Between 1893 and 1972 pre-vocational education policy in the Western Australian Education Department was framed in response to economic change. Inevitably, such a regimen tied pre-vocational schooling to the economic goals of successive governments and shortcomings in these goals occasioned inadequacies in the State's pre- vocational education policy and provision. When the Western Australian Board of Secondary Education made its first state- wide award of Achievement Certificates to Year 10 students in 1972, the lower secondary curriculum had become generalised in content. Between July 1946 and the introduction of the Achievement Certificate in 1970, it was characterised by a division between pre- vocational and academic courses. The origins of the division are located in Cecil Andrews' failure as Director of Education to convince his political masters that the pre-vocational education policy he set out in Report on Education Organization in '1912, should be implemented and maintained. Between 1913 and 1939, as successive governments chose to invest in the superstructure necessary for agricultural expansion, the pre-vocational courses that Andrews had managed to introduce in the central schools were gradually curtailed. Those that he implemented in the high schools were terminated. Agricultural education was the one grudging exception to these contractions. It was not until the 1939-1945 War that Western Australian governments began to accept responsibility for the preparation of all students in its schools for entry to the workforce. In the reforms that followed, academic and pre-vocational courses were accommodated in multilateral high schools. Postwar population growth, the increased complexity of the economy and the Commonwealth government's financial intervention in higher education quickly called into question the role of the pre-vocational lower-secondary school curriculum. Chronological promotion and the improved availability of post-school vocational training in the 1960s also continued to make its transfer to the upper-secondary school almost inevitable. The vicissitudes and contradictions in pre-vocational education policymaking between 1893 and 1972 resulted from the interplay of a number of influences. Chief among these were the political power of the propertied ruling class, their belief that economic prosperity depended upon the continued expansion of Western Australia's agricultural industries and a chronic lack of finance for the State school system. Pursuit of agricultural expansion was a convenient justification for neglecting the pre- vocational curriculum and the urban schools in which it was delivered. Between 1940 and 1966 two Directors of Education, Murray Little and Thomas Logan Robertson, played pivotal roles in securing political recognition that this neglect could not continue. A third Director, Harry Dettman, persuaded the government that the three compulsory years of secondary schooling introduced in 1966 should be devoted to general education. However, this still left the perennial problem of the relationship between the non-academic student, the workplace and the pre-vocational curriculum unresolved.