KEY:

** This column, subject in some cases to further research, gives a very rough impression of what sort of school this was between the 1950s and the mid-1980s. Successive local government reorganisations, boundary changes, school renamings/mergers/closures, and changes in local political control or national education policy, combined with the lack of any centrally agreed terminology covering all schools, mean that the situation in detail is often more complicated than this. None of this refers to the present day; indeed, several of these schools no longer exist.

CE = Church of England

compr. = comprehensive (i.e. non-selective intake), may be mixed or single-sex

DG = Direct Grant = mostly selective intake, some publicly-funded pupils but independent of local education authority control

grammar = selective intake, for the more academic, usually but not always single-sex (NB: some schools still called "grammar school" are no longer grammar schools, and not all grammar schools are called "grammar school")

RC = Roman Catholic

sec. mod. = secondary modern (selective intake, for the less academic), may be mixed or single-sex

tech. = technical school. For our purposes here, probably not materially different from a secondary modern school.

VA = Voluntary Aided status. These (mostly church-run) schools are largely or wholly funded by the local education authority (and therefore count as fully part of the state system), but are not directly controlled by it and not necessarily subject to all its rules. For instance, in Inner London, some VA schools continued to use corporal punishment after the ILEA abolished it in its directly-run schools in 1981. VA schools are not to be confused with voluntary controlled (VC) schools, also mostly run by one of the churches but more directly controlled by the LEA and, for our purposes here, not materially any different from ordinary mainstream state schools. For this reason, VC schools have not been separately identified in the above table.