ABSTRACT
The Taunton Commission of 1864-8 which enquired into the structure and quality of middle-class education revealed a whole miscellany of private schools-the public schools, the endowed grammar schools, the ‘private academies’ and proprietary schools; the last were run as joint-stock companies and offered a more commercially orientated curriculum to the sons of businessmen. The commission sought to rank the schools in a hierarchy, and such status was determined partly by the predominance of classics on the timetable, according to the values of the time, and partly by the lateness of the pupils’ leaving-ages, up to 18.1 Around 1860, of nearly 2,600,000 children estimated to be attending schools, just over 14 per cent were of the upper and middle classes in various forms of private establishment.2
