The New School - 1847

The school and teachers' house as they would have looked when they were built in 1846. The classroom to the right was badly damaged by a V1 rocket in 1944 and replaced in 1952. The house and 'North Room' are still in use but not as a school.

The infant school in the Parish Cottages had only been open a few years but it was already a victim of its own success; it was grossly overcrowded and a new school was needed. The Government had recently started to help fund such projects but most of the money still had to come from the local people. 

The children of Bromley Common were very lucky that the local squire was not only wealthy but he also believed in the need for schools for everybody. 

He was Mr George Warde Norman,  a banker and businessman who owned a lot of land in the Bromley Common area.  His home stood where Bromley College of Further and Higher Education is now.  In 1846, he and his wife, Sibella, gave some land next to Holy Trinity Church “for (the) erection of a school for the education of the children of the labouring, manufacturing and other poorer classes in the Chapelry District of Holy Trinity, Bromley, and for no other purpose.”  Work started on the new school in 1846 and it opened in January 1847.

The cost of building and starting the new school was £755. The government gave £202, the National Society¹ contributed £60, and £505 came from local people. This included £25 from Miss Shepherd and the young ladies of her school at Elmfield and £135 from the Norman family.

Many local people also promised to pay a subscription of between five shillings and five pounds a year to keep the school going. Each year, the names of those who helped pay for the school, how much they gave, the income and expenses of the school and many other details were printed and copies sent to everyone involved.²

In late 1846, the managers asked the National Society to find "...a Master and a Mistress for the school at a salary of £60 per annum with the addition of the children’s pence." The Society was unable to find anybody suitable from their training colleges so an advertisement was placed in The Times newspaper.

In Victorian times, it was quite normal for schools of this size to be run by a married couple and a Mr and Mrs Baber³ were chosen from the three couples who applied.

The teachers lived in the house between the two classrooms. It had two small living rooms, two bedrooms and a scullery.⁴  

1. "The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church." See below.

2. Copies of many of these accounts are to be found in the Bromley archives in Bromley Central Library. Click here for an example.

3. There is no further reference to Mr and Mrs Baber in the records. The next mention of any teachers by name is in September 1850 when Mr and Mrs Tijou were dismissed.  It is possible that Mr and Mrs Baber did not actually take up the offer of employment at Bromley Common. If that was the case, perhaps Mr and Mrs Tijou were the school's first teachers. 

The ‘National School’ had admitted 113 over the same period but there were only 42 boys and 33 girls ‘on books,’ in September 1848.

The school roll continued to be low; in the late 1860s, there were sometimes as few as 30 pupils in each of the classes. It was only in the 1870s that the roll rose dramatically.

5. Sometimes the two classes were referred to as separate schools; the younger children attended the Infant School and the older pupils attended the National School. Together they were the Bromley Common Schools. Sometime in the 1870s, the older class became the Mixed School and the whole school was known as the National School.

The National Society

The full name of the National Society was "The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church." The established church was, and still is, the Church of England. Schools supported by the National Society were called "National Schools."

The Society was founded in 1811 to promote the ideas of Dr Andrew Bell. He had written a pamphlet about a monitorial system that he had developed while running an orphanage in India. In this, the teacher taught the older, more able pupils; the monitors, who then taught the younger children. Previously, each teacher had taught perhaps twenty or thirty children. Now they could teach very large numbers of pupils, often over a hundred in a class, at little extra cost.

A very similar system was also developed by Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker, whose work led to the foundation of the British and Foreign Schools Society which promoted the establishment of non-denominational schools.

The monitorial system quickly became popular and made possible a rapid increase in the number of children receiving a basic education but, by the time Bromley Common School was founded, it was being replaced by a system of pupil teachers and, for a few, teacher training colleges. As part of this change, the National Society opened a number of teacher training colleges to promote a higher standard of teachers.

The Society was also active in helping communities open new schools, as long as they were controlled  by the established church.  Nonconformist churches went to the British and Foreign Schools Society for help.

When limited grants to education from the government first became available, they were initially channelled through either the National Society or the British and Foreign Schools Society.