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organisation, produced 15-18 (The Crowther Report) in 1959. It found that, although
a large section of the school population was “missing out on any suitable provision"
(Bush 1993: 11), the Advanced level examinations were fit for purpose because ''able
students were ‘subject minded’" (Quoted in Young and Leney 1997: 46). The
Crowther Report confirmed that the pressure point in the system was felt most acutely
at 16+. It was the growing demand from schools for some form of validation for the
attainment of those 16-year-olds who were missing out that led to a series of steps
towards widening access. In the first of these, the examining boards were to have only
an administrative role in a new qualification which grew out of newly recognised
teacher power.
B A golden age for educationists but not for pupils
The 1960s and early 1970s are widely viewed as a golden age in English education:
Peter Gosden, Desmond Nuttall, Denis Lawton, Stuart Maclure and Gary McCulloch
have all described this period as gilded in one way or another. Lawton, who saw the
gilt in teacher control of the curriculum, cites also the view of Maurice Kogan, in
1978 a civil servant at the Department of Education and Science working in the
Curriculum Study Group. Kogan attributed nostalgia for the period between 1944 and
the beginning of the 1960s to the fact that it was “the period of optimism and
consensus in education: both political parties (Labour and Conservative) were
committed to educational expansion..." (Quoted in Lawton 1980: 22). This has led to
the period sometimes being derided as ‘butskillism’ because so little separated the
policies of the Conservative R A Butler and Labour’s Hugh Gaitskill. Future analysts
may detect a similar blurring of party lines in these early years of the 21st century,