In Chapter 1 we looked at two societies that lay claim to the virtue of being in some degree “meritocratic” or “meritelective.” The obvious question which a comparison between these two countries poses is this: Where does England stand vis-à-vis either of them? More especially, how does England (or rather, England and Wales, since educational law is common to both those entities) compare with Scotland? Although the question is obvious and indeed pressing, the answer is not at all easy to arrive at. English educational practice is as murky as English educational history is complex.

Educational policy

In a nutshell, the history of public education in England consists in a move from religion to class as the determinant of administrative arrangements. And the people who presided over that process, and bent their efforts to promoting it, were a small group of radical policy makers. Prominent among them were R. H. Tawney and Charles Philips Trevelyan. In this respect, Scotland was ahead of England. Writing to Bertrand Russell in 1929, C. P. Trevelyan (who was then for the second time president of the Board of Education in a Labour administration) said: