III

SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING


The girls' secondary day schools of this country, largely built up in
the first place by the individual pioneer work of broad-minded women
during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, are now in
most cases coming, if not under State control, at least into the
sphere of State influence. These women educationists in some cases
worked on old foundations, in others obtained from guilds or governors
a share for girls' education of funds previously allocated to various
benefactions or to the education of boys only. Private enterprise,
individual or, as in the case of the Girls' Public Day School Company,
collective, added schools in most important towns.

Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century there was provision for
a large number of girls of the middle class up to eighteen years of
age, in schools which as High Schools were analogous to the Grammar
Schools for boys dating to a corresponding burst of educational
activity rather more than three centuries earlier. Dependent on the
fees of their pupils or on special funds or endowments, these schools
could not, for the classes unable to pay a fee, adequately supplement
the elementary schools of the country, which provide for such
children education at most up to fourteen or fifteen years of age. The
Education Act of 1902, therefore, placed education beyond this age in
the hands of local authorities, the Board of Education supplementing
the rates by grants for secondary education--so that publicly owned