ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evidence on school preference which has been obtained from the ex-pupils of the First and Second College surveys, the 'Both schools' survey, and from two relatively small-scale inquiries among pupils in grammar schools. A factor which this research has shown to affect the comparison between co-educational and single-sex schools is whether the former is a school which has been created by the merging of two single-sex schools in the previous one or two years, termed here an 'amalgamated' school. An examination was therefore made of the influence of this factor on school preference, and it was found that both the men and the women from amalgamated schools were less in favour of co-education than the rest of the sample who attended a co-educational school. The chapter describes research on the school preference of ex-pupils who were student teachers, and the objection might be raised that these are not a fully representative cross-section of grammar school pupils.
