The history of state education in Queensland commences with the Moreton Bay penal settlement of New South Wales in Australia, which became the responsibility of the Queensland Government after the Separation of Queensland from New South Wales in 1859.
Primary education
New South Wales In 1826 the first primary school was conducted in Brisbane, then the Moreton Bay penal settlement of New South Wales, by Esther Roberts, a soldier's wife. Although her stipend of £10 was drawn from the funds of the New South Wales colonial government, her school was actually administered by the Anglican Church because in those days it was generally believed that it was the duty of the Church to conduct schools. After a succession of teachers, mostly soldiers, the school was closed in 1842 with the closure of the penal settlement in favour of opening the district for free settlement. CC-BY 4.0
Almost all of the schools in the early free settlement period were short-lived. Many were private establishments in front parlours, with a few boarders and day students. Fees and pretensions to gentility were high; standards seem to have been low. In 1845 the first Roman Catholic school was opened by Michael Bourke, thus beginning a pattern of small denominational schools which provided education of a sort for almost 20 years in Brisbane. Many children in the Moreton Bay District, however, went without any formal education.
In 1848 the Governor of New South Wales, Charles Augustus FitzRoy, appointed a Board of National Education to undertake the task of creating government schools similar to the National Schools in Ireland. This was a response to the problem of providing an efficient system of elementary education for a scattered population of different religious denominations, without seriously antagonising those denominations. As a compromise, the New South Wales National Schools offered secular subjects and non-denominational scripture lessons and allowed visiting clergy to provide religious instruction during school hours to the children of those parents who desired it. A Denominational Board, appointed a day after the National Board, did not exercise much supervisory power. Its major function was to distribute funds to the four existing systems of church schools.
The National Board established and administered schools where parents contributed a third of the total building costs and guaranteed an average attendance of at least 30 pupils. The parents also had to pay school fees which formed part of the teacher's salary paid by the Board. The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, grammar, geography, object lessons (including biography, nature studies and elementary mechanics), scripture lessons and, in the final year, mathematics (algebra and geometry) or Latin. The reading books were the Irish National Readers which had no Australian content.
Four National schools were established in Queensland: Warwick (opened in 1850), Drayton (opened in 1851), Brisbane Boys and Brisbane Girls (both opened in 1860).
Early Queensland
Queensland was declared a separate colony from New South Wales on 10 December 1859 and in the following year the Queensland Parliament faced the task of providing an education system for the new colony. They provided a Board of General Education which combined the functions of the National and Denominational Boards of New South Wales. The new Board acquired the four National schools from New South Wales and had the authority to establish and administer primary schools vested in the Board under similar conditions to those applied by the New South Wales National Board. The new board also paid the salaries of teachers in non-vested schools, nearly all of which were established and administered by churches. By stipulating certain conditions for the payment of these salaries, the Board of General Education exercised close supervision over the non-vested schools. CC-BY 4.0
The curriculum provided by vested schools was the same as that provided by the earlier National schools but clergy wishing to give religious instruction were expected to attend before or after school hours, a practice which made such instruction unpopular with many parents. In 1862 a new building, designated the Brisbane Normal School was erected within the grounds of the Brisbane Boys and Brisbane Girls Primary Schools. Margaret Berry was the head of Brisbane Normal Girls Primary School and the Brisbane Normal Boys School was separate. The most important function of the Normal Schools was that they were also training centres where pupil-teachers could see the best and most efficient teaching methods in operation.
The pupil-teacher system was a cheap form of recruitment, though perhaps a little hard on the pupils and teachers involved. Children as young as 14 were enlisted as apprentices, working as class teachers during the school day and receiving their teacher training before and after school. Pupil-teachers at the Normal School were well trained, but only a fraction of Queensland's teacher needs could be met in this way. The training system was therefore modified to allow head teachers of other schools to train pupil-teachers, thus relieving the pressure on the Brisbane centre.
In 1869 the board provided provisional schools. These represented one of the earliest efforts to tackle a perennial problem of Queensland education - how to provide basic education to a scattered population with a limited education budget. Because they could be opened with as few as 15 children (reduced later to 12), provisional schools were a means of providing education in areas where the expense of a full state school was unjustified, or where the local people were unable to raise the necessary contributions towards a state school. The local people were responsible for providing a suitable building, and provisional school buildings were often of a very low standard. Moreover, teachers' salaries were low, and their standards of training correspondingly poor. As their name implies, provisional schools were intended as a temporary expedient which would eventually be replaced by standard state schools. Sometimes, when a locality prospered into a large, stable settlement, this happened; often, however, the provisional school withered away as population shifted, the gold played out or the railway moved further west.
Another significant advance came in 1870 when the payment of fees to National schools was abolished. There seems to have been little regularity in the amount or collection of fees which could be as high as one shilling per week per child. Although fees certainly augmented the meagre salaries of some teachers, their collection seems to have resulted in irregular attendance by the students.
By the 1870s, Queensland was experiencing a wave of prosperity brought on by gold rushes and the start of the mineral boom. Queensland was invigorated with a sense of democracy and national purpose, leading to the State Education Act 1875 which provided the following initiatives: Primary education for children aged from 6 to 12 was to be compulsory. (This provision was not fully implemented until 1900.) Education was to be secular, i.e. under the control of the Queensland Government. (In conformity with this policy, all assistance to non-vested schools was withdrawn in 1880. This provision occasioned considerable ill-feeling among Roman Catholics and some Anglicans.) Primary education was to be free. A Department of Public Instruction was established to administer the Act. The architects of the act were Charles Lilley and Samuel Griffith, two of the most astute leaders in the young colony.
Department of Public Instruction
Closer settlement in Queensland progressed rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s and, consequently, the number of schools rose from 231 in 1875 to 911 in 1900. This situation strained the colony's limited education budget and created problems of inadequate teacher supply and training, a proliferation of poorly designed and equipped provisional schools, and a perennial teacher housing problem in rural areas. These problems, however, should be kept in perspective: despite the difficulties, colonial educators achieved a remarkable feat in bring basic literacy to most Queensland children by 1900. CC-BY 4.0
Though a number of highly qualified teachers were imported from Britain in the 1880s, the pupil-teacher system was the main method of recruiting and training teachers. Not until 1914, when a teacher training college was established in Brisbane, was it possible to upgrade the standard of teacher preparation beyond the level of the pupil-teacher system, which was phased out between 1923 and 1935. Moreover, the disproportionate number of provisional schools in the colonial period helped keep the overall standard of buildings and teaching down. In 1908 there were 640 of these essentially makeshift schools compared with only 461 state schools. A significant development came in 1909 when the minimum attendance required for a state school was reduced from 30 to 12. This led to the reclassification of large numbers of provisional schools as state schools, and meant that new districts applying for a school were more likely to be granted a state school. Consequently, in 1909 there were 1059 state schools and only 79 provisional schools in Queensland.
The basis of the colonial curriculum was the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). In addition, object lessons (show and tell lessons), drill and gymnastics, and vocal music were supposed to be taught, but in practice these relatively new subjects were often ignored or poorly taught. Geography, needlework, grammar, history and mechanics were also included in the curriculum at various levels. While some of these subjects were included for their practical usefulness, the main criterion for inclusion of subjects in the curriculum was not their practical value, but their value in disciplining ("sharpening") mental faculties such as memory and reasoning.
The influence of this mental discipline concept on the curriculum was receding by the 1890s. Such subjects as agriculture and domestic economy were introduced as part of object lessons, and the introduction of Arbor Day in 1890 also reflected a growing concern for the utility of the knowledge and values imparted in schools. By 1905, when important syllabus changes were made, the value of subjects was increasingly assessed in terms of their everyday usefulness, and "learning by doing" was stressed. The child rather than the teacher, was becoming the centre of the learning process, at least in theory. These changes in the philosophy of education, combined with attempts to mould the content and methods of teaching to the peculiar geographic conditions of Queensland, were major influences on education for the next six decades.
A major consequence of these trends was the increasing emphasis on vocational subjects such as manual training and agriculture. This reflects not only the new educational ideas, but also the idea held by many educators that economic growth was essential to the progress and strength of Queensland. In 1905, for example, nature study was included in the curriculum. This subject included elements of agriculture, botany and biology. Then in 1910 a teacher of agriculture was appointed to travel among the schools. This teacher's work laid a basis for the project club system developed after 1923. In addition, in 1917 the Rural School concept was introduced at Nambour State School. In this new type of vocational school, boys were taught manual skills, elementary agriculture and farm management, while girls were taught home management and needlework skills. Rural Schools remained an important part of the education system till the 1960s.