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Spurley Hey, (1872-1930), educational administrator, was born on 31 March 1872 in Stocksbridge, Yorkshire, one of the eight children of Benjamin Smith Hey and Ann Birkenshaw. Family life was humble but secure, dominated by an intelligent but austere steelworker father and a strong-minded, caring mother. Hey was destined for the steelworks but went for four years (c.1877–1882) to a small school at Midhopestones, where the eccentric master made a strong impression on him. At ten he became a part-time worker in Fox's steelworks but disliked the job; a master at Stocksbridge elementary school persuaded his parents to allow him to become a pupil teacher there (c.1885–91).
Hey gained a queen's scholarship to St John's Diocesan Training College, York, where he was educated from 1891 to 1893, and in later years reminisced that the life of the college had a major effect on his character. While there he developed a love of football, which led later to paid employment with Barnsley Football Club at weekends; this helped to support his part-time BA of London University, which was awarded in 1898. From college he was appointed to Kimberworth board school, Rotherham, where he achieved a remarkable series of promotions to become director of education in 1907. With the creation of the Rotherham local education authority in 1902, he became a co-opted member representing teachers. Single-mindedness, self-confidence, and a certain aloofness were already present and made him an unusually formidable young man. Interest in the Froebel Society for the Promotion of the Kindergarten System symbolized that keenness for children's welfare in which his passion for social justice had its origins. The idea of central schools (higher elementary schools), then a rudimentary concept, caught his imagination while at Rotherham and a start was made to extend elementary schooling for children above standard five.
From 1911 to 1914 Hey was director of education for Newcastle upon Tyne, and comments on his service testify to a strong personality and dynamic, independent leadership. It was the early years of a new and potentially influential public office and Hey, with his contemporaries James Graham of Leeds and Percival Sharp of Sheffield, together nicknamed the ‘three musketeers’ for their attacks on the ‘Richelieu’ of the Board of Education, was determined that education would not be the poor relation of social policy.
For sixteen years from 1914 Hey was director of education for Manchester, where his leadership of the progressive education committee greatly enhanced Manchester's prestige as an education authority. His magisterial style was well caught by the future Lady Shena Simon, a member of the Manchester education committee, who commented admiringly that ‘Spurley Hey was an autocrat who made no attempt to disguise the fact’ . The high regard in which he was held by the radical Labour chairman of the education committee, Alderman Wright Robinson, in part accounted for his freedom of action, even extending to such overtly political statements as criticism of the Geddes financial ‘axe’, which was, he believed, ‘a serious menace to the present generation of pupils’ . During this period a stream of documents bore the distinctive stamp of his reasoned and comprehensive attitude to education policy. The intensity with which he made the environment of children his starting point was remarkable so early in the century . He made use of existing health and welfare provision, as well as the 1918 permissive legislation on continuation schools, which provided opportunities for working-class young people who had no opportunity to remain at school full-time. Concern for the mentally and physically handicapped, slow learners, and those who were disadvantaged by poverty and, ‘during the short five years' journey from the cradle to the school, fought an almost continuous battle for mere existence’, were automatically part of his inclusive approach. In order to establish positive habits of work and behaviour and to change parental attitudes he developed infant classes in elementary schools, not waiting until resources would enable primary schools to be provided. As the school was a stage in life, he tackled youth unemployment energetically and extended the jurisdiction of his department to include the juvenile employment bureaux. His determination that these be associated with education rather than the Ministry of Labour was argued in Juvenile Unemployment and Aftercare (1920). He was unapologetic that this would enlarge local education authority powers and maintained that ‘all questions of decision relative to the social, as well as the educational, side of the development of young people should be vested in the LEA’ even if this necessitated ‘compulsory measures’ .
Hey's decision to maximize school building and diversify access during a time of recession was driven by a profound consciousness that existing transfer schemes to secondary schools were inadequate. He wrote of ‘the deprivation from many children of a better opportunity of training for citizenship, and the condemnation of many to circumstances from which better education alone could lift them. A solution was to introduce selective central schools, first envisaged in Hey's 1918 blueprint for the local education authority, Manchester's Education Problem, and with which his reputation has been rightly but too narrowly associated. Resisted by some on the ground of cost or competition with secondary schools, central schools enabled more elementary school children to experience an education which, at its best, narrowed the gulf between elementary and secondary schools by providing a course of schooling beyond the age of eleven. Through policies for a primary stage, central and secondary schools, and post-compulsory provision Hey steered Manchester towards the recommendations of the 1926 Hadow committee on the education of the adolescent, which foreshadowed the 1944 Education Act. As reform depended on the quality of teachers, high priority was given to the reform of training procedures, maximum freedom for heads, and close co-operation with classroom teachers, from which evolved the possibly unique advisory committee of teachers and elected members of the education committee. Membership of the Burnham committee and two departmental inquiries, evidence to the royal commission on local government, senior positions in such professional organizations as the Association of Education Committees, and contributions to the journal Education made him an increasingly influential national figure. In 1919 he received an honorary MA degree from Manchester University.
Hey's limited leisure was spent walking and collecting antiques. His sudden death from pneumonia on 7 May 1930 at his home in Elm Road, Didsbury, Manchester, occasioned many tributes both affectionate and admiring, of which the most fitting was that he had never been surpassed by any of the great public servants who had served Manchester. He was buried on 10 May at Harlow Moor cemetery, Harrogate, Yorkshire, and honoured with a memorial service in Manchester Cathedral. Two schools were named after him, including Rotherham's Spurley Hey. His wife, Ada Annie Hey, survived him.
Source: Oxford DNB