A grammar school is one of several ifferent types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom. Four distinct uses of the word can be noted, the first two referring to ordinary schools set up in the age before compulsory secondary education, and two referring to selective schools thereafter. Arguably the most well-known grammar schools were those of the Tripartite System (also known colloquially as the grammar-school system), which existed in England and Wales from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, and still exists in Northern Ireland.