Macclesfield Sunday School

It was founded by John Whitaker whose objective was "to lessen the sum of human wretchedness by diffusing religious knowledge and useful learning among the lower classes of society".

Sunday schools were first set up in the 1780s to provide education to working children on their one-day off from the factory.

[2] It was proposed by Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal in an article in his paper and supported by many clergymen.

By 1895, the Society for the Establishment and Promotion of Sunday Schools had distributed 91,915 spelling books, 24,232 Testaments and 5,360 Bibles.

[2] The Sunday School movement was cross-denominational, and through subscription built large buildings that could host public lectures as well as classrooms.

In the early days, adults attended the same classes as the infants, as each were instructed in basic reading.

[4] Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, who founded a school there in 1769.

[5] However, the founding of Sunday schools is more commonly associated with the work of Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal, who saw the need to prevent children in the slums descending into crime.

The town-based middle class may have sent their sons to grammar school; daughters were left to learn what they could from their mothers or from their father's library.

In the home of Mrs. Meredith, he opened the first school on Sunday, the only day these boys and girls living in the slums and working in the factories could attend.

[1] In 1796, John Whitaker, a leading Methodist whose father was an alderman, commenced a free Sunday School for 40 children in Pickford Street.

Some questioned the need for the chapel to invest in education, and whether the poor should be taught to read and write, but a Sunday school was opened in 1902–3 with 160 pupils.

[8] The Primitive Methodists established themselves in Macclesfield in 1819, and had their own well-attended Sunday School classes and built their own building in 1835 on Beech Lane.

The church no longer saw the need to involve themselves in literacy and numeracy, and Sunday Schools saw their sole purpose as religious education.

The building included an auditorium with a balcony with raked seating, following the Stockport Sunday School example.

Scholars were expected to be at least six years old, free of any "contagious distemper" and to arrive "washed" and "combed".

When John Whitaker died at the age of 47, in October 1820, his nephew Samuel Higginbotham continued as superintendent for the next 40 years.