This is a study of the relative commitment of two groups of Victorian administrators, the Endowed Schools Commissioners and the Charity Commissioners, to promoting the education of girls under the Endowed Schools Act, 1869. It is based on a thesis which was supervised by Professor O. R. McGregor of London University (now Lord McGregor) and the sources used come largely from the Public Record Office.

The selection of data needs a word of explanation. The Record Office holds, in its Ed. 27 class, several thousand files which record the work of both sets of Commissioners in making Schemes under the Endowed Schools Acts to reorganise the grammar schools. Only some of these Schemes include provision for girls and it is this group which has been scrutinised, leaving unmapped a very large hinterland which must contain a number of cases where the Commissioners did their best to provide for girls but were unsuccessful. Ideally, of course, the whole field of their endeavour should be surveyed as the essential context of what they achieved in this particular area, but an enquiry of such magnitude lies beyond the individual researcher. It seems, in any case, unlikely that the whole corpus of material would reveal attitudes quite at variance with those which emerge from the ‘successful’ sample; and this view is confirmed by the pilot study of the West Riding of Yorkshire which forms the basis of chapter 2 and rests on a scrutiny of every Scheme establishing a secondary school in that area, whether it provided for girls or not.