44 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1918. 
Just as in practice the requirement of the State that all children 
must be educated means that only persons living in houses below a 
certain rateable value are ever called upon by the educational authority 
to send their children to an efficient school, so the mere fact of attending 
a public elementary school is in its turn taken as evidence of straitened 
means. As a compromise it is perhaps satisfactory: as a real solution 
of the difficulty it seems illogical and haphazard. 
The condition that a certain proportion of free places was to be 
reserved for pupils from public elementary schools came into force 
in 1907 when Mr. Reginald McKenna was President of the Board of 
Education. In the estimates for that year an additional sum of 
75,0001. was taken for secondary schools and an additional 120,000/. 
in the following year. Mr. McKenna, in explaining these estimates 
to the House of Commons, said: ‘ These free places must not be con- 
fused with scholarships. They would be for public elementary school 
children who would not be asked to compete with children outside. 
They would only be asked to pass a qualifying examination. The 
general rule would be that any school receiving the additional grant 
(provided for in these estimates) should offer at least 25 per cent. of 
its places for public elementary school children who should enter free. 
There were cases where, however, 25 per cent. of the places would not 
be used in any case in this way, and in these cases it is proposed to 
give the Board of Education power to waive the requirement... . . 
The increase in grant was in the ratio of 3 to 5. . . . The policy of the 
Board was to democratise the secondary schools by raising the general 
level of education and securing for the humblest in the land the oppor- 
tunity of education for their children in really good schools.’ 
Objection was raised during the debate that even 25 per cent. of 
free places was not enough and that all restriction on the number of 
such places should be removed. To this objection Mr. McKenna 
replied that ‘ while a school might be with or without fees, whatever 
the scale of fees was it must be approved by the Board of Education. 
The schools might have as many more free places (than 25 per cent.) 
as they liked, and he personally trusted that where the school was 
provided by the local education authority the places would all be free.’ 
(Times Report.) 
He further pointed out that his proposals would divide secondary 
schoole into two groups, viz.: those that elected to go on as before 
with the previous scale of grants and those that decided to comply 
eh the 25 per cent. rule and receive grants on the new and higher 
scale. 
In the course of this debate Mr. McKenna also stated that at that 
time there were 600 secondary schools recognised by the Board of 
Education, and that these schools had a total of 104,938 scholars of 
whom over 56,000 came from public elementary schools, and of these 
29,000 paid no fees at all. 
In the previous year a departmental committee of the Board of 
Education had reported on the question of admission to secondary 
schools of children unable to pay the full school fee, and this report, 
