This chapter describes and reflects on a long-term research project that has developed an interpretation of the history of secondary education in England in the 1940s and 1950s, following the Education Act of 1944 and the creation of a so-called "tripartite" system of different kinds of secondary schools. In particular, the project examined and tried to explain the Platonic ideals of "education for leadership" that revolved around the Norwood Report of 1943, the curriculum of the secondary schools, and how these were linked over the longer term to the elite traditions of the great public (independent) schools of the nineteenth century. It shows the furtherance of this interpretation in a second phase of the project that took a biographical and social turn. It concludes with a discussion of the nature of this interpretation in terms of social history, the implications of the historical evidence on which it was based, the connections with current issues and concerns, and the relationship with education, history and the social sciences more broadly.