Such was the situation of the Board Schools: that of the Voluntary Schools was still more impossible. These schools, founded originally on denominational lines, were controlled despotically by a private board of clerical or clerically-minded managers. No effective public control was insisted upon. Even where a voluntary school was situated within a school board area, the School Board had no shadow of authority over it. And, as I have already mentioned, rather less than half of England possessed School Boards at all. The only pretence of public supervision then existing in the case of voluntary schools was to be found in the infrequent visits of notoriously complacent inspectors from Whitehall. Indeed the inspectors had to be complacent, for few voluntary schools had the means to make themselves educationally efficient even though they might wish to do so. Though more than two thirds of the money spent on their upkeep came out of the public exchequer in the form of government grants, the remaining third had to be raised by private subscription, that is to say had to be begged vigorously from the most incongruous people, from Churchmen anxious to preserve definite theological teaching and from rich ratepayers and even Railway Companies anxious to avoid the incidence of a School Board rate. As a natural consequence the schools which, be it remembered, were reckoned as part of the national machinery for education, were counted in the statistics of school accommodation, and were indeed the only schools available for a considerable part of the child population, were in a state of chronic and hopeless beggary, and dragged on a miserable existence,--starved, irresponsible, notoriously inefficient, yet practically safe from public intervention. Meanwhile technical education, unnaturally divorced from elementary, was confided to the care of the County and Borough Councils. Secondary education was nobody’s business. It would have been entirely neglected had not some progressive School Boards stretched the term “elementary” to cover as much as they could until sharply pulled up by the Cockerton judgment, while some of the more progressive Councils stretched the term “technical” in much the same way, and would probably, but for the intervention of the Act, have met with the same fate. Now what did the Education Acts do? The first and by far the most important change which they made was to transfer all education to the County and Borough Councils.[7] The effect of this was to provide that in future there should be everywhere throughout England one popularly elected local authority responsible for every kind and grade of education within its administrative area, and that this body should be that responsible for local government as a whole. Thus they made possible for the first time the co-ordination of all forms of education and the co-ordination of education with other municipal and local services.