The Secondary Teacher Training Institution was established in Budapest in 1870 to enhance the professional theoretical knowledge and practice of secondary teacher candidates. In the early phase of its operation, its membership was not compulsoryfor teacher candites, however, this changed after 1924 as the result of the 27^th Act of the Parliament in 1924.

The 6^th § of the act declared that teacher candidates had to spend their one-year pedagogical practice in a public secondary school, preferably in the practising secondary school designed for the preparation of secondary teacher candidates in 1872. This part of the act also prescribed indirectly that the candidates had to stay for their practice in the same municipality as the teacher training institution was located to ensure the methodological preparation of the candidates parallelly run by the institution during the practising year. The reason for the intention of tightening the criteria of the one-year-long practice was twofold.

First, the secondary teacher training institute wanted to comply with its primary aim of elevating the professionalism of secondary teachers by requiring a standardized pedagogical practice that could strengthen the professionality of individual candidates. Second, before 1924, the practice year was not standardized and thus candidates exploited the shortcomings of the previous legal regulations, which affected the preparedness of the teachers for their duties. The new law and its implementation regulations theoretically ensured that all candidates had to comply with the same standards related to the pedagogical practice.

The primary aim of the paper is to provide an insight into the background of the legal changes and their consequences on teacher candidates from the less affluent social strata in the early 1930s. Since the social background of the secondary teacher candidates slightly changed, those social groups were affected seriously whose family background just made it possible to pursue higher education studies in the Hungarian capital but for a limited period. By extending the length of the staying in the capital, particularly during the period of the Great Depression (between 1929 and 1933) led to an increase in the rate of resining declarations from students with lower social status.

The paper is part of a research project, which aims to reveal the history of the Secondary Teacher Training Institute and the Teacher Examination Committee of the University of Budapest as professional institutions that enhanced the professional training of secondary teachers and scrutinised their qualifications in the interwar period. During the research project archival sources were examined in the National Archives of Hungary, the Archives of the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest and the Mednyánszky Dénes Library and Archives of the ELTE Eötvös College. Therefore, document analysis of archival sources was employed as a primary method. Three layers of the analysis could be separated from each other as analytical aspects of the research. The first is related to the nature of the connections between the professional institutions and the Ministry of Religion and Public Education as a governmental entity that regulated the operation of the professional institutions. The second is related to the relationship between the professional entities that existed in the capital and other universities in Hungary. The third entails the inner structures and operational peculiarities of the professional institutions that stand in the focal point of the research. In the paper, the first and third research aspects will be discussed since the analysis reveal the common endeavour of the ministry and the teacher training institution to elevate the professionality of the teacher candidates but also shed light on some aspects of the peculiarities of the inner operation processes of the teacher training institution. Additionally, a descriptive statistical analysis as an additional method will also be used in the paper to determine the social status of teacher candidates in the early 1930s. Besides the archival sources, the Annual Reports of the Hungarian Statistical Bureau are examined for the statistical description of the students. The main and subcategorical system of the census in 1930 will be applied to classify the social status of students through the occupation of their legal guardians. The choice of the categorial system could be underpinned by the fact that a sophisticated categorial system was used in 1930, which enables researchers to rank and thus compare data from the early 1920s and the early 1940s. As for the interpretation theoretical framework, the critical approach of the professional theories is utilized since the professional groups and the state regulated the operation of professional occupations together in the Central and Eastern European regions.

Preliminary results suggest that the traditional recruitment basis of secondary teachers from the main category of civil services was still overrepresented among the candidates but a slight shift could be detected in the early 1930s towards the students with agricultural and industrial backgrounds. Employees in these sectors were able to send their children to universities, however, students with these backgrounds were always on the brink of being dropped out for insufficient financial resources. The economic crisis affected seriously those social strata who were lack of capital or properties and secured their income as employees due to the sharp decrease in their standard of living. The bitter consequences of the economic collapse combined with the standardization of professional training that required additional financial resources put them in a fragile situation that led to the suspension of their studies temporarily or leaving the professional training permanently. Moreover, the endeavour of the government and the secondary teacher training institution remained unfulfilled to standardize the one-year-long pedagogical practice since pastoral and clergyman candidates were granted immunity from spending their entire practice in the Hungarian capital. Thus, those teacher candidates were inflicted severely by the increased costs of fulfilling the requirements of the training who were the most vulnerable due to their lower social positions.

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