Book excerpt: First published in 1974. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. Graham Balfour, in a lecture delivered in February 1921, first drew attention to the growing importance of the elementary school manager in the system of educational administration during the period with which this study is concerned: “Local administrators of education, other than trustees a hundred years ago, there were none. Indeed it is very curious how imperceptibly that important figure of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the School Manager, steals into existence.