This study focuses on the English higher grade schools, a short-lived group of institutions that flourished at the end of the 19th century. They were a natural development of the successful board schools, which by the 1890s had educated a generation of children and awakened educational aspirations in a class of the population previously excluded from all but the most basic instruction. The higher grade schools formed a key part of a dynamically expanding ad hoc system of education favoured by England's ruling elite and fully expected to occupy an undisputed place in the network of institutions that would constitute secondary education in the 20th century.