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the age of sixteen. The third-grade schools were intended for the yeoman class,
Ieavingfor work at the age of fourteen....
(Montgomery 1965: 51)
This platonic notion of the tri-partite division of learners at secondary level has
survived through the years. Although establishing a national structure of the most
basic secondary provision had to wait until the Balfour Act of 1902, the Taunton
concept of the learning population survived to reappear in the Hadow Report of 1925,
the Spens Report of 1938 and was the base of the first full secondary structure
established by Butler’s Education Act of 1944. The proposals of the Dearing Report
of 1996 confirmed the concept to be alive and well in its hopeful recommendation of
a three-track structure which would ''make explicit the equal standing of academic,
applied and vocational qualifications” (Dearing 1996: 12), despite the fact that they
had resolutely remained a hierarchy.
The close connection between this hierarchy of learners and their social class was
embodied at an early stage in the gradual development of post-elementary schools
around the country. As the 19th century progressed, three types of school were taking
shape to serve three distinct social groups well before any national system was
established. In his 1990 book Education and State Formation, Andy Green described
this pattern:
...the Anglican schools, which are dominated by the gentry and integrated with
the conservative state apparatus; the middle-class schools which are articulated
with industry; and independent working-class schools arising in tandem with
working-class political organisations and institutions of self-help.
(Green 1990: 70)
These social divisions in the system were still evident to R H Tawney in 1931. In one
of his thunderous editorials in The Manchester Guardian he claimed that "The
hereditary curse of English education is its organization along lines of social class.''
(Quoted in Green 1990: 307)