Ill
Group to continue quietly within the Department of Education and Science. Then it
replaced the Secondary Schools Examinations Council with an entirely different form
of regulatory body: the Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations, which first
met in October of 1964. (Barber 1992: 39) The examining boards were not invited to
join.
The Schools Council: Innovative but ineffectual in examination reform
The Schools Council ushered in twenty years of teacher-led innovation in curriculum
and pedagogy but its repeated efforts at examination reform bore no fruit. Like its
predecessor, the SSEC, it did not include in its Council or any of its numerous
committees any representatives of the examining boards. I believe there was a
connection between these two facts.
Looking back at that period from the current situation of strong central control, it is
difficult to credit statements like that of Michael Young in 1971:
What is significant for the sociology of education is that in spite of attempts, the
politics of the curriculum has remained outside Westminster. Apart from
compulsory religious instruction, the headmaster or principal’s formal
autonomy over the curriculum is not questioned.
(Young 1971: 22)
The succeeding 25 years have seen a revolution in control of education in England - a
revolution that has affected the examining boards in perhaps less obvious ways than it
has the autonomy of head teachers. Young does qualify his statement by pointing to
the de facto limitation on that autonomy due to the universities’ domination of ''all but
one of the examining boards" (Young 1971: 22).