Profession, “performance”, and policy: teachers, examinations, and the state in England and Wales, 1846–1862

When historians discuss the impact of examinations on elementary education in mid-Victorian England and Wales they typically focus on the Revised Code of 1862. The Revised Code is famous for instituting a policy of “payment-by-results” for teachers in state-supported voluntary schools. “Payment-by-results” made government grants to schools – and, by extension, for teachers’ salaries – contingent upon student attendance and pass rates in reading, writing and arithmetic. As this article emphasises, however, “payment-by-results” was not the first, or even the most significant, instance in which competitive examination was used by the state as an instrument for establishing the pedagogical fitness and salaries of teachers. Less often explored by historians is the formative role that state-mandated competitive examinations for teachers played in developing a professionally aspirant body of schoolteachers and, consequently, the schoolteachers’ later role in developing competitive examination as a broad-scale national accreditation apparatus. But while the use of competitive examinations came to shape modern British academic and professional life in fundamental ways, the strengthening effects that they had for certain occupations and institutions, such as physicians, civil servants and middle-class secondary schools, were in fact ultimately denied to state teachers and the elementary education sector generally. With the introduction of “payment-by-results” in 1862, competitive examinations were converted into an instrument that weakened rather than strengthened teachers’ professional identity and policy influence. This article explains how the nineteenth-century English state structured examinations and examination results to manipulate the professional status of teachers in order to suit state priorities during different stages of national development. This historical narrative is framed in reference to present-day examination-based reforms of teacher compensation systems such as performance-related-pay and value-added modelling.