Some disliked the annual examination, which was held to be unfeminine, and the difficulty of obtaining good teachers was almost insuperable. In regard to these Miss Beale suffered through being ahead of her times. She desired especially two things: that the teachers should be women, for, to quote her own words, ‘we think it essential to the right moral training of girls that the whole internal discipline and much of the moral training should be in the hands of ladies’; and that they should be to some extent specialists, the only way to abolish the textbook cram and unintelligent memory work then in vogue in girls’ schools. How she set out again and again to seek for teachers, and how many a time she was disappointed, she has herself recorded in her history of the college. Her efforts show how hard it was to found a school before the reformation of the higher education had given the necessary impetus from above. It was a case of making bricks without straw. Perhaps the practical difficulties in the way of finance were really the most hampering, for the founders had too little experience of these matters; and a Mr. Brancker, who as treasurer, by readjusting the whole system of fees, put the College on a sound financial basis, may almost count as its second founder. In 1863, five years after Miss Beale took office, some Oxford examiners were invited to inspect and report on the school. This was a new departure; it meant an acknowledgment of the connection which should exist between girls’ schools and the Universities. A small thing in itself, but typical of the many changes that the next five-and-twenty years were to bring.