Private schools did not have to be abolished; the best of them abolished themselves. Wide-awake public school headmasters worried about the stupidity of the children they were attracting, and as the drift of events became clear, and as the Treasury became more open-handed, solved their problems by negotiating with the State for inclusion on the roll of "grant-aided boarding grammar schools", as they were ponderously called in official language. For this enviable status to be secured they had to agree to take a majority of children chosen in the ordinary way by the local authorities from the primary schools. Eton in 1972 reduced its entrance age to eleven and undertook to accept eighty per cent of Queen's Scholars, pushed home to one hundred per cent in 1991. Where Eton led, others followed.
Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy.
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