It was in 1908 that Miss Esther Lawrence of the Froebel Institute inspired her old students to help her to open The Michaelis Free Kindergarten.  Since the war, the name has been altered to The Michaelis Nursery School, which is in Netting Dale, on the edge of a very poor neighbourhood, where large families often occupy a single room.  As in the Edinburgh Free Kindergartens, dinner is provided, for which the parents pay one penny.  The first report tells how necessary are Nursery Schools in such surroundings.  “The little child who was formerly tied to the leg of the bed, and left all day while his mother was out at work, is now enjoying the happy freedom of the Kindergarten.  The child whose clothes were formerly sewn on to him, to save his mother the periodical labour of sewing on buttons, is now undressed and bathed regularly.  The attacks on children by drunken parents are less frequent.  When the Kindergarten was first opened, many of the children were quite listless, they did not know how to play, did not care to play.  Now they play with pleasure and with vigour, and one can hardly believe they are the listless, spiritless children of a year ago.”

In 1910 Miss Lawrence succeeded in opening what was called from the first the “Somers Town Nursery School,” where the same kind of work is done.  One of the reports says:  “It is interesting to see the children sweeping or dusting a room, washing their dusters and dolls’ clothes, polishing the furniture, their shoes, and anything which needs polishing.  On Friday morning the ‘silver’ is cleaned, and the brilliant results give great pleasure and satisfaction to the little polishers.  ‘Have you done your work?’ was the question addressed to a visitor by a three-year-old child, and the visitor beat a hasty retreat, ashamed perhaps of being the only drone in the busy hive.  At dinner time four children wait on the rest, and very well and quickly the food is handed round and the plates removed.”

There are other Free Kindergartens at work.  One is in charge of Miss Rowland, and is in connection with the Bermondsey Settlement.  It is Miss Rowland who tells of the “candid mother” she met one Saturday who remarked, “I told the children to wash their faces in case they met you.”

The Phoenix Park Kindergarten in Glasgow is interesting because the site was granted by an enlightened Corporation and the Parks Committee laid out the garden, while the real start came from the pupils of a school for girls of well-to-do families.  By this time other social agencies have been grouped round the Kindergarten as a centre.

The Caldecott Nursery School was opened in 1911 and has grown into the Caldecott Community, which has now taken its children to live altogether in the country.  This Nursery School was never intended to be a Kindergarten; it was started as an interesting experiment, “chiefly perhaps in the hope that the children might enjoy that instruction which is usually absorbed by the children of the wealthy in their own nurseries by virtue of their happier surroundings.”