Most of the students on the list owed just £2 for the term, but it was an amount that would break the financial backs of many parents and stymie their children's educational future. For the four boys, along with many others, it spelled the end of their secondary education. 'Left School' is the handwritten annotation alongside their names and those of six others on a carbon copy of the list held in the same file.

The Great Depression hit just as state secondary education was becoming established in Victoria. Victoria's first state secondary school, the Melbourne Continuation School (later Melbourne High School) had opened in 1905. Over the next twenty-five years a dozen more secondary schools appeared across the city.⁵ Northcote High School opened in 1926, first as a co-educational school and then as a boys-only school when it moved to its current location on St Georges Road in 1929.⁶

Northcote High School, 1926. Courtesy Northcote High School

It didn't take long for Northcote High School to become fully enrolled with students. By 1930 the school boasted 516 pupils, despite the fact that it had only opened in its permanent building the year before, that the Depression was starting to have an impact on employment figures in the city, and that students in forms higher than year 8 had to pay school fees of £6 a year.

Fees were a part of the state secondary school system right from its inception. Free state education, so hard fought for during the late 1800s, only applied to primary-school-aged children initially. It was extended to years 7 and 8 when the compulsory school age was raised to 14, and in many cases those students were accommodated at the local primary school, which now offered the extra two years of classes. But increasingly students moved to the new high schools where they had the opportunity to stay on, theoretically at least, to year 12. But if they stayed beyond year 8 they had to pay - at a rate of £2 a term.⁷

Neither the Left nor Right of politics was particularly supportive of the idea of extending free education past the compulsory years. The Labor Party had something of an ambivalent attitude to high school education, regarding it as for the elite: 'those who could afford the fees, the uniforms and the books'. It supported technical education as the proper sphere of the working class, and was concerned that educating children in academic high schools would give them middle-class values that would turn them against their working-class origins.⁸ Those of a more conservative bent (the Nationalists) argued that extending the years of education for children of families from less wealthy homes might produce children who were 'misfits', over-educated for their proper station in life.⁹ If children from such backgrounds did continue their secondary education, their parents should pay for it.

For bright children from impoverished families there was a safety net in the form of a fee exemption their parents could apply for on the basis of their need and their merit.¹⁰ Until the Depression hit, it was a system that seemed to work well enough: numbers of enrolments in high schools across the state nearly doubled in the ten years between 1918 and 1928, growing from 4,959 to 9,774.¹¹ But by 1931 it was already evident that local families in Northcote, as elsewhere, were struggling to afford the cost of sending their children to high school.