History
The first infant schools were established by Samuel Wilderspin, influenced by the schools set up at New Lanark by Robert Owen. They influenced development in continental Europe and North America.
When education became compulsory in England from 1877, infant schools were incorporated into the state school system.
Infant and junior schools were often separate schools, but the final three decades of the 20th century saw many infant and junior departments coming together as single primary schools. The late 1960s and 1970s saw hundreds of infant schools in Britain abolished in favour of 5-8 or 5-9 first schools, but some of these were abolished in favour of a return to infant schools by the early 1980s and most of them have now followed suit.
The introduction of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 meant that classes in infant schools in England and Wales are limited to no more than 30 children per school teacher.
Read more about this topic: Infant School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)