46 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1918. 
local authorities of the North of England and the Board of Education as 
successor to the defunct Science and Art Department. 
Under the latter body School Boards had established science 
schools supported partly by grants for science, art, and manual instruc- 
tion, and attended by children of both sexes who had passed through 
the ordinary elementary school curriculum and wanted some further 
education. When, as a condition of the grants, these schools were 
urged to provide efficient literary instruction in English and at least 
one modern language they became secondary schools in all but name, 
and flourished for a time exceedingly. But the decision in the 
Brighton case, followed by the famous Cockerton judgment, that a 
School Board could not legally spend the rates on schools of this type, 
which were, as a rule, without fee or with fees not exceeding a shilling 
a week, led ultimately to the abolition of the School Board system and 
the creation of the local education authorities, with definite powers 
for secondary education, in its place. Several of these new local 
authorities followed the policy of their School Board predecessors and 
kept the fees of the reconstructed organised science schools at an 
almost nominal sum since the Board of Education’s regulations 
required a fee of some amount to be charged. 
The Board strove for some years to raise the school fee—not, it 
must be admitted, from a desire to exclude the poorer children from the 
schools, but from a wish to increase the school’s resources, to emphasise 
the importance of secondary education, and to squeeze out all children 
who were not determined to take their secondary school training 
seriously and stay at school sufficiently long to profit by the school 
instruction. The opposition, represented by certain local authorities, 
concentrated its efforts in making secondary education as accessible as 
possible to any child that desired it, and as a result of these contrary 
forces in truly English fashion the free-place expedient was devised. 
Like many other illogical devices it has shown during its ten years’ 
existence that it is workable and that it possesses a remarkable amount 
of vitality. Whether in the immediate future it will be superseded by 
some more comprehensive system it is impossible to foresee. 
II. Summary or INFORMATION DERIVED FROM THE HEADS OF SCHOOLS. 
Copies of a questionnaire were sent to the 910 schools which receive 
grants from the Board of Education; 384 replies (42 per cent.) have 
been received. 
A very large number of schools say they are quite satisfied with the 
present working of the system; others, whilst not objecting to the 
principle of the system, point out difficulties they have found in its 
working, or make suggestions for improving it. In this analysis more 
attention is naturally given to suggested alterations than to expressions 
of perfect agreement; but it must be remembered that as far as the 
evidence goes the system is working very well in the large majority of 
those schools whose pupils are drawn from the elementary schools to 
the extent of more than 50 per cent., including free-place holders. 
