Stanton St. Quintin Primary School

Providing education in the parish seems to have been a losing battle in the late 18th and early 19th century. The rector, Samuel Smith, attempted to start a school in 1786 and in 1818 in his return to a Select Committee enquiry into the education of the poor he was only able to report that an old woman had a school for poor children that had an average attendance of six or seven children from a population of 216 people. However, by 1827 the school occupied the chancel of the church and the number of children must have been considerable as benches were needed in the aisles.

A Sunday School was started in 1823 and by 1833 had 60 children. Also by 1833 there was a day school educating between 25 and 30 children supported by fees paid by their parents. The site of the school is uncertain; it may still have been in the church, or in the rectory, or it may have been in a barn on the site of the later school.

In 1838 the Earl of Radnor leased a cottage that had been divided to house two families, and gardens; to the Rev. Charles Grey Cotes; one of the tenements was for the Sunday School. This was the left hand part of what is now School Cottage and may have been a conversion from the barn. The Earl of Radnor continued to support the school.

An enquiry by the National Society in 1846-7 found that the school was supported by subscriptions from parishioners and fees from the parents of pupils. The day school was attended by 41 children, out of a population of 302, but only 13 attended the Sunday School. The schoolroom was the left hand side of School Cottage while the school teacher lived in the right hand side. In1849 a new schoolroom was built on the western end of School Cottage, the money being provided by Lord Featherstone, lord of the manor and son of Lord Radnor, and the Rector. The 1871 census provides the name of the schoolmistress, Mrs Mary Beard, who was aged 45.

In the Warburton Report of 1859 it was stated that the school was supported by Lord Radnor and the clergyman and that between 40 and 50 girls and boys were taught by a master in a good room, with a wooden floor and with desks around the walls. The report said, “The school is light, airy, and comfortable, and the exterior picturesque and characteristic”. The schoolmaster may have been Abraham Bethell, who by 1861 was living in School Cottage.

The school log books begin in 1868 and provide an interesting picture of the school. The teacher was assisted by pupil teachers, aged between 13 and 18 years, who were also taught by the head teacher in the morning before school began and in the late afternoon, when school had ended. Pupil teachers were paid and normally taught the younger children while taking exams themselves and often moving to training collages to become fully certified teachers. The head teacher would also normally have taught each Standard (Standards were decided by ability rather than age) at some time during each day.

Much of school involved the 3Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Younger children had object lessons concentrating on a single subject; in 1887 these included a fly, sheep, a reindeer, paper, a house, kings, geese, iron, gold, a jug, a teapot, an oak tree and a chestnut tree. Poetry was learned by heart with the higher Standards tackling more difficult poems. For example, Standard I would be learning a Victorian children’s poem “The Two Crossing Sweepers” Standard II had advanced to “The Lost Child”, while Standard III would be working on “The Graves of a Household”; Standard IV were advanced enough to tackle Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”.

Spelling and recitation were important parts of the timetable while arithmetic often included some geometry and even algebra for the higher standards. One of the more audible areas of arithmetic was the chanting of multiplication tables by the younger children. Religious education was an important part of the school day with lessons often taken by the Rector. Attendance of church services was also included in the school day. Singing lessons were doubtless popular with the children and they learned school songs as well as the hymns that they were expected to sing in church. The girls learned needlework but this was often dependent upon the materials that could be provided. The Rector’s family often helped out here as when Lady Constance Bouverie brought in needlework for the girls in October 1873. She also took some of the younger classes for reading and dictation. By the 1870s both geography and history were taught and the syllabus continued to expand later in the century.

School attendance was very variable and before 1870 some children would not have gone to school at all while others may only have completed two or three years. Some children were absent for long periods, such as in 1877 when a girl was re-admitted on 4th June having been away from school since the autumn of 1876. Illness could bring about low attendances and sometimes the school had to be closed. In one week in October 1877 measles and whooping cough caused 17 children to be away from school. Children were also kept away to work in the fields or at home. Potato picking, haymaking, harvesting, bean planting and gleaning after harvest work were all activities carried out by older children when they should have been at school. Girls were sometimes kept at home to look after younger siblings, especially when their mother was ill or having a baby.

In the 1880s the average attendance was 40 pupils under the head teacher Miss Susan Snelgrove. Even with a small number of pupils there was some misbehaviour but often this was truancy or arriving late for school. Occasionally children were insolent or impertinent to the teacher, swore in class, fought or were generally disorderly. In 1871, when average attendance was only 32 children all the infants were detained one day for disorder and one older boy was sent out of school for “Rebellion and violent conduct”.

Every school received an annual HMI inspection, similar to a modern Ofsted. Children were tested and examined and the amount of the government grant to the school was dependent upon the results of these.

The teaching and condition of the school, and other matters also appear in the reports. In 1874 the report said “The children on the whole in fair order and appear to be overcoming the tendency to communicate with each other during the examination. At present the reading is very fair [good]. Spelling on the whole fair. Arithmetic much below par. The grant is reduced by one tenth for faults of instructing in arithmetic”. The award of the teaching certificate to pupil teacher Miss Brookes was deferred because of this poor arithmetic exam.

The children were divided into Standards (grades) according to what they had learned and the head teacher would have taught each grade at some point each day, with the pupil teachers taking the standard at other times. All standards would have been taught in the same room.

Throughout the later decades of the 19th Century the average school attendance fluctuated between 30 and 40 although there were often 60 to 70 children registered at the school. The school mistress was often quite young, in 1871 Emily Curtis was aged 23 while 1876 Louisa Hughes was only 20 when she was appointed; in 1881 pupil teacher Clara Boorer was 18.

Average attendance had dropped to 26 in 1937-8 but after the war the families of RAF personnel increased numbers. A decision then had to be taken as to whether to extend the existing school or build a second school. Everyone wished to integrate the RAF families into the village and so it was decided to extend the village school as an additional 100 extra children were expected to attend in 1953/4. In 1952 the school was closed and the older children moved into the drawing room and dining room of Stanton Court while the infants were taught in a house at number 49 Stanton St. Quintin. The school re-opened in 1954 with three classrooms, a kitchen, cloakrooms and office space, with Mrs Kay as the new headmistress.

In 1949 the school had become a primary school when all pupils over 11 years were moved to Chippenham Secondary Modern School. In 1950 Mrs Hughes retired as head teacher and was succeeded by Mrs Dike from Lowden School in Chippenham. A School Welfare Committee was formed to improve school/parent contacts and the children performed a Nativity play at the village church.

Numbers on the school roll were high with families coming in from RAF Hullavington but fell after the RAF left the airfield. There were 75 children at the school in 1988 but with new housing in the village this had risen to 116 in 2007.