Virtually all writings about "Methodist involvement" in state-provided English education use Wesleyan material. It is the most accessible and it is complete: every year there is a report from the Wesleyan Education Committee to the Conference. Official information on the attitudes of the other British Methodist churches to elementary education can only be found by reading the Minutes of their annual Conferences or Assemblies: there are no comparable surviving papers on education. It could be this obscurity that has led to the other branches of Methodism being subsumed under the Wesleyans in the assumption that all took the same view of education. It is as though all Methodists = Wesleyans and all Wesleyans = Methodists. In fact, the Wesleyan view on most educational matters was at a point between those of the Church of England and the other Nonconformist churches: on some issues it followed the voluntary school line of the Anglicans and in others it agreed with the majority of Nonconformists in demanding unsectarian Christian schools. This article explores the other branches of English Methodism which had different perspectives from the Wesleyans and made, in some places, a significant contribution to the provision of elementary schools in England. A more detailed study of the effort in Lancashire was undertaken because the county has a strong tradition of a wide range of denominations in addition to a distinctive pattern in voluntary education. The period under consideration runs from the start of Wesleyan Methodist involvement in elementary education in the mid-19th century up to union of virtually all the different bodies in 1932. (Contains 2 figures, 4 tables and 50 notes.)