Teacher Training and the Normal Schools

The term baffles modern readers because "normal" has drifted in meaning. A 19th-century normal school had nothing to do with pupils' behaviour or ability — it was an institution for training teachers, named for the French école normale, where "normal" meant a model or rule-setting standard of teaching method. The school's job was to demonstrate the "norm" — the correct method — not to sort or specialise in a type of child.

The founding dates, institutional names, and core pedagogical descriptions in this card — the 1813 origins of the Edinburgh Sessional School, the 1835 formalisation of its teacher-training programme, David Stow's Glasgow institution and his "Training System," and the later evolution into Moray House — are documented in university archival histories and standard biographical reference works, and are stated as fact. The claim that Scotland's normal schools were "among the earliest in Britain" is treated as traditional: it is a comparative ranking repeated across many secondary accounts rather than a single precisely sourced measurement, since "earliest" depends on exactly which training activity (informal apprenticeship, monitorial training, or a dedicated normal-school building and curriculum) is being compared. There are no significant legend-myth claims specific to this topic beyond the common modern misunderstanding of the term "normal school" itself, which this card corrects directly.

What "normal school" actually meant

The phrase trips up modern readers because the ordinary meaning of "normal" — usual, typical, unremarkable — has nothing to do with its 19th-century educational sense. The term derives from the French école normale, where "normal" carried its older Latin-rooted meaning of a rule, standard or model (norma). A normal school was, in effect, a standard-setting school: an institution whose purpose was to establish and demonstrate a correct, replicable method of teaching, which trainee teachers observed and practised before taking that method out into ordinary classrooms. Crucially, as contemporary accounts of David Stow's Glasgow institution make explicit, "the Normal School existed to train teachers, not to provide them with an education" — it was assumed, at least in principle, that aspiring teachers already possessed the general schooling needed, and the normal school's distinct job was professional training in how to teach, not what to know.

Edinburgh: from sessional school to formal training programme

Scotland's teacher-training story in this period runs along two main tracks, one centred on Edinburgh and one on Glasgow. The Edinburgh track began earlier but more gradually. The city's churches opened the Edinburgh Sessional School in 1813 at Leith Wynd, responding to education gaps exposed by social unrest two years earlier. It began using Joseph Lancaster's monitorial method — older pupils ("monitors") drilling younger ones under a single master's supervision — before switching in 1818 to the rival Madras system developed by Andrew Bell. Formal interest in training teachers, rather than simply running a school, gathered pace from 1824, when Rev. George Baird, Principal of Edinburgh University, pressed concerns on the Church of Scotland's General Assembly, which responded by forming a dedicated Education Committee. Following the school's 1824 move to Market Street, it functioned by 1826 as a designated "model" school, notably used to train Gaelic-speaking teachers for Highland parishes. The decisive step came in 1835, when, under John Wood's direction, the school adopted a genuinely formal teacher-training programme: structured daily instruction in subject content combined with supervised practice teaching as monitors, typically completed in around six months and certified by diploma for those judged proficient. In 1837 the institution was renamed the Normal and Sessional School of Edinburgh, by then training more than fifty teachers a year alongside roughly 300 ordinary pupils, and in 1841 a government grant funded a dedicated new building at Johnston Terrace — one of the first instances of UK state money flowing directly into teacher-training infrastructure.

Glasgow: David Stow and the "Training System"

Running roughly in parallel, and frequently credited with equal or greater historical significance, was the work of David Stow in Glasgow. Working through the Glasgow Educational Society, Stow opened his Normal Seminary around 1836–37, built on an approach he called the "Training System." Where earlier monitorial schools concentrated almost entirely on rote instruction of academic content, Stow's method deliberately addressed "the whole nature of the child... the affections and habits, as well as the intellect" — an explicitly holistic, character-forming conception of teaching that went well beyond drilling facts. Stow's school attracted visiting observers from across Britain, including the influential educational reformer James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, and teachers trained under his system were subsequently deployed not only across Scotland but into England and British colonial territories, spreading his method at a time when formal teacher preparation remained comparatively undeveloped south of the border. The institution's history was then complicated by one of 19th-century Scotland's defining religious ruptures: the Disruption of 1843, which split the Church of Scotland and, following a legal ruling in 1845 confirming Church of Scotland control of the original institution, forced Stow and his Free Church-aligned colleagues to resign and found a rival Free Church Normal Seminary — teacher training in Scotland, like schooling itself, was for decades entangled with denominational rivalry.

From normal schools to colleges of education

Both tracks — Edinburgh's and Glasgow's, and the denominational splits each produced — fed into a broader 19th-century pattern in which Scotland's main Presbyterian churches each ran their own normal schools, training teachers largely for their own networks of parish and congregational schools. This changed structurally after the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 shifted day-to-day school management from churches to secular, locally elected school boards (covered in depth elsewhere in this series), gradually pulling teacher training itself toward more standardised, state-recognised certification even where individual training institutions retained denominational roots and names for decades afterward. Over the following century, the "normal school" label itself fell out of use, with institutions rebranding as teacher-training colleges and then, in the 20th century, as colleges of education — a shift in name reflecting a shift in self-conception from narrow method-demonstration schools to broader professional education bodies. Edinburgh's line is traceable with particular clarity: the lineage running from the 1813 Sessional School through the 1835 training programme and 1837 Normal and Sessional School fed, via later institutional reorganisation, into what became Moray House College of Education and, ultimately, Moray House School of Education and Sport, now part of the University of Edinburgh. By the later 20th century this pattern repeated across Scotland, as colleges of education were absorbed into university faculties of education, ending the normal school and college-of-education era as a distinct institutional category and folding teacher preparation into the mainstream university system that trains Scottish teachers today.

Grants, pupil-teachers and women

established The state's lever. Robert Anderson, in his chapter of Scottish Education (5th edn, 2018), explains how the state shaped training long before it ran the colleges. State aid began in the 1830s with building grants and was supervised from 1840 by a Scottish inspectorate. In 1846 it was reorganised into annual grants for schools that followed the government's curricular Code. That system encouraged the "pupil-teacher" apprenticeship, in which promising older pupils were trained on the job and then went on to the church-run normal or training colleges. The state did not discriminate between denominations in giving grants, which is why the Church of Scotland and the Free Church could each run colleges side by side after 1843. Ann MacDonald and Ann Rae, writing on initial teacher education in the same volume, add that the Free Church bought Moray House in Edinburgh for teacher training in 1848, and that training centres were all under government control by 1907.

established A route for women. Anderson notes that the training colleges offered women a significant path to independence and social mobility, even though women did not outnumber men in the profession until well after 1872. Aileen Kennedy, citing Helen Corr's research, gives the scale of the shift: about 35 per cent of Scottish teachers were women by 1851 and about 70 per cent by 1911. Kennedy also records that women teachers were paid roughly half as much as men in the late 19th century and were subject to a marriage bar.

established From colleges to universities. Teacher education kept a foot in the universities throughout. Simon Laurie became the first holder of the Bell Chair of Education at Edinburgh in 1876, and colleges such as Moray House kept links with the university. The training colleges were renamed colleges of education in 1958 and were encouraged to expand and award degrees. The last intake to the three-year primary Diploma in Education was in 1983, after which the BEd made teaching a graduate-only profession. The General Teaching Council for Scotland, created by statute in 1965, controls entry to the profession and accredits training courses. In the 1990s the colleges merged into universities as faculties or schools of education, a move MacDonald and Rae link partly to the difficulty of financing them as separate bodies.

• The word "normal" in "normal school" comes from the French norma (a rule or standard), not from any sense of pupils being typical or well-behaved — it described the teaching method being standardised, not the children being taught.
• David Stow's Glasgow institution explicitly trained teachers, not pupils — contemporary descriptions stress it existed "to train teachers not to provide them with an education."
• The 1843 Disruption, a split within the Church of Scotland over church governance, directly disrupted teacher training too, forcing David Stow out of the institution he had founded and prompting him to start a rival Free Church Normal Seminary.
• Edinburgh's early teacher-training programme, from 1826, was specifically used to train Gaelic-speaking teachers destined for Highland parishes — an early, targeted response to Scotland's linguistic diversity.
• An 1841 government grant funded a purpose-built Edinburgh training college at Johnston Terrace — a rare and early instance of direct UK state investment in teacher-training infrastructure, decades before state funding of schools generally became routine.
• David Stow's "Training System," which addressed children's character and conduct alongside academic content, drew visits from influential English educational reformers, including James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth.
• Teachers trained under Stow's Glasgow method were exported well beyond Scotland, including into British colonial school systems, spreading a specifically Scottish teaching methodology internationally.
• The modern University of Edinburgh's Moray House School of Education and Sport traces an institutional lineage back to the 1813 Edinburgh Sessional School, making it one of the longest continuously traceable teacher-education lineages in Britain.

• Do not state that "normal school" referred to schools for "normal" (typical or well-behaved) pupils. Correct phrasing: the term described an institution modelling a standard teaching method, derived from the French école normale and the Latin norma (a rule or standard).
• Do not state flatly that Scotland's normal schools were "the first" in Britain. Correct phrasing: they are widely and credibly described as "among the earliest," a comparative and traditional claim, since the exact ranking depends on how formal teacher training is defined and measured.
• Do not state that Stow's seminary was the first teacher-training institution in Europe, even though one chapter of the 2018 Scottish Education says so. Prussian teachers' seminaries and the French école normale of 1794 came earlier.
• Do not state that David Stow's Glasgow institution and the Edinburgh Normal and Sessional School were the same institution. Correct phrasing: they were separate, parallel institutions in different cities, both significant, with distinct founders and histories.
• Do not state that normal schools and modern teacher-training university departments are the same institutions simply renamed. Correct phrasing: there is a genuine, traceable institutional lineage in cases such as Moray House, but normal schools, training colleges, and colleges of education represent successive, structurally distinct stages, culminating in absorption into university faculties.
• Do not state that teacher training in Scotland was state-controlled from the outset. Correct phrasing: early Scottish normal schools were predominantly church-run (Church of Scotland, later also Free Church after 1843), with the state's role limited mainly to occasional grants (such as the 1841 Edinburgh building grant) until the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 and its aftermath shifted the balance toward state oversight.