Educational records are here dealt with, for the sake of convenience, in three sections. The first treats records relating to those schools which were intended to provide mainly elementary education. The second section describes the sources for schools providing what would now be considered secondary education. A third section deals with adult education, loosely embracing the formal institutional education, elementary or otherwise, and the less formal cultural activity of those of post-school age. The records for the history of universities and teacher-training establishments are not considered in this book although in the nineteenth century some of them were to a certain extent ‘local’ institutions.

A division into elementary and secondary is necessarily artificial since, for example, some endowed ‘grammar schools’, despite the intention of their founders, were by the nineteenth century providing mainly or entirely elementary education, and for early periods the nature of the instruction is sometimes difficult to determine. In middle-class education, in particular, there was no clear-cut distinction between elementary and secondary. For that reason sources for all ‘grammar’ and for some other schools before the eighteenth century are dealt with in the second section, as, too, are the records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century private schools, although some of these may have been elementary in nature. Much adult education in the nineteenth century, the sources for which are described in the third section, was also largely elementary.