The proposal also illustrated a familiar difficulty in educational policy: what appears workable in a large town may be quite impossible in a rural district.
In heavily populated areas several secondary schools might lie within a comparatively short distance of one another. Elsewhere, families frequently had little meaningful choice.
A district might contain only a grammar school, a Catholic school and a secondary modern, for example. Sending a pupil to another suitable establishment merely for disciplinary purposes could therefore have involved considerable travelling.
For that reason alone, any national system of transferring pupils between “caning” and “non-caning” schools would have presented formidable practical difficulties.
