Purpose: Soon after its establishment in 1863, the Board of Education -- the body responsible for administering public education in Victoria -- determined that a system of universal mixed (coeducational) schooling would be adopted in the colony. Existing single-sex departments were "encouraged", or compelled, to amalgamate, and no new…

Central to the assembling of the New South Wales public education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the setting of borders and boundaries between different categories of students. These boundaries were particularly decisive in the institution of the public high school, where entry and progress were regulated by tests…