If Young's vitality recalls the old days a glance once more at the relative achievements of the Charity Commissioners and their predecessors in this field of girls' education makes quite clear that the old days had gone. Lyttelton and his colleagues were responsible for Schemes establishing 178 grammar schools, of which 47 were for girls and one was mixed. The Charity Commissioners were responsible for Schemes establishing 335 grammar schools, of which 47 were for girls and 6 were mixed. If the mixed schools are divided equally between the sexes, then girls'schools comprise 27 per cent of the output of the Endowed Schools Commissioners and 15 per cent of their successors'. This is a significant difference and one to which other noticeable differences, such as time-scale and total work-load, are irrelevant.

No one, one imagines, would have been more surprised at such an outcome than the Charity Commissioners. In 1886 the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the Endowed Schools Acts heard that a great deal had been done for girls. ‘I may say at once that we have been able to act upon that section very largely,’ said Richmond, while Young, who was in charge of endowed schools work, spoke of the necessities of female education as ‘specially commended to us by this clause’. They could certainly claim to have favoured it, he said, ‘as indeed under the terms of the Act we are bound to do’.