From their inception in New Zealand in 1816, until the end of the century in some cases, most mission schools in the colony maintained instruction solely in the Maori language. However, from the 1840s, successive colonial governments promoted a secular schooling system in which English would be the language in which students were taught, principally because Maori was seen as an impediment to the governments' assimilationist ideology. The 1880 Native Schools Code, devised by the first Inspector of New Zealand's Native Schools, James Pope, was one of the final major steps in this era in advancing this assimilationist ideal through the country's education system. Pope's initiative was partly a continuation of state policy that had existed in some form since the 1840s, but it also served as the most explicit statement to that time of how the government intended to use schooling to incorporate Maori into colonial society.