ABSTRACT
The Education Department emerges as an essentially conservative body on questions of school design at this time, and this was in large part due to the unadventurous approach of the schools’ inspectorate during the period of the Revised Code. In fact, the returns showed Eton to be lagging behind some of the other schools; at Charterhouse ‘divisions’ varied in size from nine to twenty. In one respect only, through a vigorous condemnation of Gothic styles, did a few inspectors foresee the advantage which some school boards were quickly to establish over the voluntary societies. The Revised Code pointed schools inexorably towards an internal organization based upon standards, and certainly involving some degree of subdivision. The central school in Deansgate, for example, where 276 of the 320 boys had passed standard six, taught ‘mathematics, physiology, chemistry, sound, light and heat, magnetism and electricity, physical geography and mechanics’.
