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By 1800, public school education was already an accepted pattern of life for the upper classes of society in Great Britain. The eight schools mentioned in the article can be ranked for the first half of the nineteenth century as Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, St. Pauls. This presents interesting parallel patterns with the position at the present day. Boys entering the acknowledged public schools, at that time, came from a wide range of social classes. The lower classes were excluded and the middle class entry was severely restricted to boys on the foundation. Of the professional groups as a whole, less than one out of ten sons of service officers, and less than one in six sons of clergymen were catered by the school while the proportion of boys from the other professions of medicine, law and scholastics was negligible. In the upper classes, however less than one in two gentry boys attended school and more than one in two for the titled aristocracy.

In a much discussed book, sociologist R. Pedley puts forward the view that the sixth forms of maintained grammar schools are the weakest link in the English education system. Their inefficiency is a result of their small size. Sociologist R.C. Oldfield has produced statistical evidence to show that small schools actually do significantly better than big ones. He shows that, although large schools naturally tend to get more awards than small, when the size of school is taken into account there is a significant tendency for small schools to obtain more awards per 1,000 boys than large schools. This article presents a study to examine the relation between educational achievement and school size. Findings of he study seem to show that Pedley is right in his view that the small schools are not producing such good results as the large. They show also that this tendency becomes more marked with higher levels of academic attainment. The better achievements of large schools are most evident in university awards and are markedly present in distinctions at advanced level. In passes and failures at advanced and ordinary levels the differences are less striking. However, it is not at all obvious from the results that Pedley is right in attributing the superiority of the big school to its large sixth form as such.