Raikes's great-granddaughter Caroline Alice Roberts (1848–1920) was a fiction writer who married the composer Sir Edward Elgar.

Raikes had become interested in prison reform, specifically with the conditions in Gloucester gaol and saw that vice would be better prevented than cured.

The textbook was the Bible, and the originally intended curriculum started with learning to read and then progressed to the catechism.

The original schedule for the schools, as written by Raikes was "The children were to come after ten in the morning, and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one; and after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to Church.

After Church, they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till after five, and then dismissed, with an injunction to go home without making a noise.

Notwithstanding all this, Adam Smith gave the movement his strongest commendation: "No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the days of the Apostles."

[7] By 1831, Sunday schools in Great Britain were teaching weekly 1,250,000 children, approximately 25 percent of the population.