Historical thinking: using the census in primary teacher education

This blog is from a guest contributor. It is based on an article written by Tony Pickford, Visiting Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Chester, about using the Census in primary education.

Local History is a required area of study on the primary school curriculum. When educating would-be teachers, I have always encouraged them to empathise with historical characters and to try and think like them as well. A key resource in promoting this ‘historical thinking’ is the census. Site visits, images and written documents such as diaries all have potential for prompting ‘historical thinking’ - in teachers and older primary pupils alike - but census extracts provide a unique window into real lives and life experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries.

A census has been conducted in this country every ten years since 1801 (except 1941). The first only gathered population figures for villages or towns, but details of the members of each household were collected and recorded from 1841 onwards. In every census year, heads of households were instructed to complete forms giving details of everyone who slept in that dwelling on census night, which was usually a Sunday in March or April. The forms were collected a few days later by an enumerator, who entered the information into enumeration books.

For the period up to 1901, enumeration books recorded people’s place of birth, their age, occupations and relationships. In 1911, because of rising standards of literacy, forms completed by householders were retained for the first time. Accessing the pre-1911 records is now a relatively straightforward task: transcribed and digitised versions of the schedules are available via the online subscription services Ancestry and Findmypast, which are provided for free at Cheshire Record Office in Chester. Some transcripts of census records are also available free of charge on www.freeCEN.org.uk.

Younger primary children can find it difficult to read 19th century handwriting, and this is easily addressed via transcriptions mentioned above. But older children often enjoy the challenge of deciphering original documents. The authenticity provides a tangible link to the past and helps to foster ‘historical thinking’. To promote this principle further, I developed some census-based activities for students.

The first activity aimed to combine history and information technology. Students had to imagine a time machine bringing back an enumerator from the past to do a final check of the census. They had to ‘become’ the residents of a street and use census information held on a database to find information about ‘themselves’, such as their address, relationship in the household, occupation or place of birth. When the enumerator appeared (myself or a colleague wearing a Victorian top hat!) we would discuss what they had learned. It became clear that while this task and role-play was useful at demonstrating how to use a database, it was less useful at immersing students in the period and getting them to relate to the people in the census.

As a result, I changed the activity to include more immersive role-play to try and achieve the goal of ‘historical thinking’. We visited the streets listed in a chosen census and students had to identify buildings through photographs of features on buildings. Finding a suitable street was not a difficult prospect being based in Chester, with an abundance of streets built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Cheshire Record Office has a searchable online database of local images (Cheshire Image Bank). This, with supplementary work like sketching buildings, or listing key words to describe the people who lived and worked there in the past, had a more positive outcome.

Back in the classroom, students were given copies of the census, and were surprised by the range of different households in the locality, and their inhabitants, that the census revealed. Alongside wealthy middle-class families with servants, there were boarding houses, public houses, small hotels and even a bank. Students were then given a key task that I hoped would lead to ‘historical thinking’: working in small groups to create a short conversation between the residents of ‘their’ property – a conversation that might be overheard by a passer-by and give some information about who lived there. We would discuss the type of language that would be used - words and expressions that would and would not have existed in 1901, for example - and strict instructions to avoid slang and expressions such as ‘okay’ and ‘yeah’!

We recorded these conversations and, after sharing them with the wider group, students were asked how they had approached the task. Had ‘historical thinking’ been used to underpin the conversations? The answer to this question was not simple.

Some conversations produced a great deal of information. Others conveyed individual characteristics with some humour (such as using an accent or imagined personality traits linked to a person’s profession) but gave little detail about relationships in the households. A few conversations suggested students had genuinely explored the views that characters might express – differing opinions about issues of the time that might arise in the households, for example. There were glimpses of ‘historical thinking’ - not enough to claim that the role-play had achieved its aim in full, but the conversations showed more engagement and immersion in the census material than the previous database activity. To that extent, this second activity was successful.

The session concluded with students translating the activity into a series of lessons for a chosen age-range of primary school pupils, and the audio files were shared on the University intranet. Overall, the second activity showed that census extracts, when supplemented with other sources like a visit to the houses and streets documented in that census, can provide the cognitive scaffolding that might support student teachers – and the children they are intending to teach – in ‘getting inside the head’ of people in the past.

Thank you to Tony Pickford for offering us his article.

Cheshire Archives and Local Studies published another blog about the census in 2022. ‘A “New” Census’ can be found here.

Back to school!

As the new school year is about to begin, we have been looking at documents from school days of the past. The records of hundreds of schools are held at Cheshire Record Office in Chester – read on for examples of lessons, rules, uniform, reports and more, going back a hundred and fifty years.

Teaching methods may have changed over time, but pupils have had to learn the same subjects for generations.  Some school exercise books have been deposited with us, such as the French and physics books of a child named Neild at Sandbach School from 1908. Science was perhaps not his best subject, as whole pages of his ‘pysics’ book have been scored through in red ink with the word ‘bad’, presumably written by the teacher who made many other corrections of his work! 

The arithmetic book of a girl called Elizabeth Stockton at Harthill County Primary School in 1887 (SL196/7441/8) was much better though - her mathematical problems on silverware weights prompted the teacher to write, “Elizabeth has made a very good beginning, and with care she promises to do well, for she takes great care with her work which is clean and neat throughout."

All schools have rules, and we hold a copy of the ‘Loyal Devoir’ for Mostyn House School in Parkgate, an instructional book written by the head teacher in 1920 listing school rules such as being truthful, having good manners and knowing how to behave in chapel and at a cricket match, for instance.  It also includes an introduction 'To My Boys' reflecting on the effects of World War One on the school and on boys of their class.

We have several prospectuses of Mostyn House School from the 1880s to the 1930s as well, which included school uniform requirements that were rather different to today: the 1889 version (document reference SP5/8427/18/1) stated,

“boys will need for Sunday wear an ‘Eton’ or ‘Norfolk’ suit, and a silk hat.  For ordinary wear a dark knickerbocker suit and ‘Eton’ collars are recommended”.

When school rules were broken, ‘punishment books’ from dozens of schools across Cheshire detail the corporal punishment children received as a result.  To take one example, Byley Primary School in the 1910s recorded giving one or two 'strokes', presumably with a cane, for carelessness in work or disobedience; two strokes for copying or for refusing to answer; four strokes for not doing work and six strokes were given for telling untruths to a child’s parent (SL 31/2). Other punishment books went into further detail: for instance Acton Church of England Primary had a boy given four light strokes with cane, two on each hand, and detained in school 30 minutes each day for a fortnight, for stealing cardboard coins from school and trying to pass them on to the local shop keeper in 1911, and playing truant resulted in one boy being struck six to eight times across the buttocks in 1919 (SL2/4).

Attitudes to corporal punishment changed over time, as illustrated by a 1968 Department of Education and Science circular found within the records of Macclesfield Parkroyal County Primary School. The Secretary of State acknowledged many teachers’ need for a “reasonable amount of force” in some circumstances, but believed that

“the practice of corporal punishment should disappear from our schools, and I hope that the local education authorities, the governing bodies of schools and the teachers themselves will all use their powers and influence to achieve this end."

Schools today require high levels of attendance, but everyone has had to spend the occasional day at home due to being ill.  In the records of Alsager County Secondary School, we found guidance of how long sick children should take off school, such as 28 days from the beginning of the “characteristic cough” of whooping cough.  Diphtheria and small pox were also listed as some of the “commoner infectious diseases”, showing how far medical science has advanced today.  We also found an example of Cheshire County Council playing its part in tackling the 1918 flu pandemic in the papers of Acton Church of England School.  A communication from the Education Department’s School Medical Officer shows the whole school being closed for almost a fortnight “to prevent the spread of Influenza”, noting “it will be necessary for you to arrange for the thorough cleaning and aeration of the school for the time it is closed”. 

              

Children also had time off for reasons other than sickness:  the head teacher's log of Saighton Church of England School for July 3 1874 - at harvest time -  "gave several children leave, to help to make hay for their parents" (SL 122).  And it seems many children benefitted from a day off due to the royal family - Acton C E School papers include a note that,

"The Elementary Schools Committee at its meeting on the 20 February, 1922, had before it a request from His Majesty The King that a whole holiday might be granted to all schools on 28 February, 1922, being the wedding day of Princess Mary, and it was decided to accede to this request." (SL 2/5/3)

Attendance nowadays features in school inspections, and we have found evidence of early versions of inspection reports recorded in head teachers' log books.  Congleton Mossley Church of England Primary, for example, received some slightly negative comments regarding its teaching of spelling and geography, but

"the work both on the slates and paper is neatly done and the results in arithmetic are good". 

And Saighton School will have been pleased that a summary of the Inspector's Report they received in March 1875 stated that,

"The School is in excellent condition, and the children are thoroughly well taught.  There is no weak point." (SL 122)

Like today, children of the past occasionally had time away from lessons for school trips or something different like sports day.  We have an account of children at the same school in Saighton who were able to enjoy a sports day, out-of-school visit and treats all at once, according to the school log book entry of August 1 1873, which gave an account of Lord Westminster's annual treat for the children - including a description of the tea ("consisting of a bountiful supply of currant bread, seed-cake etc, which was heartily partaken of by all"), races, games and prize-giving.
 

Duddon Church of England Primary School had a dedicated log book for evacuees during the Second World War (SL195/3), which starts in September 1939 and details the numbers of children and how they were separated into classes for their lessons.  Towards Christmas, the log book entry for December 13 describes a teacher who "left school at 11.45am" in order to discuss with the Welfare Worker arrangements for a party for evacuee school children.  We have other school records that show the impact of the war, with evacuees coming to Cheshire from places as near as Liverpool or as far as Guernsey.  This photograph from Bramhall Primary School, which at the time was in the county of Cheshire, shows a knitting lesson for evacuated school girls.

Finally, as the school holidays come to a close, Tattenhall CE Primary School records include an 'Important Notice' from 1875 to the parents and employers of children following an Act of Parliament regarding the employment of children in agricultural labour.  Whilst it states that "no child under 8 years of age shall be employed at all in agricultural work", those aged 8 to 10 could be, if they had attended school 250 times in the 12 months preceding, or 150 times for children aged 10 to 12.

For any children reluctant to return to their studies next week, perhaps they could think about this and imagine how different their lives could be!


All of these documents, and more, can be viewed at Cheshire Record Office in Chester.  Admission Registers for some Cheshire schools have also been digitised, and can be viewed here on Find My Past.