by town councils, they were adopted by all religious denominations in the nineteenth century. The movement peaked in the 1890s. By 1890 the Baptists had more Sunday schools than churches and were teaching over 10,000 children. In 1895, 50,000 teachers were working within the Church of Scotland in these schools and 60 per cent of children aged 5–15 in Glasgow were enrolled on their books. From the 1830s and 1840s there were also mission schools, ragged schools, Bible societies and improvement classes, open to members of all forms of Protestantism and particularly aimed at the growing urban working classes. The ragged school movement attempted to provide free education to destitute children. The ideas were taken up in Aberdeen where Sheriff William Watson founded the House of Industry and Refuge, and they were championed by Scottish minister Thomas Guthrie who wrote Plea for Ragged Schools (1847), after which they rapidly spread across Britain. Theory and practice Scots played a major part in the development of teacher education. Andrew Bell (1753–1832) pioneered the Monitorial System, by which the more able pupils would pass on the information they had learned to other children and which developed into the pupil-teacher system of training. It was further developed by John Wood, Sheriff-Depute of Peebles, who tended to favour fierce competition in the classroom and strict discipline. In contrast David Stow (1793–1864), who founded the first infant school in Scotland, in Glasgow in 1828, focused on the bond between teacher and child and advocated the "Glasgow method", which centred on trained adult teachers. He established the first teacher training college in the United Kingdom, the Glasgow Normal Seminary. When, after the Great Disruption it was declared the property of the Church of Scotland, he founded the Free Church Normal Seminary in 1845. Ultimately Wood's ideas played a greater role in the Scottish educational system as they fitted with the need for rapid expansion and low costs that resulted from the reforms of 1872. Scottish schoolmasters gained a reputation for strictness and frequent use of the tawse, a belt of horse hide split at one end that inflicted stinging punishment on the hands of pupils. Commissions The perceived problems and fragmentation of the Scottish school system led to a process of secularisation, as the state took increasing control. From 1830 the state began to fund buildings with grants, then from 1846 it was funding schools by direct