ABSTRACT
THE development of the conception of the secondary modern school, like that of secondary education for all, is a product of the steady advance throughout the last hundred years in the average school leaving age. Experiments in post-primary education, as the Hadow Report has shown, have always been a feature of the elementary school system, but while the leaving age of the majority of children remained at or below fourteen years of age such developments as there were, whether higher grade schools, higher elementary schools, or central schools, were primarily selective in character, meeting the needs of those children who were able and willing to remain at school beyond the age of fourteen. Not until after the first World War did the time seem ripe for the development of some form of post-primary school for every child.
