However good the state schools may be, it is still true that if an English parent has enough money to pay the fees to send his children to an independent school he will most probably do so.
In independent schools boys and girls above the age of eight are usually educated separately. The terms “primary” and “secondary” are not usually applied to independent schools at the different levels because the age of transfer from a lower to a higher school is normally thirteen or fourteen instead of eleven. The principal schools for boys of over thirteen are called “public schools” and those for younger boys are usually called “preparatory” (or colloquially “prep”) schools.
For girls there are some preparatory schools and public schools which are female imitations of the boys’ institutions.
A typical “preparatory school”—or private primary school—is very small, with between fifty and a hundred boys, either all boarders or all dayboys, or some of each. Many of these schools are in adapted houses in the country or in small towns, houses built in the nineteenth century and too big to be inhabited by families in the conditions of the modern world. If there are fifty boys, aged between eight-plus and thirteen-plus, they will probably be taught in five or six grades (or “forms”); the headmaster will himself work as an ordinary teacher, and he will have four or five assistants working for him. The preparatory schools prepare boys for the public schools’ common entrance examination and for public school life. The, schools in the state system do not prepare boys for the public schools’ common entrance examination, so a boy who tried to change from the states system to the independent school system at the age of thirteen would find difficulty in entering a public school at all.
With a few exceptions public schools are all boarding schools, providing residential accommodation for their pupils, though many of them take some day-boys also. Most are in the southern half of England. Some of them are several hundred years old, but many others, including some of the most prominent thirty, were founded during the past 140 years. Most public schools, particularly the most eminent ones, are called by the name of the town or village in which they are situated; some are called “College” and some are not. The four most famous of all are Eton College, Harrow School, Winchester College and Rugby School.
Public schools are inspected by the inspectors of the Department of Education, but otherwise they are quite independent. Each has a board of governors. They control the finances and appoint the headmaster, who in his turn appoints the other teachers. To send a boy to a leading public school costs about 900 to 1,100 pounds a year, though some of the less prominent schools may cost as little as 600 pounds. All the schools award “scholarships” to some of their boys who do very good work in an examination on entering or during their first year, and the boys who win scholarships pay reduced fees or in a few cases no fees at all.