The Lancashire Public School Association, later the National Public School Association, in its role as a pressure group, with an account of the Manchester Model Secular School, later the Manchester Free School

The Lancashire Public School Association was founded in l847 by a group of locally eminent Manchester men who, hoping to overcome the religious obstacles in the way of national education, drew up a plan of secular education which they hoped would satisfy all parties. Using the American Common School system, as practised in Massachusetts, as a basis, they attempted to get a bill into Parliament to establish a system of free, rate-supported, locallycontrolled secular education. The movement spread rapidly outside Lancashire, and in 1850 the Association was re-named the National Public School Association. As a pressure-group, the Association used machinery very similar to that of its predecessor, the Anti-Corn Law League, many of whose members joined the educational movement. Extensive use was made of placards, pamphlets, public lectures and public meetings to bring its activities to the attention of the public, while T. Milner Gibson, W.J.Fox and Richard Cobden represented it in Parliament.
Opposition arose in Manchester and Salford when the Manchester and Salford Committee on Education produced a rival education scheme and introduced a bill into Parliament in 1852. Its progress was stopped when T. Milner Gibson, acting on behalf of the K.P.S.A., obtained the appointment of a Select Committee of Inquiry of the House of Commons to investigate the state of education in Manchester and Salford. Neither of the two pressure groups succeeded in obtaining legislation on its scheme, and in 1857 members of both groups came together in a compromise which foreshadowed the Elementary Education Act of 1870.
Although the IT.P.S.A. was dissolved in 1862 the Manchester Model Secular School, later re-named the Manchester Free School, which the Association founded in 1854, continued to do excellent work among the poor children of Manchester until its pupils were absorbed into the Manchester School Board system during the 1870s.