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Public school (United Kingdom)
Fee-charging schools in England and Wales
This article is about a number of older, fee-charging schools in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth. For other fee-charging schools, see Private schools in the United Kingdom. For publicly funded schools, see State school.
A public school in England and Wales is a type of fee-charging private school[1] originally for older boys. They are "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession, and not being run for the profit of a private owner.
Public schools are elite institutions and are associated with the ruling class.[6][7][8] Historically, public schools produced many of the military officers and administrators of the British Empire.[9][10] In 2019, two-thirds of cabinet ministers of the United Kingdom had been educated at such fee-charging schools.[11] The term is rarely used in Scotland, where "public school" has been used since the early 18th century to refer to publicly funded schools, and was defined by the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act as including those managed by the school board of a parish, or of a burgh.[12][13] There are instances of the term being used to refer to elite Scots private fee-paying schools.[14]
^Roach, John (1991). Secondary education in England, 1870-1902 : public activity and private enterprise. London: Routledge. ISBN0-203-40552-8. OCLC252881458.
^Walford, Geoffrey (June 1986). "Ruling-class Classification and Framing". British Educational Research Journal. 12 (2): 183–195. doi:10.1080/0141192860120207. S2CID146433863.
^Winslow Jr., Stanley Blakeley (1 May 2010). A Boy's Empire: The British Public school as imperial training ground, 1850-1918 (Thesis). doi:10.18130/V3KF83.[page needed]
^Griggs, Clive (January 1994). "The Influence of British Public Schools on British Imperialism". British Journal of Sociology of Education. 15 (1): 129–136. doi:10.1080/0142569940150108. JSTOR1393353.
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