Miss Walker, Head Mistress of the Sheffield High School, who presided (at a session at the North of England Conference in Scarborough), said today people were beginning to see that a girl might be given an equal chance of education with a boy, but yet a rather dissimilar one. Education ought to prepare them to be home-makers, and that meant something much wider, bigger and deeper than it did a generation ago. They wanted a girl to study hygiene, food values, ventilation, water supply and drainage as well as the older accomplishments of cooking, laundry work and household management.

50 years ago January 17, 1953

IT has long been observed that adult education is gradually being monopolised by the middle classes. Bodies like the WEA and now the York Educational Settlement, which were founded originally to extend the intellectual horizons of the manual worker, have had reason to complain that their classes have become excessively respectable. Of 888 students who attended the York Settlement last term, only 44 were manual workers. Some 213 were housewives, but the next largest group was “non-manual workers” with 149, closely pursued by 133 clerks or secretaries and 97 teachers.

25 years ago January 13, 1978

Teachers’ unions agreed this week to press for a 12.5 per cent pay rise from April 1. At the same time a claim for an additional 2 or 3 per cent will be lodged with employers to restore the pay increases lost by teachers earning more than pound;8,500 a year and to correct various anomalies in the salary structure. There was a surprising unanimity among leaders of the major unions, according to Mr Terry Casey, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters-Union of Women Teachers.