Shoreham Village School
We think the first school in Shoreham was a Charity School known to exist between at least 1712 and 1792. We don’t know where it was but early in its life it had a schoolmaster and 25 boys. In 1840, landowner Humphrey St. John Mildmay founded the Village School in Church Street that we know today. It was a Church of England “National School” with half of the money coming from Mildmay and half from the government.
The first master and mistress were Robert and Sarah Barton. Robert was a young former baker from Cambridge, his wife Sarah the daughter of the tenant at Preston Farm. There were 80 children for them to look after at first. The couple emigrated to Australia 16 years later, perhaps because their Methodist leanings were causing problems.
School log books and Inspectors’ Reports from the second half of the 19th century provide much vivid detail of the school’s ups and downs. Children started at age six and left at age eleven to begin working, but many went missing from class to help their parents with jobs like harvesting and brick-making. Illnesses such as scarlet fever, typhus and diphtheria kept others at home. In 1868, standards were low. “The discipline is bad, the religious knowledge very meagre, reading moderate, writing unsure, spelling moderate [and] arithmetic – a total failure,” reported the Visiting Inspector. The Master, Alfred White, left shortly afterwards.
A few years later, the Master recorded that the “children are generally sharp and intelligent [but] fighting amongst them was of frequent occurrence”. Standards had picked up by the end of the century, by which time separate classes for infants had started in a building across Filston Lane from the Almshouses. Teaching was found by inspectors to be “thorough” and there was “an excellent tone to this school”.
Vincent Steane ran the school with tight discipline in the early 1900s: he was “quite easy with the cane” according to one former pupil. But he got into trouble himself when he tried to put rifle-shooting on the curriculum. It was not a subject, the Board of Education decreed, “which can be advantageously taught” in public elementary schools.
You can read more about Shoreham School in Historical Society Publication No 32, “Education in Shoreham in the 18th and 19th Centuries”