page_title: Joseph Lancaster
section_title: Support
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Lancaster / Support
caption_attribution_description: The British or Lancasterian School opened in September 1809 in Severn Street, some of whose buildings still survive today. Named after the creator, Joseph Lancaster, the school allowed large numbers of boys to be educated by just one teacher with the help of a number of assistants or monitors. What was most distinctive about the British School was that it was non-sectarian, and though attendance at church was urged, it was not enforced. Indeed, a handful of the boys were Jewish, and many were Quakers. In its first four years of existence the British School at Severn Street admitted 878 boys, and the school usually contained about 300 children, learning to read and write, and, for a few, to learn arithmetic. Most of the literacy was taught using slates; paper was only available to the most advanced. The youngest boys were in the “alphabet or sand class”, learning to make the shape of letters in the sand.
context_page_description: Joseph Lancaster was an English Quaker and public education innovator. He originated the saying "a place for everything and everything in its place". The height of popularity of his system came in the first decades of the 19th century.
context_section_description: The Borough Road school called itself the Royal Free School, and Lancaster was granted an audience with George III in 1805, at Weymouth. This apogee of recognition built on the support of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and involved two royal dukes, Kent and Strathearn and Sussex.
  Lancaster's supporters have been defined as "influential Nonconformists, utilitarian liberals and radicals." They included Edward Wakefield and James Mill. In his education book Chrestomathia (1816), Jeremy Bentham supported a version of the monitorial system, for which he gave both Bell and Lancaster credit, but moved from Lancaster's non-sectarian religious stance to a secularism hostile to Anglicanism.
  The year 1808 saw the creation of "The Society for Promoting the Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor". A major figure in it was William Allen, another Quaker, who acted as treasurer. It went by the name Royal Lancasterian Society. According to Henry Dunn, writing in 1848, the others on the initial committee were William Corston, Joseph Foster (of Bromley), Joseph Fox, John Jackson and Thomas Sturge. This group, without Sturge, raised £5600 for Lancaster's school.
caption: The Lancasterian School in Birmingham, founded in 1809
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