ABSTRACT
The rapid development of secondary education, and its spread into new areas of society, must obviously have been bringing first-generation grammar school children into the maintained schools ever since the 1902 Education Act was put into operation. Maintained grammar schools in industrial areas, and those which serve the 'poorer' areas of large cities, will normally expect this kind of proportion among their new pupils. Education and the Working Class consists largely of a survey of the experiences and attitudes of ten middle-class children and eighty-eight working-class children, who passed in the Higher School Certificate or at Advanced Level in four grammar schools in a northern industrial city between 1949 and 1952. The grammar school needs to be receptive, permissive and tolerant: it must aim, consciously and positively, at removing the difficulties in the way of the first-generation grammar school child.
