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This article analyzes the reform in England and Wales that changed the secondary school system from a selective type (with grammar and secondary modern schools) to a comprehensive type during the period 1965-74. It presents evidence of two possible middle-class tactics: resistance to the reform and using the reform to protect the middle-class advantage. Resistance took the forms of keeping grammar schools from being transformed into comprehensives and maintaining high middle-class enrollments in grammar schools and in private schools. Organizing the comprehensive system to the advantage of the middle class involved establishing some comprehensives without sixth forms and making it less likely that middle-class children would attend them. Enrollment patterns of a national sample are used to show how the middle class retained an advantage even as the types of schools were being changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]