The dissenting academies were schools, colleges and seminaries (often institutions with aspects of all three) run by English Dissenters, that is, those who did not conform to the Church of England. They formed a significant part of England's educational systems from the mid-seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Background
After the Uniformity Act 1662, for about two centuries, it was difficult for any but practising members of the Church of England to gain degrees from the old English universities, at Cambridge and Oxford. The University of Oxford, in particular, required – until the Oxford University Act 1854 – a religious test on admission that was comparable to that for joining the Church. The situation at the University of Cambridge was that a statutory test was required to take a bachelor's degree.
English Dissenters in this context were Nonconformist Protestants who could not in good conscience subscribe (i.e. conform) to the beliefs of the Church of England. As they were debarred from taking degrees in the only two English universities, many of them attended the dissenting academies. If they could afford it, they completed their education at the universities of Leyden, Utrecht, Glasgow or Edinburgh, the last, particularly, those who were studying medicine or law. Many students attending Utrecht were supported by the Presbyterian Fund.
While the religious reasons mattered most, the geography of university education also was a factor. The plans for a Durham College of Oliver Cromwell provided an attempt to break the educational monopoly of Oxbridge, and while it failed because of the political change in 1660, the founder of Rathmell Academy was Richard Frankland, who may have been involved in the Durham College project. Almost as soon as dissenting academies began to appear, Frankland was backed by those who wished to see an independent university-standard education available in the north of England.
Tutors in the academies were initially drawn from the ejected ministers of 1662, who had left the Church of England after the passing of the Uniformity Act, and many of whom had English university degrees. After that generation, some tutors did not have those academic credentials to support their reputations, although in many cases other universities, particularly the Scottish institutions that were sympathetic to their Presbyterian views, awarded them honorary doctorates.
Funding
There were several sources of funding. Some of these funds gave their trustees the option of sending young men either to dissenting academies, or to universities abroad. An academy, to attract such students, had to offer a course of instruction approved of by the Board for its purposes. Funding might be central or local, and there could be doctrinal as well as practical reasons why a given academy was sent students with financial support.
The Common Fund Board, founded in 1689, gave scholarships to Presbyterian and Congregational candidates for the ministry; its successor, the Presbyterian Fund Board, continued into the middle of the nineteenth century. An education at a dissenting academy was not the only option for the Fund Board, since a candidate could also be sponsored at a Scottish university, or elsewhere. A gap opened up between the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, as the Independents started to be called, for reasons of doctrine.
The Independent or Congregational Fund Board was established in 1695 to assist poor ministers, and to give young men who had already received a classical education, the theological and other training preparatory to the Christian ministry. An early sign of the division between Presbyterians and Independents was the fate of the Rathmell Academy after the death of Frankland in 1698: it migrated to Manchester under John Chorlton, while another academy under Timothy Jollie, an Independent, operated at Attercliffe (one of the locations of Frankland's migratory academy) from the 1690s onwards.
In 1730, the King's Head Society was founded by laymen in London (after the pub behind the Royal Exchange at which they met) who were dissatisfied with the management of the Congregational Fund Board. The chief point of objection was the Academies' rule which limited students to those who had already passed through a classical training, including the demanding and lengthy training period required for learning to read Greek and Latin texts. The King's Head Society resolved to found an academy where young men without a general classical education would receive it during their first two years and could then proceed to the usual classical-theological course.
