What's In This Month's Issue?

This month’s issue takes us on a trip through English schooldays through history.

September has always seemed to carry a hint of the new school year, so this month we are looking back at the changing experience of schooldays in England.

Our main feature follows English education from the Middle Ages, when formal schooling was available to relatively few children, through the growth of grammar and charity schools to the Victorian classroom, universal education and the modern school system.

Schools have also provided some memorable settings for English literature. We look at six very different examples, from Dickens’s grim Dotheboys Hall and the Rugby of Tom Brown’s School Days to Hogwarts.

Finally, our Famous Briton this month is Thomas Arnold, the nineteenth-century headmaster whose reforms transformed Rugby School and helped shape Victorian ideas about education, character and responsibility.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this journey through English schooldays (and that there isn’t an exam at the end).