshire Dales in Victorian Times: Education
• The School House, Trumpington
• The Liverpool Collegiate Institution
• Raising the Grade: A Review of Pamela Horn's Life in a Victorian School (A Pitkin Guide)
• Review of William Whyte's Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities

Adult Education Institutions

• Bishopsgate Institute
• The Regent Street Polytechnic and Its Travel Programs
• (Former) Institute of Popular Science and Literature, York
• The Literary Institute, Muker, Swaledale

Educational Theorists

• Frances Mary Buss
• Hannah More and the "Classical Christian" View
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Johann H. Pestalozzi
• Elizabeth Missing Sewell

Public Schools

• Introduction
• The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature
• Charterhouse
• Charterhouse School
• Alumni of Charterhouse mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Thackeray on Grey Friars, the Public School in The Newcomes that stands for Charterhouse
• Eton (sitemap)
• Victorian images of Eton
• Alumni of Eton mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Alumni of Harrow mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Rugby (sitemap)
• Thomas Arnold's Theories of Secondary Education
• Thomas Arnold, Rugby's great reforming headmaster
• Thomas Hughes's Defence of Fagging at Rugby
• Alumni of Rugby mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Victorian images of Rugby
• Alumni of Shrewsbury mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Alumni of Winchester mentioned in the Victorian Web
• Westminster
• Alumni of Westminster mentioned in the Victorian Web

Independent boarding schools

• The Marlborough School
• St Columba’s College, Stackallan, Ireland
• St. Peter's College, Radley (Radley College), Oxfordshire
• St Peter's School, York

Universities and other institutions of higher learning

When England had only two universities, Germany had about fifty, intended to train clerics and admninistrators. . . . Instead of passively acquiring established knowledge, students were expected to learn how to do original research, helped by the new institution of the research seminar. These innovations have fed slowly into British universities, where Mark Pattison was almost alone in advocating reseearch in nineteenth-century Oxford. — Ritchie Robertson, Times Literary Supplement (1 October 2010): 7

Cambridge University

• Victorian and later images

Oxford University

• An awfully idle place" — Thomas Hughes on Oxford in the 1840s
• "Ah, Geordie, the scout is an institution!" — Tom Brown describes his college servant
• Gentlemen Commoners

University of London

Universities outside london, oxford, and cambridge.

• University of Birmingham
• University of Cardiff
• Trinity College, Dublin
• University of Leeds
• University of Liverpool
• University of Manchester
• University of Glasgow
• Queen's University, Belfast

Royal Military Academy at Woolwich

• Designed by James Wyatt (1805)

Material needed for the following institutions

Scottish universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews)

Bibiography

• Bibliography
• Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Victorian Education

Archival resources

• Archival resources relating to the higher education of women in England: Introduction
• The University of London
• Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
• Queen Mary and Westfield College
• King's College for Women
• The University of Cambridge
• Girton College
• Newnham College
• Lucy Cavendish College
• The University of Oxford
• Lady Margaret Hall
• St. Anne's College
• Somerville College
• St. Hugh's College
• St. Hilda's College
• The University of Durham
• Conclusion (1994)
• Archival Resources revisited (2013)

Of Special Notice

• CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review : “Victorian Education and the Periodical Press”

Last modified 25 August 2022

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Updated 19 February 2024

Victorian Education Reform: Comparative and International Contexts

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• Marianne A. Larsen 2  

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During the Victorian era, public education systems were constructed in newly industrialised and urbanised nation-states, and in former colonial societies undergoing these modernising processes, along with the processes associated with new nationhood. The construction of popular, universal education systems was premised on the idea that schooling was to be the cure for the social ills of the time, providing children with the foundation they required to become obedient, moral citizens. While the timing, processes, and practices associated with key educational (political and economic) reforms differed across these settings, the central importance ascribed to mass education did not. Whether reformers called for state funded public education systems, or a system operated in conjunction with religious institutions, local churches or voluntary societies they all subscribed to the general benefits of popular education and, as we will see in the next chapter, the central role of the teacher in education reform.

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Larsen, M.A. (2011). Victorian Education Reform: Comparative and International Contexts. In: The Making and Shaping of the Victorian Teacher. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306363_3

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Women's Education

Introduction, general overviews of women’s education in the nineteenth century.

• Bibliographies and Reference Works for Women’s Education in the Nineteenth Century
• Archives of Women’s Education in the Nineteenth Century
• Nineteenth-Century Ideas and Theories Related to Women’s Education
• Education of Working-Class Women in the Nineteenth Century
• Nineteenth-Century Governess Memoirs and Guides
• Governesses in 19th-Century Literature
• Secondary Education for Girls in 19th-Century Periodicals
• Secondary Education for Girls in 19th-Century Literature
• Women’s Education and Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
• Histories of Women at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge
• Women’s University Education in Letters, Memoir, Poetry, and Fiction
• Critical Studies of Women’s Higher Education in 19th-Century Literature
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Women's Education by Sheila Cordner LAST REVIEWED: 27 November 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 27 November 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0200

Against the backdrop of momentous education reform in 19th-century Britain, women made important inroads to institutional learning. They gained access to elementary and secondary schools as well as the first women’s colleges. Even by the end of the century, however, women often still felt excluded from elite higher education. Like the socially stratified learning models for male students, women’s education was commonly dictated by class. As a result, many scholars have approached the subject of Victorian women’s education through this lens, and many of the sources here are categorized by social class as well as by level of schooling. Education reform sought to provide broader opportunities for children of the lower classes to attend schools, with the Education Act of 1870 making elementary education compulsory. More secondary schools opened for middle-class girls, as reported by the 1868 Schools Inquiry Commission, but they were criticized for being unsystematic and barely more rigorous than the tutored education of accomplishments many bourgeois girls received at home. Some middle-class and upper-middle-class women pursued professional paths as educators, becoming governesses or teachers at the newly proliferated schools. In the second half of the century, as a debate flared regarding women’s physical and intellectual capabilities for higher learning, a small group of women attended universities for the first time. Opponents of the women’s higher education movement highlighted the tensions between women’s rigorous study and their responsibilities as wives and mothers. Despite gaining more access, women were not granted degrees at the two most prestigious universities in England until the twentieth century (1920 at Oxford and 1948 at Cambridge), although Scottish universities allowed women graduates in the late nineteenth century, such as the University of Edinburgh (1893) and the University of Glasgow (1894). Ultimately much direct insight into the education women obtained at home, in schools, and at universities comes from novels, poetry, memoirs, essays, and letters, along with historical studies and scholarship on literature and education.

Several studies cover 19th-century women’s education generally, such as Martin and Goodman 2004 , Burstyn 1980 , and Bryant 1979 . David 1987 and Hilton and Hirsch 2000 are useful places to start for case studies of influential women involved in debates about higher education. For an overview of elementary and secondary education reform even more generally, start with Birch 2008 . For additional sources not relating to women specifically, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “ Education .”

Birch, Dinah. Our Victorian Education . Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Birch examines larger debates about Victorian education through the lens of literary writers such as Charles Dickens and John Ruskin, and offers insight into contemporary education in Britain. Chapter 3 explores the tension Victorian women felt in trying to maintain their individuality when faced with institutional pedagogies.

Bryant, Margaret E. The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century . London: University of London, Institute of Education, 1979.

A short introductory volume with some examples drawn from literature, periodicals, and leaders of the women’s education movement. Although much of the material is studied in more depth elsewhere, this could be worth consulting to find potential further specific areas of study.

Burstyn, Joan N. Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood . Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980.

Extensive discussion of the opposing arguments to giving women access to higher education. Helpful summary in chapter 4 of the scientific studies meant to prove the intellectual disparities between men and women.

David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-18792-8

David examines how the bodies of work by political journalist Harriet Martineau, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelist George Eliot resist the Victorian patriarchy as intellectuals and also work within it. The introduction discusses these authors’ educational ideas along with John Ruskin’s arguments for women’s education.

Hilton, Mary, and Pam Hirsch, eds. Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, 1790–1930 . Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000.

Collection of essays, each highlighting key figures in the development of educational institutions. Broad range of examples includes elementary schools for the working classes, teacher training for the lower-middle classes, and new colleges for middle-class women. Particularly helpful chapters on Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the founding of Cambridge’s Girton College, as well as Anne Jemima Clough and Blanche Athena Clough’s influence on the formation of Cambridge’s Newnham College.

Martin, Jane, and Joyce Goodman. Women and Education: 1800–1980 . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4039-4407-8

Profiles individual women who made contributions to educational reform in England, such as Jane Chessar and the teacher training system and Sarah Austin, who lobbied for an expanded system of national education.

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Charles Dickens and the push for literacy in Victorian Britain

Lecturer in Victorian Literature, Queen Mary University of London

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Such is the aura still surrounding Charles Dickens that it is no surprise readers want to mark the 150th anniversary of his death in June 1870, even in the middle of a desperate global public health crisis.

While this impulse to show one’s admiration of – and gratitude to – deceased writers is fairly commonplace, it’s much rarer to consider the conditions that enable people to read at all. One of the events of 1870 that will probably not be treated to the same attention in the UK as Dickens’s death, but should be remembered alongside him, was the passing of the Education Act .

Mandating new partially state-funded board schools to be built in areas where provision of elementary education was insufficient, the legislation established the principle of a statutory responsibility for schooling, and helped achieve the rapid rise in UK literacy rates seen in the latter decades of the 19th century. Between 1851 and 1900, there was a rise in British male literacy from 69.3% to 97.2%, while for the female part of the population, the improvement in literacy rates was even more pronounced, from 54.8% to 96.8%.

The legacies of the Education Act – also called the Forster Act after W. E. Forster, who drafted the bill – are multiple, given the importance of mass reading and writing to the functioning of democracy. Perhaps most visible of them is the collection of still-used school buildings dotted around Britain’s cities that date from the decade following this legislation.

Dickens famously used his pen throughout his career as a tool for campaigning with and writing about a huge number of topical issues, from inhumane welfare reform to parliamentary corruption, but education was one of his most consistent concerns. In Nicholas Nickleby , his depiction of the abusive Dotheboys Hall exposed the Yorkshire boarding school industry as a national disgrace. Later, in Hard Times , Dickens raised the problem of an overly utilitarian curriculum – with no space for imaginative learning or play.

The author gave speeches for working-class adult education facilities, such as the Manchester Athenaeum, and visited Ragged Schools – charities that taught the poor before the government assumed responsibility for their education.

While Dickens had some anxieties about the overly religious syllabus in some of these philanthropic schools, he wrote articles exhorting his readership to support them nonetheless, while making it clear that their existence was a marker of the state’s “frightful neglect” of “those … whom it might, as easily and less expensively, instruct”.

Literacy as theme

Dickens also made the problem of illiteracy a major theme of his fiction . Many of his characters are semi-literate, while others have no reading ability at all. Jo the crossing sweeper from Bleak House , who dies from the same infectious disease that the heroine Esther Summerson survives, is one of Dickens’s completely illiterate characters. His inability to decipher the signs that saturate the city in which he lives makes him especially vulnerable to exploitation.

When Dickens’s non-reading characters get the chance to correct their disadvantage, they often take it. In Our Mutual Friend, the illiterate servant Mr Boffin suddenly becomes wealthy and swiftly hires someone to teach him how to read.

Dickens did not see literacy as a panacea for all the ills of his unequal society – and he warned against the dangers of teaching some but leaving others uneducated. In Our Mutual Friend , literacy drives a wedge between the non-reader Lizzie Hexam and her brother, Charlie, whose personality is clearly tainted rather than enhanced by his encounter with the education system.

A similar estrangement happens between Pip and his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery, in Great Expectations . In both cases, it is the non-schooled characters who retain their moral compass, while their literate loved ones become prey to the seductions of social prestige and a concomitant self-disgust for their roots.

Read more: Charles Dickens: how two novelists gave Great Expectations a second life in the Pacific

Great Expectations includes an episode that looks back to the very start of the narrator Pip’s literacy, in which he composes his first, orthographically unorthodox letter:

Pip’s coming to literacy is not merely ornamental to Great Expectations, and his early bad prose isn’t exhibited among the refined words of the narrator’s mature self just for the sake of comic value. After all, if Pip hadn’t learned to read and write we would never hear his story.

Radical reading

Unlike many in his time, Dickens saw that improving literacy had nothing to do with teaching the poor morals and everything to do with empowering them. His continual emphasis on learning to read was a key part of that democratic radicalism which made him popularly loved but drew criticism from conservatives such as Anthony Trollope, who satirised his rival as “Mr Popular Sentiment”.

It is because Dickens implicitly recognised literacy as a political issue that the revolutionary Marxist William Morris included a lover of Dickens’s novels nicknamed Boffin in his News from Nowhere , a novel that imagines a 22nd-century London after its transformation into utopia.

Real-life working-class readers paid homage to Dickens too, in the decades following the Education Act. As Jonathan Rose, a historian of reading, insists , Dickens was the most popular author in typical working-class communities – and may have even been a source of political radicalisation for working-class readers, when other kinds of reading were less accessible.

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Education during the victorian era.

            Education changed much during the Victorian era, both for the poor and rich. In 1933, Parliament authorized for sums of money to be provided to build schools for the poor children of England. However, many poorer families needed their children to be home and often had to supply their children with school materials (papers, pens, and ink, etc.), which made it even more difficult for the people who couldn’t afford it. However, the rich didn’t face these issues. Both social class and gender played a role in education. It was boys from rich, upper-class families that had the best options for education. This was because private schools were male-only and expensive, so lower-class families were unable to send their children to them. Conversely, upper-class women were expected to learn skills that would be useful for marriage from their homes. Both the gender and social class aspect of education can be seen in Middlemarch through the characters Rosamond and Fred. Rosamond has been trained in ‘womanly’ duties like entertainment, as she is described as playing piano and singing for guests. However, Fred is expected to go back to university.             I am the youngest woman of my family, daughter to the wealthiest man in my town. I feel as though I have waited my whole life for marriage. I have been trained in all of the ways to help someone feel both attended to and entertained. Cooking is something I have been taught from a young age; it takes up most of my earliest memories. It will be important for keeping husband content. At least, that is what I am told. I remember being trained to play piano from a young age, and I am now able to entertain my family and our guests with ease. I am similar in age to my brother; however, he is expected to travel to England to study at university. I would love to travel somewhere like he is, but I suppose that I will wait for my honeymoon before worrying myself with something like that.

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Facts About Victorian Schools and Classrooms

In 1880 a law was passed making it compulsory for every child in Britain between the ages of 5 and 10 to attend school.

Lots of new schools were opened in Victorian times, but they were very different from the schools of today.

What were Victorian classrooms like?

• In the first half of the 1800s, classes were massive. Sometimes there were more than 100 pupils in every class.
• The Victorian classroom was often referred to as the schoolroom.
• Victorian pupils sat at iron-framed desks. These were usually bolted to the floor in rows facing the front of the classroom.
• The walls of a Victorian school were often completely bare.
• The floor of the schoolrooms were tiered (a bit like in a cinema). The children sitting at the back of the room were higher up than those sitting at the front. This meant that all of the children had a good view of the teacher and the blackboard, but it also meant that the teacher had a good view of them.
• The windows in a Victorian classroom were high up (to stop pupils looking out of the window) and the rooms were lit by gaslights. As a result, the schoolrooms were gloomy and often stuffy.
• Sometimes different classrooms were only divided from the others by curtains. This meant that it was very easy to hear noise coming from other lessons.
• Although lots of schools were built during the Victorian era, not a great deal of money was spent on taking care of the buildings. Victorian schools were often quite shabby and in need of repair.

What did Victorian children learn? What were Victorian lessons like?

Most Victorian lessons involved listening to the teacher and copying sentences from the blackboard. There was very little partner work or group work and very little chance for pupils to discuss their ideas and ask questions.

Here are some more facts about Victorian lessons:

• The most important lessons were the ‘three Rs’ – r eading, w r iting and a r ithmetic (maths).
• Pupils had to chant things (the times-table facts, for example) out loud until they could do it without making a mistake.
• Victorian pupils also received lessons in history and geography.
• Some lessons were called ‘object lessons’. Items (such as models, seeds, rocks and pictures) were placed on each pupil’s desk. The pupils were meant to make observations about the object in front of them. Most science lessons were taught in this way.
• PE lessons were called ‘drill’ and usually took place in the playground. The children didn’t get changed for PE and the lessons involved lots of jogging on the spot, marching, stretching and lifting weights (dumbbells).
• In the afternoons the girls and boys did different lessons. The boys were taught woodworking (and some schools also taught farming, shoe-making and gardening). The girls were taught how to cook meals, how to do embroidery and how to complete housework (such as washing and ironing).

What equipment did Victorian pupils use? What did they write on?

• Children often wrote on slates instead of paper. They scratched the letters onto the slate with a sharpened piece of slate (which they held like a pencil). The writing on the slate could easily be removed and slates could be used again and again. This saved the school money as paper was expensive.
• The very youngest children used to practise writing letters in sand-trays.
• Older children used pen and ink to write in their ‘copybooks’. Each child had an inkwell and a fountain pen. It was the job of the ink monitor to fill the inkwells each morning.
• Children were taught to write in a handwriting style called ‘copperplate’ and left-handed children were often forced to write with their right hands.
• Victorian classrooms often had an abacus and a globe.

How were Victorian pupils punished if they misbehaved?

Discipline in Victorian schools was very harsh.

Here are some examples of Victorian punishments:

• Teachers often beat pupils using a cane. Canes were mostly made out of birch wood. Boys were usually caned on their backsides and girls were either beaten on their bare legs or across their hands. A pupil could receive a caning for a whole range of different reasons, including: rudeness, leaving a room without permission, laziness, not telling the truth and playing truant (missing school).
• Victorian pupils who couldn’t keep up in lessons were often made to wear a ‘dunce’s cap’ (usually made of newspaper) or told to put on an armband or badge with the word ‘dunce’ written on it. The Victorian teachers thought that the pupil would be embarrassed into making more of an effort.
• In some schools (mostly in Scotland), Victorian children were beaten with a ‘tawse’ (a vicious-looking leather strap).
• ‘Punishment baskets’ were used in some Victorian classrooms to suspend badly behaved children from the ceiling. The pupil was made to sit in a wicker basket and was then raised from the ground by ropes and pulleys.
• Sometimes pupils were given lines. They often had to write out the same sentence over 100 without making a single mistake.
• All of the punishments handed out by Victorian teachers were recorded in the school’s ‘punishment book’.

What were Victorian teachers like?

Here are some useful facts about Victorian teachers:

• In Victorian schools there were more female teachers than male ones.
• Victorian pupils were expected to call a male teacher ‘Sir’ and a female teacher ‘Madam’ or ‘Miss’.
• Older pupils were sometimes given the job of teaching the younger pupils. They were known as ‘pupil teachers’.

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Victorian Era

From Georgian to Edwardian

Woman’s Education in Victorian Britain

With changing times, societal behaviour greatly transformed towards women and women’s education in Victorian England. But if you think about times before the year 1800s, it was all different, weird and cruel. Women have received their rights after a lot of sacrifice and fights.

They not only had to undergo unreported domestic violence for years but also endured the pain and humiliation of not being educated enough to fight for their rights either.

Victorian era used to be dominated by the teachings of the Church, and a great part of it was the definition of masculinity and femininity. Until the 1840s and even later, a good chunk of women’s education contained the role they were supposed to play in the family later.

What areas was Victorian era female education in?

Education for young girls back then implied cooking, sewing, cleaning and other household chores – anything that they would be subjected to in their married lives. The schools and rather the small interest groups that the women could attend provided only very basic education about general stuff.

Science and mathematics were still not introduced to women, and those who somehow enrolled themselves in colleges, could not even touch the higher-education level because they were simply not allowed!

THE HUE AND CRY FOR WOMEN’s EDUCATION in VICTORIAN TIMES

The major part of revolt from women’s side for education was to create independence among their community and to reduce the dependency on the male population. They wanted to become able to earn and become economically independent. They wanted to learn new things and expand their knowledge. They wanted to explore areas of expertise and understand how things worked in the real world.

But everything changed in 1852 when Queen Victoria was going to be made the crowned queen of almost half the world! At that time, Britain had made colonies in every country of the world and occupied more than 150 countries. The queen, at that time, said to her uncle, King of Belgians, that women should not accept these masculine roles of ruling and governing nations.

This was a powerful statement coming from a woman who ruled for over 60 years! She was crowned as Queen in the year 1837 and descended from her crown in 1901. She is still remembered as one of the finest rulers of England, and the one who brought in a drastic change towards how women were treated in Britain, and subsequently the whole world!

When a woman rises to a position that’s even higher than that of a man, the whole world has to bow down to her! A woman not only contains the power and vigour to give birth to a new life but can also do every task a man can, with much more grace and poise. In those times, various art styles were also inspired by women.

It was that time only that even male artists had female muses, and many female artists also emerged. One of the most famous female artists was Frida Kahlo, who painted about her own struggles in life and gained worldwide popularity. She was a Mexican painter who highlighted the issues faced by females across the world, using her own face and body as a muse.

It is only after Queen Victoria and her glamorous rule that British Currency gained power. But soon after, two wars came and destroyed a lot of things, including the colonies of Great Britain. Many countries gained independence after World War II because the British empire ran out of money to govern and control those colonies.

That is when a democratic setup was established and Bonar Law, the first official British Prime Minister was introduced to the world.

TRANSFORMATION IN EDUCATION FOR VICTORIAN WOMEN

So, how were Victorian era schools and education in general?

Soon enough when many countries and nations experienced that it was an overall loss to keep the women uneducated and confined inside the homes, education for women became a necessity! Schools and colleges were opened across the world for women.

Many countries like India and Pakistan, have women-only schools even today where no males can attend classes. While in some remote places there are male-only schools as well, but they are now a rare occurrence.

With changing world and modernization of society, co-ed schools have now gained popularity and fame, where students from different classes, social groups, communities, religions and races can study together. It is all being done to avoid clashes in the future and to help the students gel well with their classmates. It also increases the social contact and reduces social awkwardness.

There are many instances of people being surprised when they see a person from a different race! These schools, reduce that social weirdness and awkwardness that someone might get when they come across someone belonging to a different race or creed.

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New Book Examines Work of Victorian Authors, Links Fears of Imperial Decline with Today’s Free Speech Debates

In Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk , Dr. Amy R. Wong, professor and chair of English at Dominican University of California, studies stories about the British empire by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad, and argues that a preoccupation with controlling different forms of speech in these late-19th century fictions indicates a "crisis" of English language and dominance at the time. Wong traces the resonances of this fear of Western imperial decline with today’s debates on what constitutes admissible speech, especially on college campuses.  

“At its core, Refiguring Speech is a polemic against the many ways in which supposed notions of "free" speech are in fact regulated by cultural norms about property and ownership that American culture has inherited from the British empire: specifically, racialized notions of who is even capable of speech, and who has the right to possess their own speech,” Wong says. On May 6, Dr. Wong, joined by literary scholars Dr. Christopher Rovee (Louisiana State University) and Dr. Omar F Miranda (University of San Francisco), will celebrate the publication of Refiguring Speech (Stanford University Press) with a conversation about how the historiography of 19th century English – both the language and the field of study – relates to current debates about free speech, today’s power structures, and the "crisis of the humanities" in higher education. The May 6 conversation “A Nostalgia for English: Rethinking Language, Refiguring the Discipline” will be held at San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, beginning at 7 p.m. PST. It will also be broadcast on zoom. Register here . Dr. Wong is a scholar of Victorian studies and an associate professor in Dominican’s English Literature program in the School of Liberal Arts and Education . Her primary areas of research and expertise include Victorian literature and culture, media theory, critical race studies, and anticolonial approaches to literary studies. This spring, Dr. Wong incorporated her research into a first-year core course on photography, visual culture, and community engagement. “Although the focus of this course was on how we represent and replicate power imbalances in visual practices, the course material resonates with Refiguring Speech 's emphasis on how our conventions around what constitutes legitimate speech also unknowingly replicate existing power structures,” Wong says. This shows up, for example, in how educational institutions from kindergarten through higher education inadvertently devalue speech capacities, norms, vernaculars, and languages of BIPOC, neurodivergent, and disabled students. “The sense of students who are learning English as deficient (rather than multilingual), for instance, and the idea that "fluency" and "self-possession" are inherently "good" forms of embodied communication, neglect the ways in which human communication becomes far more interesting when we also attend to dysfluency, gaps, silences, and what remains unspoken.” Wong was awarded a 2022 Graves Award in the Humanities to support her sabbatical work on Refiguring Speech . Administered through Pomona College, the Graves Award recognizes young faculty in the first decade of their careers to “encourage and reward outstanding accomplishment in actual teaching in the humanities.” As Dr. Wong noted in her Graves Award proposal, Refiguring Speech “is a book that argues that everyday talk’s seemingly mundane realities can challenge hegemonic and ultimately colonialist ideas about speech as the property of individuals.”

“When we talk with one another in the classroom, interlocutors co-own speech, and mediations of speech through gestures, tone, affect, accents enacted by different bodies in the same space compel interactions among people that might be unruly, conflictual, harmonious, humbling, embarrassing, joyful, or difficult,” she says. “These are the encounters and the emotions, I argue, that will preserve and enact democracy, rather than all of us clamoring to speak before or on behalf of others.” “Even as our continued debates on free speech insist on adjudicating content, our attitudes encode something different: almost viscerally, we demarcate which bodies are incapable of controlling speech, and incapable of self-possession.”

Dr. Wong’s ideas for her book  project largely owe to her experiences in the classroom and her desire to learn from her students. Indeed, Dr. Wong’s scholarship and teaching naturally inform one another. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes the classroom as a democratic space for shared growth where all are teachers and learners. Dr. Wong is committed to a pedagogy that connects the humanities to our lived experiences in the 21st century.

“I have learned to attend closely to language, power, and speech’s non-neutral embodiments,” Dr. Wong says. “The distinct privilege of always engaging diverse student populations has formed my deep intellectual and pedagogical commitment to what live, co-owned spaces of interaction can generate in the way of bettering our relations with others who may not look like us, think like us, feel like us.”

Dr. Wong began teaching at Dominican in Fall 2015. Her courses have covered such topics as 19th-century British literature, children's literature, dystopian science fiction, literary monstrosity, critical media studies, reading popular media, the study of film and drama, and expository writing through the lens of identity formation and community engagement. Before her career in academia, she was a public school teacher in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, specializing in English Language Learner (ELL) education.

Dr. Wong is also the co-editor of “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” in Victorian Studies (with Ronjaunee Chatterjee and Alicia Mireles Christoff, 2020). The introduction to this special issue won the Donald Gray Prize for best essay in Victorian studies in 2020. Her other publications may be found in V ictorian Literature and Culture , Mediations , Narrative , Victorian Review , Modern Philology , SEL: Studies in English Literature , Studies in the Novel , Literature Compass , ASAP Journal , Post45 , The Los Angeles Review of Books , Parapraxis Magazine , and Public Books . Dr. Wong received her PhD in English from UCLA, a MSc Education from Long Island University, and her BA in History and Literature from Harvard College.

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This episode is 3 of 3. Valuing maths positively impacts student learning outcomes and determines whether a student will continue to engage with maths at school and beyond. This episode discusses a particular type of maths – utility value – and the research backed way to improve it. Hosted by Teaching Excellence Program Master Teacher Ben Allen with guest Dr Sarah Buckley (Australian Council for Educational Research -ACER), this episode is great for both teachers and parents to help support students develop more positive attitudes towards maths. Resources: https://go.vic.gov.au/3TlxyKX Time stamps: (01:03) – MAES (maths anxiety engagement strategy) definition and history. (03:19) – What is positive maths talk? (04:35) – What does positive maths talk look like at home? (06:00) – Why is positive maths talk essential? (08:32) – Dispelling maths myths. (10:10) – Research and student outcomes. (14:17) – Resource ‘Why Maths?’ (17:41) – What is different about this resource? (22:25) – Where is math in our lives and careers? (25:42) – Presenters key take-aways. This podcast series explores, challenges and considers insights into education, school leadership and classroom learning. Views expressed by guests and hosts are their own and do not represent the Academy.

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Supporting Our Fastest Growing Communities

The Allan Labor Government is supporting Victorian families with the critical infrastructure that makes our fastest growing suburbs better places to live – like new schools, health services, public transport and road upgrades.

Premier Jacinta Allan and Minister for Planning Sonya Kilkenny were at Whittlesea Early Parenting Centre (EPC) today to announce a more than $400 million package through the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution (GAIC) fund , which includes a new $9.6 million Enhanced Parenting Centre in Wallara Waters.

New mums and dads across the north are already benefiting from the new Whittlesea EPC – with specialised support, close to home – including sleep and settling, feeding and extra care for bubs with additional needs.

A total of 37 projects will be funded through the GAIC – including 10 from the Growth Areas Public Transport Fund and 27 from the Building New Communities Fund.

Some significant investments in the package include:

• $60 million to deliver a critical road link for the Ison Road Overpass in Werribee
• $35 million towards a new school in Cobblebank
• A $29 million land purchase for a proposed government school in Wyndham Vale
• More than $150 million for new bus services across Melbourne’s north, west and south east
• $10 million for an intersection upgrade in Mernda to support a future major recreation precinct
• $6 million for road and traffic upgrades in Pakenham

These projects complement the more than $685 million worth of initiatives the Labor Government has already delivered across Melbourne’s growth areas through the GAIC fund – including ambulance stations, parks, schools and public transport.

The GAIC fund is a one-off contribution payable by landowners developing certain land zoned for urban use and development in the Cardinia, Casey, Hume, Melton, Mitchell, Whittlesea and Wyndham local government areas.

The fund supports the Labor Government’s landmark Housing Statement by delivering key transport, health, community and education infrastructure to ensure communities in growing suburbs have access to the services they need, close to where they live.

Quote attributable to Premier Jacinta Allan

“ We know more Victorians want to live close to transport, schools and essential services – and this investment will deliver exactly the kind of infrastructure Victorian families need in our fastest growing suburbs.”

Quote attributable to Treasurer Tim Pallas

“Contributions help make these projects a reality – developers aren’t just building houses, but communities too.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Planning Sonya Kilkenny

“While we create the conditions for 800,000 new homes to be built over the next decade, we’re delivering schools and health services, parks and playgrounds – the community facilities and open spaces that families need.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Public Transport Gabrielle Williams

“We're investing in better transport links – from better bus routes, to upgraded train stations, to more cycling and walking paths to ensure these growing communities can access jobs, schools and services.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Education Ben Carroll

“We’re building new schools and services for our growing suburbs needs so more Victorian children can access the first-rate education they deserve, closer to home.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Health Infrastructure Mary-Anne Thomas

“Whether it’s new or upgraded ambulance branches or making it easier for locals to access our expanded Sunbury Community Hospital when it opens later this year, this infrastructure boost in our growing suburbs will ensure more Victorians can access health care closer to home.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Roads Melissa Horne

“These investments will ease congestion and make roads safer in communities where roads are vital to getting people to work or seeing family and friends.”

Quote attributable to Minister for Children Lizzie Blandthorn

“Becoming a new parent can be the happiest time in a person’s life, but it can also be challenging – that’s why we’re investing $9.5 million to build a new Early Parenting Centre in Wallara Waters to ensure more families can get the support they need.”

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Restrictions on Victorian doctor accused of racist and homophobic remarks paused due to bulk-billing shortage

Vcat suspends Bendigo doctor’s supervision order over ‘significant financial imposition’ on one of region’s last bulk-billing clinics

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A Victorian doctor who allegedly made racist and homophobic comments to patients has had restrictions imposed by the medical regulator paused, due to their “significant financial imposition” on one of the last bulk-billing clinics in his local region.

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has suspended the requirement that Dr Tom Crawford be subject to 10 months of supervision at his Bendigo practice, which was imposed by the Medical Board of Australia last month.

He was also required to undertake “one-on-one” education and receive mentorship as a result of comments made during two separate consultations that the board alleged were homophobic and racist.

Vcat heard that Crawford, the sole practitioner at his clinic and who specialises in the treatment of skin cancer and skin issues, denied making homophobic, racist or inappropriate comments to patients. He has also sought a review of the Medical Board’s decision.

The tribunal heard that two notifications about Crawford’s conduct were lodged with the Australia Health Practitioner Regulation Agency last year.

The first involved a same-sex parent family for a consultation for their five-year-old son who had previously been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The mothers alleged Crawford asked who “the natural mother was”, if they “even knew the father” and – when told the child was conceived with an anonymous sperm donor – said: “those people aren’t even screened that well”.

Vcat heard that when the parents were having difficulty getting their child’s consent to pull his pants down for the examination, Crawford allegedly said: “just pull down his clothes, I need to see his skin” and “look, your GP might have time to waste like this, but I don’t, I need to see it”.

The board described Crawford’s conduct as “homophobic” and said he “lacked disability awareness”.

In a written submission to the tribunal, Crawford said his comments were not homophobic, and were made to help him understand the history of a new patient.

He said the parents may have been offended by an “unintended slight” but that no concerns were raised with him.

In a separate incident, a patient with Māori heritage alleged that Crawford made comments about Māori people. That included an alleged comment suggesting New Zealanders with both European and Māori ancestry did not want to acknowledge their former because they want to claim Māori descent for government benefits.

It was also alleged that Crawford had spoken about a Māori friend who had been taken captive overseas, and then released because the captors thought he was native to that country.

But Crawford disputed any suggestion that he made racist remarks, with his saying the discussions were “an attempt to build rapport with the patient”. He said he “has an acute understanding of First Nations people from Australia and New Zealand and believes he is culturally sensitive when he provides care to all patients”.

In asking for the supervision condition to be stayed, Crawford’s solicitor, Russell Ball, told Vcat the cost of an external supervisor would be $6,000 to $6,375 a week, and could increase by $1,000 if they required travel from Melbourne, which he said was not financially viable for the practice.

Ball said Crawford saw 70 to 75 patients a week, including six long-term patients who would be affected if he was unable to practise.

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In written reasons published on Wednesday, senior Vcat member Anna Dea said she halted the supervision and education requirements because they would “represent a significant financial imposition on Crawford”.

But she said the mentoring condition remained in placed until the application for review concluded.

“Crawford is one of the few remaining bulk-billing practices in the region,” Dea said. “Ball’s affidavit referred to a number of long-term patients who currently depend on Crawford for the management of their serious medical conditions.

“I accepted that evidence showed Crawford’s inability to practise (due to the challenge of finding and paying a supervisor as required by the supervision condition) may jeopardise the timely and well-informed treatment of those patients for many months and render the practice unviable.”

She said the evidence suggested there were “significant shortcomings” in Crawford’s “communication skills and capacity to understand his patient’s personal circumstances” but said it was in the “greater public interest” to allow him to keep practising.

“I reached that view with an expectation that Crawford would reflect carefully on the matters raised by the notifications, including with his mentor, and ensure his communications hereafter were consistent with what is expected of a practitioner with his experience and training,” she said.

Guardian Australia has contacted Crawford for comment.

A spokesperson for the Medical Board of Australia said it could not comment because the matter was before Vcat for a final review that is not likely to be listed until well into the second half of 2024.

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As Victoria's net debt soars, the government walks a tightrope trying to balance the books

Analysis As Victoria's net debt soars, the government walks a tightrope trying to balance the books

Grim. Horror. Very tight. Tough.

These are just some of the public and private ways Labor ministers are describing next month's Victorian budget.

This Labor government has been adept at expectation management in the past, but there's a consensus that Tim Pallas's 10th budget, due on May 7, will be different.

"There will have to be hard decisions in this budget, and there will be,'' Pallas warned on Wednesday.

There are few easy options for Premier Jacinta Allan, who is confronted with a budget that needs to rein in spending to address ballooning state debt.

Net debt is set to hit $135.5 billion this year. By comparison, NSW's debt is set to hit $94.8 billion.

Government spending will be cut with the government to axe jobs in an effort to avoid slugging Victorians more tax. Jobs and programs that were set up or expanded during the pandemic will not have funding renewed, and redundancies have already been outlined in some departments.

"I'm not going to amplify the challenges that I have managing our budgetary and our fiscal position by amplifying them onto households,'' Pallas said.

"The way we will manage that is effectively by running a more efficient government and that will come at some level of challenge for existing expenditure right across government agencies."

If households are forced to wear economic pain because of Labor's fiscal management, it will severely dent Labor's hopes of a fourth term in 2026.

The premier faces big decisions over taxes, what to cut and which infrastructure projects to slow down.

Her first budget as leader also gives her a small window to show Victorians what her priorities are, and that she is prepared to make tough calls.

Some Labor insiders concede that Team Allan is yet to define what her "political narrative" is, so this this budget is being framed with the premier's agenda in mind.

"I think we'll have some reasonably positive things to say to the people of Victoria,'' the treasurer said on Wednesday.

The challenge is to forge a fresh path out of the shadow of Daniel Andrews, while holding on to the key parts of his agenda. It's difficult.

"We've gone from Bon Scott to Brian Johnson but we are still AC/DC,'' one senior figure said, to describe the change of leadership.

So, what can the government do without slugging voters?

Experts, Labor MPs and insiders agree the state has to slow its capital spending, so you can expect some major projects will be delayed.

Labor's Big Build, while initially politically popular, has created problems.

The magnitude of government works has overheated the construction sector and contributed to a rise in building costs due to a scarcity of materials and competition for labour.

David Hayward, emeritus professor of public policy at RMIT University, said the government had failed to make hard decisions during last year's budget.

"Will the premier do the right thing and slow down spending? Or does she want to keep running around opening things with the yellow hat on?'' Hayward asked.

Slowing down infrastructure spending by delaying some projects, he said, would reduce debt as a proportion of the state's economy and critically free up workers to build new homes.

Remember, the state wants to build an extra 80,000 homes a year — a target few in the sector believe can be met.

Earlier this year, Pallas got a big windfall from Canberra, with an extra $3.7 billion from the commonwealth in GST payments, after Victoria's slice of that tax pie was increased.

That extra cash should help deliver a surplus next year.

But debt will remain a political weight in Labor's saddlebag, and unless the government gets its spending under control, Victoria's credit rating could take another hit – it's already at AA, according to S&P Global Ratings.

The agency's director of government ratings, Anthony Walker, said a return to cash surplus was important and hinted that without a substantial change in fiscal management another rating cut could be on the cards.

"Since the pandemic, the government's been funding its operating position, which is doctors, teachers, nurses, etc, through debt. And that's unsustainable,'' he said.

To combat debt in recent years the government has upped taxes, including on property and payroll as well as private schools.

"We're not expecting any tax relief,'' Mr Walker said.

"This government has been very clear that it is going to tax investment, it is going to tax business, we have seen a number of new taxes across those which is probably weakening the property market in Victoria."

Victoria's property market, due to higher taxes, is weaker than in other states, Mr Walker said.

So why does Victoria have so much debt?

On the eve of the 2014 Victorian election, Treasury's official budget update showed the state's debt under the Napthine Coalition government was $21.8 billion and it was forecast to drop to $19.8 billion in three years' time.

The Coalition lost that election after just one term in office, beginning 12 years of unbroken Labor rule. It also led to an explosion in Victoria's debt.

The most recent budget update shows Victoria's net debt will be $135.5 billion this year, rising to $177.8 billion in 2026-27.

Much of this accumulation has been to fund a myriad of infrastructure projects: The Metro Tunnel, level crossing removals, schools and hospitals to name but a few.

In 2014, the Napthine government was spending just $5.8 billion on infrastructure – this year the Allan/Andrews government is spending $22.3 billion.

In the eyes of this Labor government it's productive debt, a view shared by many experts.

Shadow Treasurer Brad Rowswell said the government needed to live within its means. This budget is a big test.

"If the government is bold enough to admit that we can't afford the Commonwealth Games, why can't they make that same admission with some of their big build projects?'' Rowswell asked.

"I genuinely think Victorians, given the state of the budget after 10 years of Labor, would be understanding of a government bold enough to acknowledge that not everything can be done all at once.''

Within the state's total debt is $31.5 billion owed from the pandemic. The government used its credit card to keep the economy afloat while the state was forced into successive and frequent lockdowns.

The government is making efforts to repay this portion of the debt, including a swag of levies on business outlined in last year's budget.

Pallas and Allan will want to find something good to hang their hat on. Part of that will be making tough economic management a virtue, including cutting public servants.

It will also be looking for some type of sweetener, most likely some cost-of-living relief to convince voters it's on their side.

So perhaps we'll get yet another round of the power saving bonus, the $250 payment for comparing powers on a government website.

But as the treasurer often says, you'll have to wait until the budget.

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Victorian Christmas at the McConnell Mansion in Moscow

December 3, 2019 danielle

The Latah County Historical Society will hold their Victorian Christmas at the McConnell Mansion on Saturday from 1-4pm. Enjoy hot wassail, delicious treats, children’s crafts, and carolers. This even is free and open to the public.

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