Originally published in 1967, this book was intended to be of value to students of Education in two ways. Firstly, all such students were expected to know in broad outline the story of the development of our national education system in the previous 150 years. This book shows how these national events affected a number of schools in a particular locality. Their history was preserved in their physical structure, all too solid and long-lasting in many cases to be easily adapted to changing needs of the time; it was preserved also in minutes and log-books and other records that happen to survive. The second value of this book was that quite often students were asked to use these local records to re-create the story of a history of a school or group of schools. It was felt that we needed many more of these local investigations as a basis for a fuller and more vivid representation of this national development, and students’ accounts, if done with proper care, could make a useful contribution. Mr Seaborne’s book is a model and example of how this may have been done.