In 1918 legislation in Britain permitted local education authorities to provide financial support for Nursery Schools. Of those that were funded immediately following the legislation, the vast majority had been free kindergartens founded by members of the Froebel movement. But the change was more than in name only, for it also involved changes in pedagogy and curriculum. The sources of the changes were multiple and varied but a significant revision of the orthodox kindergarten was carried out by the English supporters of the practices implemented in the Froebel-Pestalozzi House founded in 1874 by Henriette Schrader- Breymann, a great niece of Froebel, This paper draws upon research conducted in a number of archives, including the Froebel archive at the University of Surrey, Roehampton to explore the transition of the ideas of the Pestalozzi- Froebel House from Berlin to England. It examines the nature of the way German cultural practices were perceived by a section of the English middle and upper classes and how they appropriated them. Their institutional impact was greatest in London and Birmingham and it is the practice of selected kindergartens in those cities that are analysed in detail. The Pestalozzi-House, in addition to providing a model for the revision of the kindergarten also advocated a widening of women's professional role under the banner of 'spiritual motherhood'. If this was one principal characteristic of the tendency, another was its response to the perceived crisis of urban childhood at the beginning of the twentieth century. The adherents of the Pestalozzi House tendency viewed the kindergarten, as it was constituted, as an inadequate vehicle with which to intervene in the cycle of poverty, ill health and general disadvantage experienced by the children of the urban poor. This, together with an increase in working class women's employment, created the conditions for demands for a different kind of institution to provide care for young children that emphasized children's health rather than their educational needs. The Nursery School was the institution that emerged but the paper considers the extent to which it differed from the kindergartens that followed the practices of the Pestalozzi-Froebel House and the continuities that can be observed in the Selly Oak Nursery School in Birmingham which was formerly the Birmingham People's Kindergarten at Greet. Julia Lloyd, who had been trained by Schrader-Breymann was involved in both these institutions and her role in reproducing the Pestalozzi-Froebel House approach is discussed. The final section is concerned with the perceptions of working class children and their families by the supporters of the Froebel- Pestalozzi House tendency and the tension between child saving interventions and surveillance by the new professionals of the families of the poor.