This is a certificate which was awarded to Lucy Sherwin for winning a scholarship place at Manchester High School in 1898. A scholarship place was a free place - Lucy's parents did not have to pay fees.
The problem of school fees
Manchester High School for Girls has always been a fee - paying school. These were the fees in 1898:
|
Entrance fee |
£0 10s |
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Fee per term for pupils under 10 |
£3 3s |
|
Fee per term for girls over 10 |
£4 4s |
|
Fee per term for girls over 14 |
£5 5s |
|
Pianoforte lessons per term for an hour or two half hours weekly |
£2 2s |
Such fees could have been paid by most Victorian middle class fathers such as doctors and teachers and by some working class men such as skilled workers and shopkeepers, but there were many poor people at that time who could not afford to pay so much for their daughter's education.
Unskilled labourers earned about 4 shillings a week and in the 1880s nearly two thirds of working men in nearby Salford earned less than that.
Families were also large at that time. Parents usually thought that it was far more important to pay for their sons to have a good education than for their daughters. They assumed that their daughters would marry whereas their sons would have to earn a living.
The first scholarships
From the beginning there were scholarships at Manchester High School. The school was established to promote the education of girls and "to provide for Manchester's daughters what has been provided without stint for Manchester's sons."
The founders of the school were determined that girls who could take advantage of the academic education it offered would be helped with their fees if their parents were unable to pay them. Scholarships were awarded on the results of scholarship exams. There are three examples of such scholarship exam papers on this website.
The first scholarships were awarded in 1874, the year the school was founded. The first School Prospectus states that a lady and a doctor had given scholarships to the school. This means that they would both pay the school fees of a pupil at the school throughout her school life.
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It was announced last year that two scholarships have been offered for competition, one by a lady for the daughter of a clergyman and the other by Sir James Bardsley for the daughter of a physician.
This year the examiners awarded one of them to Mary Geden, daughter of the Reverend J D Geden, Professor in the Wesleyan Theological College in Didsbury and the other to Elizabeth Harrison, daughter of G Morley Harrison, surgeon of Ardwick Green. |