At the beginning of the Victorian period, the quality of education available to working class children was, at best, variable. Many families were reliant on the incomes that their children could provide from going out to work and illiteracy was widespread throughout the country. Locally, the children from poor families who were lucky enough to acquire basic reading and writing skills probably did so through the many Sunday Schools of Wellington’s local churches and chapels.
The Church of England was the main provider of education in the town and their National School, a plain, two-storey edifice, stood in the churchyard directly to the east of the Almshouses. Before 1835, the school was a charity institution supported by donations and managed by the parish church. Records of a free Grammar School within the church building itself exist as far back as 1534 and, by 1799, there were 60 pupils being educated in the charity school, which received a maintenance grant that had once been paid to the earlier foundation. In 1842, a separate school for infants was established on the site but the building became so overcrowded that junior pupils were moved to a new school on Constitution Hill in 1855, with the infants following them in 1897.
By the 1870s, it had become clear Britain’s educational facilities were lagging some way behind their European counterparts and the Government of the day was no longer content to leave schooling to the church organisations who had until then dominated popular education. In 1872, the first Local School Board in Shropshire was formed in Wellington and given sweeping powers to manage existing schools in the area and provide new facilities to be paid for by the local ratepayers. The Board took over the running of the Constitution Hill School and its charities in 1876 and, by the end of the era, no other town in the county had as many publicly funded schools. More importantly, when the Board abolished school fees in 1891, all children in the town under the age of 11 were finally given the right to a compulsory, free education.