It is unfortunate that the myth persists that the 1944 Education Act prescribed a tripartite system of schools – grammar, technical and secondary modern (Letters, 14 July).
James Chuter Ede, the Labour party minister at Rab Butler’s board of education in the war coalition, told a union conference at the time that, having piloted the act through the Commons, he had gone through it with a small-toothed comb, and could find only one type of school for senior pupils – a “secondary school”. Selection, the 11-plus and the three types of school are not mentioned in the act at all.
