Trouble at 't back end
Long before I was sent to a Shropshire field to learn to fly on the Prentice, I had felt a bit sorry for it - pictures in the aeronautical Press showed that the first prototype had a neat fin and rudder, rather like an elongated Proctor's (remember them?). As time went on, the whole back end gradually changed, with a new tailplane, new rudder, and finally anti-stall strakes and those odd upturned wing-tips, with handholds for gound crew to (try to) hold the thing straight for cross-wind taxying. Percival's design office must have spilt much ink, and (possibly) hours of digesting wind tunnel results to get the device thought up by distant educationists with odd ideas of the second pupil "learning by listening" from the rear seat reasonably flyable.
Combine that with the Ministry's insistence that 350-odd h.p. was enought to propel the machine - "Camel -> horse -> committee "?
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, the Prentice was, at the time, the inevitable step to (one hoped) the mighty Harvard and beyond, and did the job of weeding out the poor chaps who couldn't master the beast.