Founded in 1851 as the ‘Wesleyan Normal Institute’, Westminster College was a Methodist teacher training college which relocated to Harcourt Hill on the edge of Oxford in 1959. By this time, the Methodist Education Committee had been attempting to relocate the College for thirty years, and had considered a number of locations as potentially suitable, including sites linked to the University Colleges of Hull and Leicester. From 1930, Westminster College operated a four-year training scheme: three years of undergraduate study at a University of London college, and one year of teacher training at the College itself. Teacher training evolved considerably during the early twentieth century, shifting from a vocational training programme certified solely by the Board of Education towards primarily being the responsibility of universities. Colleges like Westminster, therefore, saw their place in education change greatly during this time, further impeded by two world wars and other changes in society. Completed under Oxford Brookes University’s research degree regulation 6.6 (“the preparation of a scholarly edition of a text or texts”), this study utilises archival material which has never been used before to understand the changing nature of the Methodist provision of teacher training; the College’s relocation to Oxford; and the flaws that this scheme represented. It also touches on ideas of belonging; the tensions between the establishment and nonconformist traditions; and early conversations surrounding environmental planning concerns.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/savg-5103
Dobson, Thomas J.
Supervisors: Clack, Beverley; Gibson, William
Faculty of Humanities and Social SciencesSchool of Education, Humanities and Languages
Year: 2024
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