Unusually, both in terms of real-life public schools and their fictional counterparts, Greyfriars School does not have a house system. In the early Magnet stories, this created a problem for the author in that inter-house rivalries are a useful source of plot conflicts in many fictional school stories. To compensate for this, Frank Richards created three separate forms of similar age groups at Greyfriars (the Lower Fourth, the Fourth and the Upper Fourth) as well as rival characters in the neighbouring Highcliffe School. As the stories developed, the time would come when plot conflicts would arise naturally from the minutely detailed characters that were fleshed out over the years.