The Penal Laws of the 1690s restricted the ability of Irish Catholics to access education by prohibiting the establishment of Catholic schools. Catholic children were instead taught in informal schools, often situated outside, known as hedge schools.
Although the penal laws were relaxed in the late 18th century, hedge schools persisted and the third Royal Commission of Inquiry into Education in Ireland, which sat between 1825 and 1827, found that about 350,000 Catholic children were being educated, largely in hedge schools.
The lengthy appendix to the second report of the commission is a list, gathered from returns made by the local Catholic and Protestant clergy, detailing more than 11,000 schools, including hedge schools. Over 12,000 teachers, employed in 1824, were enumerated alongside a description of their school. If your ancestor was a teacher in early 19th-century Ireland then they may appear in this appendix, which has been fully indexed at Ancestry but can also be found using ProQuest’s UK Parliamentary Papers Online, freely available in most established libraries and universities. In addition, it can be downloaded as a PDF costing €19.99 from the Irish Family History Centre’s website.
Following the publication of the commissioners’ reports and in line with similar education initiatives across Europe, the Board of Commissioners for National Education in Ireland was established in 1831, to roll out a National School system. The British government often used Ireland as a laboratory for testing policies before they were implemented in England, Scotland or Wales, which means that the provision of free primary education for the population was first introduced in Ireland.
The commissioners funded and oversaw the building and staffing of non-denominational National Schools across the country. The Catholic church embraced the opportunity to play a role in the education of Catholic children, despite the secular nature of the curriculum, and parish priests were nominated as managers for local schools, agreeing to keep religious education separate. The Church of Ireland was more circumspect, and remained outside of the system during its early years.
The administration of national education by the commissioners generated an enormous volume of paperwork, which contains a great deal of information about the teachers who were employed. The entire collection is held by the National Archives of Ireland in Dublin (NAI) under the reference ED. The most useful files are ED/1, the initial applications for school grants; ED/2, the administrative registers for the school; ED/4, teachers’ salary books; and ED/9, correspondence files.
The grant application forms found at ED/1 include a section about the teacher employed at the time of the application, detailing their name, age and educational qualifications.
The school registers at ED/2 do not detail the students attending the school, but rather the results of inspections of the school, further applications for financial support, changes of staff and promotion of teachers. The registers are peppered with comments about the teacher’s competence, and whether the students are attending school and meeting their educational milestones, alongside details of the size and condition of the school.
The annual teacher salary books found at ED/4 can be used to establish when a teacher was transferred to a different school, how much they were paid, and whether they purchased items for the school room, such as a clock or map, out of their own pocket. The salary books date from the 1830s and are initially organised by county and roll number, and later by district number.
In order to locate the salary books and other material for the school your ancestor taught at, you will need to know the school name, roll number and district number. These numbers will be recorded on an index card for the school, found in cabinets in the NAI’s Reading Room. The cards are organised by county and then by the name of the school. Most schools were named for the townland in which they were located.
The index cards also recorded references to the ED/1, ED/2 and ED/9 files that pertain specifically to that school, offering a shortcut to a large number of relevant files.
The most varied files are found at ED/9, which includes correspondence between the board and the school manager or teacher. The files can relate to teaching qualifications, accommodation of teachers and improvements to the school building. For example, ED/9/6881 is a folder of correspondence regarding the transfer of the teacher’s dwelling house to teacher Hanora Forde, after the resignation and departure of her husband, Andrew Forde, in 1891. In his letter, the school manager states that he took pity on Hanora, who had been left with their seven small children, without means to support herself, and granted her continued use of the house as well as employment at the school.
None of this material has been digitised and is only available in the NAI. It is largely organised by the name or roll number of the school, so the first step to documenting your ancestor’s life as a teacher in Ireland is to identify the school in which they were teaching.
If your forebear can be found employed as a teacher in the 1901 or 1911 census, they were likely living in the schoolhouse or nearby. A search of Form B1 House and Building Returns for each townland in the District Electoral Division in which your relation was found should reveal a reference to a schoolhouse. The townland name should be the name of the National School, and you can pursue records for the school, including salary books, to establish how long your ancestor was employed and where they were employed earlier or later in their career.
In 1905, a return of all of the National School teachers employed by the commissioners was prepared for the Privy Council Office. The list, arranged alphabetically by surname, is available to download from the NAI. The list recorded the name, age and length of service of the teacher, as well as their places of education and the school in which they were employed, along with the school roll number. Place of education is important because it was usually a National School, located close to the teacher’s parents’ home. Using the age and place of education information, it should be possible to calculate where the teacher was residing when they were a child.
Particularly intelligent children were usually kept in school assisting the teacher, and were known as monitors. They were often sent to the Model Schools, established by the commission as teacher-training schools. Alternatively, they were sent to one of the Catholic or Protestant teacher-training colleges. There are roll books for the teacher-training colleges in the NAI (ED/TD), some of which date from the 1880s, which document the attendance and exam results of students and their probationary postings following qualification. ED/TD/1/1/18 documents a Jane Renwick Lister, who entered the Marlborough Street Teacher Training College in Dublin, aged 18 years and 4 months in September 1911, having been a monitor at Carlow Convent Infants National School. She was described as “lively, sympathetic, Ladylike” with good disciplinary powers, and went on to teach in several schools in Armagh and Belfast following qualification.
There is a great deal of material documenting National School teachers in Ireland through the 19th and early 20th century. Unfortunately, little is currently available online, and an in-depth search will require a day at the NAI, or possibly several days if you want to work methodically through the salary books to document an entire career of a teacher in Ireland.
