ABSTRACT
Educational debate, particularly when it leads to policy decisions affecting the lives and interests of teachers, pupils, and parents, is often characterized by strong passions and tends to involve rhetoric and emotion rather than evidence. In Britain the viability of the small primary school has been a major issue ever since the 1944 Education Act established a selective system of secondary education to which children were allocated on the basis of the results of the 11+ examination. The decline in school population has therefore occurred at a time when, for a variety of reasons, many people value highly what small schools, particularly small rural schools, are believed to offer. Thus policies with respect to merging and closing small schools that seem logical and coherent to education administrators are increasingly resisted by local populations. Throughout the debate about small schools, one area of particular contention has been the standards achievable by children attending such schools.
