Payment by Results in Nineteenth-Century British Education: A Study in How Priorities Change

Until 1862, the British government funded elementary (primary) education through a variety of grants, which had been awarded on an ad hoc basis since 1833. In 1862, the then government abolished all the grants that had been available and replaced them with a single set of grants. From that point, schools received money if children attended on a regular basis and if they passed various tests, in reading, writing and arithmetic, set by a professional set of inspectors. At the time, this system was described as payment by results. During the 1860s and 1870s, this policy was adapted and in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s it was phased out. This represents an interesting case study for understanding why a policy was created and why it changed. Rather than as previous scholars asserted, policy changing because of a clear failure, we shall find that policy changed because of changes both to attitudes to education and because of changes in the power of affected interest groups. We shall find that though the policy succeeded in achieving its narrowly based objectives, it was vulnerable precisely because it was narrowly based. Once success in literacy and numeracy was achieved, it was reasonable to ask what the point of payment by results was.

Contemporary scholarship in political science often assumes that policy change arises because of learning. As Heikkila and Gerlak state, “The role of learning in shaping public policy has long been recognized by prominent scholars.”¹ In supporting their theory of punctuated equilibrium, Baumgartner and Jones argue that while policymakers can ignore reality, “information that is ignored will accumulate over time, producing occasional lurches or policy punctuations.”² While there is some empirical evidence supporting these claims, scholars have found that crises often don’t result in the expected changes. In one study, Lowry and Ostrander found that despite many crises in the oil industry, U.S. oil policy was remarkably constant.³ In the case of this study, previous historians have often argued that payment by results failed in its own terms. Marsham and Jabbar see the policy as an unmitigated failure.⁴ Sutherland argues that the policy eventually changed because politicians and civil servants realized it was inefficient and attached to poor educational outcomes.⁵ Sutherland dates the change to a particular crisis in the policy, when observers realized that children were suffering psychological stress because of examinations and dates the first major public campaign against payment by results to this event.⁶ As we shall see, such an account both fails to include other factors such as increased professionalization and misses the fact that overpressure only became an issue because of developments in Victorian attitudes to childhood. The conventional account of payment by results in this period has a lot more validity when we think about school attendance: for a variety of reasons, payment by results did not impact much upon attendances at school. Governments therefore layered reforms on top to improve attendance over payment by results.

Scholars have also sought to study the process of change, rather than seeing change as the result of a single moment of learning or disruption.⁷ This kind of account privileges two important dynamics behind change: on the one hand, the slow evolution of ideas and, on the other, feedback mechanisms through the effects of the policy on particular lobbies. What Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm, the “definition of the legitimate problems and methods” to approach problems is relevant to politics as well as science.⁸ Quentin Skinner imported Kuhn’s ideas into the history of political thought: pointing to the absurdity of treating thinkers as though they were answering a standard set of problems.⁹ Peter Hall pointed to its relevance in policymaking. Hall described three orders of policy problem: first-order or second-order problems in which goals remain fixed but techniques and levels of policymaking changed and third-order problems in which the goals themselves changed.¹⁰ Jabbar and Sutherland focus on seeing policy change from an absolute universal position: viewing payment by results from the perspective...