Schools ahead of their time – and ours too

What will the future bring? Children at my sons’ primary school down the road had bright ideas nearly twenty-five years ago.

“…a robot in every classroom, ‘see-through’ classrooms made of glass, blackboards rubbed clean at the touch of a switch and electronically operated toilets.”

The school of the future hasn’t turned out quite as pupils imagined in 1996 though ‘see-through classrooms and electronically operated toilets’ could come in handy. The centenary book I helped to produce turned up in a cupboard clear-out during lockdown. Now a bit of a museum piece, Broughton Primary 100 casts not always favourable light on the present.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, the then headteacher Liz Gordon wanted ‘an Apple Mac computer and multi-media facilities in every classroom’. And, in the final chapter, we wondered fancifully how that might have sounded to children writing on slates one hundred years earlier. What would they have made of the emerging electronic wonders of the imminent 21^st century?

In 2020 we might ask what would teachers, pupils or parents of 1896 make of the primitive state we are in now? Their handsome new school closed and shuttered for four months? The quandary of opening up while a vigorous virus circulates unseen. It’s both intriguing and humbling to rediscover that our primary school story begins with a tribute to the late 19^th century pioneering approach to health, hygiene and infectious diseases.

Providing for body and mind

When Broughton Elementary School opened in September 1896, Edinburgh had been expanding uncomfortably fast, like other cities, with people flooding in to take the new industrial jobs. Infectious diseases rampaged through streets of overcrowded tenements. Then, as now, ill health and mortality went hand in hand with low pay and poor housing.

This new school, a tall red sandstone building on a corner between dairy farms and smoking factories, looked imposing and self-important. It was built to impress. It had an important role to play. Children were still dying of typhoid and diphtheria, and young people with ambition escaped when they could, boarding emigration ships from Leith to the New World.

Edinburgh School Board wanted to improve the health of a new generation in body and mind. Broughton Elementary School with airy classrooms, swimming pool, gymnasium, laboratories, WCs and carefully calculated ventilation was designed by the board’s own architect, Robert Wilson, to meet ideals which were well ahead of their time. Perhaps they still are.

Meet the medical officer of health

Some of the most poignant and telling entries in the School Log and School Board Minutes refer to health and social conditions.

Edinburgh was emerging as a pioneer of children’s health. Perhaps that’s not surprising. The city had appointed their first medical officer in 1862, and Henry Duncan Littlejohn sounds a force of nature – his 1865 report on the Sanitary Condition of Edinburgh is regarded as ‘a landmark in urban management and public health administration’. The Lancet (no less) described it as ‘monumental’.

Littlejohn was a devil for data. “He divided the city into 19 districts and used census-derived data to determine the population within each. He made personal observations of the sanitary conditions in the different districts and related these to the mortality data for residents of the areas obtained from the Registrar General for Scotland.”

A year after the opening of Broughton Elementary, the Public Health (Scotland) Act 1897 gave significant powers to medical officers and sanitary inspectors. Edinburgh was the first place in Scotland to appoint a Schools Medical Officer in 1907 (the year before Littlejohn’s retirement). By then schools were already required to report outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and scarlet fever to the city’s medical officer, “each day if necessary.” Weights and heights of all pupils were taken, air tests and classroom temperatures routinely monitored. The School Log notes in 1905: “Room 13 below 50 degrees, Fire lighted at 7.30 am, HM tells janitor to light it earlier.”

Disinfecting the school

In classes of 90, and more, epidemics spread rapidly, whatever the weather. School Log, May 12 1902: “School closed at 2.30 to allow for disinfection of school during epidemic of measles.”

When the janitor’s youngest child went down with measles, his house was put in quarantine. When scarlet fever broke out in nearby Rosslyn Crescent and Beaverbank, the janitor disinfected the school with carbolic acid.

Medical officers of health, according to Prof Tom Devine, were a formidable breed. He names J B Russell in Glasgow, Mathew Hay in Aberdeen and Henry Littlejohn in Edinburgh. “They led the battle for cleanliness, drainage, public parks, civic fever hospitals, better housing and collections of statistics to the continual embarrassment of the city fathers.”

Their influence spread and lingered in cities across Britain. In 1950s London, my husband remembers his mother receiving a visit from the health visitor when she sent a note of absence – if he had an infectious disease, the school needed to know. But after WW2, medical officers of health increasingly relinquished responsibilities to the newly established NHS and other agencies.  From 1972 the National Health Service (Scotland) Act transferred their roles to the new Health Boards and two years later the post of MOH was discontinued, as Glasgow University records: “to the regret of many who remembered their forcible approach to public health in Britain.”

Epilogue

Our future visions in 1996 ended with hopes for the changing landscape around the old Victorian building. In place of smoking factories brownfield sites offered scope for new homes, with open green space for community gardens and tree planting. Some of that came to pass though no-one foresaw that the new homes of nearby ‘Hopetoun Urban Village’ would provide such fertile ground for Airbnb.

What now? In August 2020 we might share some of the special excitement of 1896 children starting school, ‘marching in to the rhythm of a piano on the landing’ – and note with shame that the Committee for Feeding and Clothing Destitute Children (“On Condition of Their attendance at School”) was handing out clothing and free meals – “to very poor children a ticket for breakfast is also given.”

Not enough has changed, but we might learn from the progressive thinking which gave power to local public health officers who understood local lives and deaths.