ABSTRACT
The impact of eugenic theory on educational policy during the early twentieth century is well documented. Francis Galton and his followers developed theories of ‘race’ and heredity which legitimised the development of intelligence tests and which also gave credence to the establishment of separate educational tracks for different social groups. The widespread adoption of ‘tripartism’, for example, by local education authorities after the Second World War, which was posited on theories of fixed intelligence, was, as I have argued elsewhere, due in part to the pervasive influence of eugenicists.1
