ABSTRACT
There are more young people over sixteen receiving full-time education in Britain than ever before. This is part of the general expansion of British education which has taken place since the end of the Second World War, and is related to factors which in educational jargon have come to be known as the ‘bulge’ and the ‘trend’. The early arguments for comprehensive secondary education concentrated as much upon what were thought to be the defects of the selective system of grammar and modern schools as upon the supposed merits of comprehensive schools. The increase in the number of comprehensive schools is associated with a decrease in the number of maintained grammar schools. The future contribution of grammar schools depends on some of the same factors relating to the expansion of comprehensive schools. If their numbers continue to be reduced at the rate they have over the last ten years they could all be gone by the end of the century.
