The Story of Education in Sheffield page 2

As secondary schools, both the Boys' and the Girls' Departments have attained a remarkable degree of success. The number of scholars reaches 450 boys with twenty-six teachers; and 480 girls with twenty-three teachers. The number of bursaries and scholarships admitting into the school free and providing maintenance grants is large, and they have been used to fine advantage, the school being one of the principal avenues to the University.

A very large proportion of the bursars are preparing for the teaching profession, and pass on, as apprenticed pupil-teachers, into the Pupil Teachers' Centre.

Here again, extraordinary success has been achieved, and the Centre ranks as second to no institution of the kind in the kingdom. An unusually large proportion of the pupils matriculate, and, going on to the University, or to leading Training Colleges, take a degree. A number of the students take their Intermediate Degree Examination immediately after leaving the Centre.

The Technical School of Art is another educational institution financed and managed by the Education Committee. It was established in 1843; went to its present home in Arundel Street in 1857; and was greatly extended after being taken over by the City Council in 1902. Not only are the principles of Art taught with very great success, but workshops are provided for the application of Art to manufactures and crafts. The students in day and evening Art classes number about 1,200, and there are about forty teachers. About 200 students attend the technical trade classes.

Another highly successful branch of the Education Committee's work is the Training School of Cookery and Domestic Science. This institution was founded by the Yorkshire Ladies' Council of Education, and occupied premises in York Street. It was handed over to the Education Committee in 1902, and, later, was removed into rooms in Leopold Street, vacated by the Medical School in 1906. The School prepares its students to take Teachers' Diplomas in Cookery, Laundry Work, Household Management, Dressmaking, Needlework, and Millinery, and provides classes also for any one who wishes to take a series of lessons in any of these subjects for domestic purposes. About 460 students attend the classes in the course of a year, and of these 130 are qualifying for diplomas.

In the city are two Training Colleges for teachers, one a branch of the University, the other, the Municipal Training College, for men and women, with its class-rooms in the enlarged Grammar School in Collegiate Crescent. Its residential halls for women students are at the junction of Ecclesall Road and Broomgrove Road, and for men at "Southbourne," in Clarkehouse Road. The accommodation is for 140 women and sixty men. The college, which has been very successful in its courses of training, has a staff of sixteen lecturers exclusive of art-teachers.

To complete the list of schools of a public character, it should be mentioned that the Education Committee recognises the training during Pupil Teacher-ship of the excellent Girls' High School - established in 1878 as one of the schools of the Girls' Public Day School Trust - and also the Convent School of Notre Dame for Catholic girl teachers; and these schools are included in the Committee's scholarship schemes.

The way through the Elementary Schools to the Secondary Schools, and forward to the different departments of the University, or to the older universities is made easy by a most generous system of scholarships, too elaborate for explanation here, but set out in a "Handbook of Information" issued by the Committee. Suffice it to say there are numerous scholarships, exhibitions, or bursaries awarded on entrance examinations to the various Secondary Schools; there are other similar awards open to those who are scholars in the schools; and there are further awards that carry the successful student forward on leaving the schools to the Sheffield University, either on the Arts or the Technical side, or to Oxford or Cambridge. There are also valuable scholarships into, through, and beyond the School of Art.

In passing from the educational work of the Education Committee, to whom the City, through its Council, delegates complete control, except that it reports its financial statements to the Council for approval, it may be mentioned, as a fact probably without a parallel in England, that the Secretary of the Committee, Mr. G. S. Baxter, has spent his whole life from boyhood in the service of Sheffield education. He entered, as a boy clerk, the office of the Sheffield School Board when it was formed in 1870, and has taken an increasing share in the development of the city's education ever since.

The Sheffield University, which began its career in 1905, when King Edward VII opened its new buildings in Western Bank shortly after its Charter had been received, was an expansion of Sheffield University College, and the College had been formed in 1897 by the union of three institutions - the Medical School, Firth College, and the Technical School. The Medical School had been formed in 1829 in the Medical Institution, Surrey Street. It removed into Leopold Street in 1888, occupying the building now fitted up as the School of Cookery.

Firth College was opened by Prince Leopold in October, 1879, thanks to the generosity of Mark Firth, eldest son of the founder of the Norfolk Works. It is, however, generally agreed that the educational movement which found a home in Firth College began as early as 1842, when a Congregational Minister, the Rev. R. S. Bayley, started a People's College in a garret in George Street. Dr. Moore Smith has written a sketch of the rise of this movement, which really has an historical position of considerable interest. The classes that met under Mr. Bayley's tuition had firm hold of two valuable ideas. First, they came together to acquire real scholarship - not to be amused; and next, they were willing to pay for their learning. These classes were carried on vigorously after Mr. Bayley left Sheffield, and they were not disbanded till Firth College was ready to take up the work they had been trying to do. It was in imitation of this People's College in Sheffield that the Working Men's College in Red Lion Square, afterwards in Great Ormond Street, and now in Crowndale Road, London, was formed, a college that attracted to its service Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, William Morris, John Ruskin, and other notable men, and has a place in the general story of English education. The building of Firth College followed also immediately on the delivery of a series of popular University Extension Lectures.

The founding of the Technical School, which was opened in 1886 in the old Royal Grammar School buildings as a branch of Firth College, was largely due to the enthusiasm and generosity of Sir Frederick Thorpe Mappin, and the school, on its practical side, appealed to the City Council and won from it handsome financial support. The three movements - medicine, arts, and technology - became united in a University College in 1897; and after the Victoria University broke up, and Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham had each succeeded in establishing a University of its own, it became impossible for Sheffield to be left educationally in the cold.

The city responded nobly, both through a subscription list and by the action of its Council. Already the City Council contributed handsomely to the Technical Department, and it now resolved to give permanently a penny rate yearly to the University. Thus a sufficiently large endowment fund was raised, and the University was formed-. Sir Henry Stephenson became Chairman of the University Council (a position now occupied by Dr. George Franklin), and Sir Frederick Thorpe Mappin remained Chairman of the Committee of the Technical Department (a position which is now filled by Sir Joseph Jonas.)

The special feature of Sheffield University is its Technical Department, devoted to Engineering, Metallurgy, Mining, and such science as bears on the lighter trades of the city. This department is housed, so far as its studies and experimental work are concerned, in a fine range of buildings occupying one side of St. George's Square. Hither it attracts students from all parts of the world; and, particularly as regards metallurgy, there is no teaching centre in the world better, if so well, fitted up. The students who have passed through the course of study here go to every quarter of the earth to direct scientifically great engineering and metallurgical works, and they man the experimental laboratories of the most successful Sheffield firms. All that Sheffield stands for in every form of the steel industry - and in that field it is the leading city of the world - is represented in the form of study under the most experienced professors at this great Technical Department of the University.

The "Tec," as the Applied Science branch of the University is familiarly called, with its scientific and practical training, is the distinctive feature of Sheffield education, but the University has firmly established itself through its other faculties of Arts, Pure Science, Medicine, and Law. The Faculty of Arts includes separate departments in Latin, Greek, French, German, Mathematics, English Language and Literature, History Modern and Ancient, Economics, Philosophy, and Education. The Faculty of Science embraces chairs or lectureships in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Zoology, Botany, Physiology, Education, Geography, and Geology. In Medicine, besides the usual chairs, there are departments of Public Health and Dentistry; the Faculty of Applied Science includes, besides Mechanical, Electrical, and Civil Engineering, Metallurgy, Mining, and Applied Chemistry; there is a lectureship in Architecture; and the Faculty of Law includes Accounting. In fact, the University has extended its work to the fullest extent that its income will allow, and has striven with energy, ambition, and encouraging success to fulfil all the requirements of a modern University in close touch with practical life.

Its Education Department includes a Training College for Teachers in Elementary Schools, and also training for a Diploma for Secondary School teaching, and this department, recruited largely from the Pupil Teachers' Centre, is one of the most popular sections of the University.

The men who have "borne the burden and heat of the day " in raising Firth College and the Technical School to the status of a University are, on the Arts side, Dr. Hicks, the popular Professor of Physics, who was Principal of the old College and the first Vice-Chancellor of the University - a most loyal worker and splendidly unselfish man; Dr. Ripper, the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science, Professor of Engineering, and former Principal of the Technical School; and Dr. J. O. Arnold, the Professor of Metallurgy. With them, as workers all through the developments that have completed the educational system of Sheffield by crowning it with a University, at once scholastic and practical, have been Professors Moore Smith, Appleton, and Leahy. On the medical side Dr. Arthur Hall has been its most continuous worker; and on the business side, among men still active, Dr. George Franklin, the presiding Pro-Chancellor, Sir Joseph Jonas, Sir William Clegg, Colonel Hughes, and Aldermen A. J. Hobson and H. K. Stephenson.