physician, public-health reformer, and chief founder of the English system of publicly financed elementary education.

Kay studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and obtained his medical degree there in 1827. His subsequent work as a physician among various social classes in Manchester demonstrated to him the social and educational needs of the poor in Britain's industrial towns. In 1835 he became an assistant poor-law commissioner, and his efforts to educate pauper children in workhouses convinced him of the need for a national system of education and teacher training.

In 1839 Kay was appointed first secretary to the council that had been set up to administer the British government's annual grants to education. In 1839–40 he and E. Carleton Tufnell founded St. John's College, Battersea, London, which was the first training college for schoolteachers in England. Kay introduced a system for the inspection by government officials of those schools receiving a grant. He also expanded and improved the pupil-teacher system, in which intellectually promising youths (aged 13–18) simultaneously taught in elementary schools and received secondary education from the heads of those schools. Kay-Shuttleworth's health collapsed in 1848, and upon his retirement he was created a baronet. He continued to promote British public education through numerous publications, including articles on the results of the Education Act of 1870.