In England things were very different, because of the Infant Schools which had already been established, but which had fallen far below the ideal set up by Robert Owen.  As every one knows, the education given in those days to teachers of Elementary Schools was but meagre, and the results were often so bad that, to justify the expenditure of public money, “payment by results” was introduced.  In 1870 came the Education Act, and the year 1874 saw a good deal of movement.  Miss Caroline Bishop was appointed to lecture to the Infants’ teachers under the London School Board; Miss Heerwart took charge of a training college for Kindergarten teachers in connection with the British and Foreign School Society; the Froehel Society was founded, and Madame Michaelis took the Kindergarten into the newly established High Schools for Girls.  For the children of the well-to-do Kindergartens spread rapidly, but for the children of the poor there was no such happiness; the Infant School was too firmly established as a place where children learned to read, write and count, and above all to sit still.  Infants’ teachers received no special training for their work; their course of study, in which professional training played but a small part, was the same as that prescribed for the teachers of older children.  Some colleges, notably The Home and Colonial, Stockwell, and Saffron Walden, did try to give their students some special training, but it was not of much avail, and the word Kindergarten came to mean not Nursery School, as was the idea of its founder, but dictated exercises with Kindergarten material, a kind of manual drill supposed to give “hand and eye training,” and with this meaning it made its appearance on the time-table.

Visitors from America were shocked to find no Kindergartens in England, but only large classes of poor little automatons sitting erect with “hands behind” or worse still “hands on heads,” and moving only to the word of command.  One lady who ultimately found her way to our own Kindergarten told me that she had been informed at the L.C.C. offices that there were no Kindergartens in London.

It was partly the scandalised expressions of these American teachers that stimulated Miss Adelaide Wragge to take her courage into her hands, and in the year 1900 to open the first Mission Kindergarten in England.  She called it a Mission, not a Free Kindergarten, partly because the parents paid the trifling fee of one penny per week, and partly because it was connected with the parish work of Holy Trinity, Woolwich, of which her brother was vicar.  The first report says:  “The neighbourhood was suitable for the experiment; little children, needing just the kind of training we proposed to give them, abounded everywhere....  The Woolwich children were typical slum babies, varying in ages from three to six years; very poor, very dirty, totally untrained in good habits.  At first we only admitted a few, and when these began to improve, gradually increased the numbers to thirty-five.  They needed great patience and care, but they responded wonderfully to the love given them, and before long they were real Kindergarten children, full of vigour, merriment and self-activity.”