Henry Morris (education)

Henry Morris (1889 – 14 December 1961) is known primarily as the founder of Village Colleges. He was the Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire for over thirty years, taking up the post in 1922 during a time of depression in the United Kingdom following the First World War.

Morris was born in Southport in Lancashire in 1889. At the age of fourteen he began work as an office boy at The Southport Visiter, later becoming a reporter. In 1910 he moved to St David's University College, Lampeter to read for a degree in theology, and in 1912 moved to Exeter College, Oxford. At the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered for army service, and became an officer in the RASC. In 1919 following the end of the war he read philosophy at King's College, Cambridge.

After a year as Assistant Secretary, Henry Morris took up the post of Secretary of Education for Cambridgeshire in 1922. At one point during the Great Depression, Cambridgeshire was the second poorest county in England, despite the relative wealth of the university. Education outside of the City of Cambridge was in a poor state due to lack of funding, with no separate secondary schools in the countryside; all children between the ages of three and fourteen were educated in their village school-house, often in one room and by the same, single teacher for their entire school career. Morris envisioned integrated between secondary and community education accessible by all those living in the villages and small towns around Cambridgeshire: the idea of 'Village Colleges'. He described this as "raising the school leaving age to ninety", and firmly believed that education, both formal and informal, should be a lifelong process. In the 1930s his visions materialised as the Village Colleges he had initially only hoped for, and the first four Village Colleges in Cambridgeshire were opened before the country became heavily involved in the conflicts of the Second World War.

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