Scarsdale

James P. Kay-Shuttleworth was born into a prominent Lancashire family. As a youth he worked in the bank of a relative and seemed set on finance as a profession. However, in 1824 he enrolled in the University of Edinburgh as a medical student and soon proved to be one of the most promising of his class. The result is one of his most famous texts, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), in which he describes the horrendous unsanitary conditions that the working classes faced daily. In 1835, he became an assistant Poor Law commissioner and began his investigations into the training of pauper children, the first report on which he published in 1841. His efforts in this area led him to become interested in the establishment of publicly funded education in England.

Along with E. Carleton Tufnell, Kay-Shuttleworth established the first training college for teachers at Battersea. He advocated the use of student teachers - older students who would teach elementary school children and in return receive secondary school education from the elementary school headmasters. He was also a strong advocate of a school inspection system and was instrumental in establishing British public education.

Although little work has been done on Kay-Shuttleworth, he was one of the most influential men of the period. His early work on the conditions of the working class in Lancashire is unparalleled for its investigative rigor and its unflinching gaze at the opprobrium that the manufacturing towns produced.

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