The growth of the Roman Catholic training colleges for women in England during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

This account of the establishment and growth of the Catholic Women's Training Colleges in England has been written to illustrate the efforts of the small and poor Catholic community, beset by- innumerable and apparently unsurmountable problems, to provide women teachers for the schools, which after the establishment of the Catholic Poor School Committee in 1847, they struggled to establish and maintain. The earlier years have been treated in more detail because it was an heroic age of experiment in unfamiliar circumstances, when it was vital for the Catholic Colleges to establish their reputation in the eyes, not only of the Catholic community, but still more in those of the Committee of Council from whom so much of their income came. For the very existence of the Catholic schools depended on the supply of well trained and devoted teachers. There is also for the nineteenth century much first hand material, not hitherto published, in the Reports of the Catholic Poop School Committee, in the Reports of the Committee of Councils and at Mount Pleasant Training College, Liverpool and for the short lived college at the Holy Child Convent, Mayfield, Sussex. The developments of the present century are covered in less detail since by the end of the nineteenth century, the colleges had become part of the established provision for teacher training in this country and the pattern, once laid down was followed in great measure by succeeding foundations, though the history of each college has of course its special fascination and its distinctive features. With the coming of the Three Year Course and the opening of new colleges planned for the early sixties, we may be on the eve of a new heroic age, but that is another story.