Three Royal Commissions and a Select Committee of the House of Commons produced significant reports on Education during the 1860s. Two of the Royal Commissions dealt, respectively, with the two ends of the school spectrum: the provision of elementary education was made the business of a Commission on Popular Education, while there was a separate Commission to deal with the condition of the handful of Public Schools which served the upper classes. The Select Committee broke new ground by probing the need for Technical Education. Secondary education, other than that offered in the Public Schools, was the remit of the third Royal Commission, whose terms of reference covered all schools not being discussed by the other two Commissions, and was soon known, simply, as the Schools Inquiry Commission. It was chaired by Lord Taunton, signed on 2 December 1867, and surveyed the patchy, complicated world of hundreds of endowed schools, grammar schools and proprietary and private schools. The Taunton Commissioners found a great need of reform of this sector, which they recognised as the natural provider of education for the increasingly numerous and demanding middle classes.

In following the course of the struggle to allow women to be candidates for University examinations in London, we saw that the cause was helped by the wider and more immediate concern for the improvement and extension of secondary education for girls. But that concern was itself narrower than the perceived need to understand, analyse and offer a better way forward for the secondary education of all the children of the middle class. From the mid- 1860s to the early 1880s, the University of London, responding to internal and external pressure, and to the examples set by older universities and other institutions, worked out its own contribution, which included pioneering the inspection of secondary schools, and introducing post-graduate qualifications for teachers.

In addition, the University was drawn into the arguments about school examinations. Examinations held locally for pupils in secondary schools, the greater number of whom would leave at the age of fifteen or sixteen, had been introduced in some areas in the late 1850s, and had been taken up by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The notion of developing a system or systems of school-leaving examinations, for fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds, became entangled with the use of more advanced examinations designed for pupils wishing to enter university.