Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

The 19th century witnessed a revolution in Britain's schools.

As compulsory mass education was rolled out, and thousands more children were

learning to read and write. But what was it like to go to one of these schools? How tough was the

discipline? How widespread was truancy? And did teachers get any formal training? These are some of the questions that Spencer Mizzin puts to Rosalind Crone

for our latest everything you wanted to know episode on Victorian schools.

What did education in Britain look like when Queen Victoria came to the throne?

That's a good question. It's a big question. First of all, education was incredibly diverse,

and one's experience of education depended on one's class, age, gender, and also their geographical

location, among other things too. So, by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne,

full-time formal schooling was pretty much the norm for males born into the upper and middle

classes. Okay, so in England, there was a range of private schools or endowed schools which

charged fees to cater for this.

And I'm talking here about the older grammar schools all the way through to the neuroacadamies that were being set up.

And for the wealthy and elite, of course, there were the famous public schools that many people would recognize today,

often called the seven great schools or the

Clarendon schools, Eaton, Westminster, Harrow, Winchester, to name just a few of them. And there were

also private preparatory schools that had been set up to prepare boys for entrance into these

great schools. Now, turning to Scotland for a

minute, in Scotland there were no great public schools in the 1830s. Some elite families sent their

sons to the English public schools, but many in the middle classes used the local day schools.

There was a principal in Scotland that there should be no distinction in the schooling received by the rich and the poor,

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