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• George Walden with We Should Know Better
Such populist works on education - while providing a flavour of the live issues at a
particular time - do not credit the Boards with the influence they have been popularly
rumoured to exert. Not one of these commentators made any reference to the
examining boards despite their stress on the importance of examinations in
determining the life chances of young people.
Still with popular overviews of education, Stuart Maclure, editor of the journal
Education from 1954 to 1969 and of The Times Educational Supplement from 1969 to
1989, has written a very readable insider’s version of policy developments from the
HMI perspective in The Inspectors’ Calling (Maclure 2000). His account, using
evidence provided by the personal accounts of some 200 members of the Inspectorate,
throws light on rather murky episodes like the production of the unpublished Yellow
Book prior to James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin speech. Yet in his account of “the
evolution of the education system in England and Wales in the second half of the
twentieth century” (Maclure 2000: vii), the Boards and their examinations, which in
his role as TES editor he covered so regularly, do not feature.
More curiously still, the Boards have failed to interest academic analysts. Although
their stock in trade is the finer points of assessment, the Boards do not feature in
research into technical measurement. (See for example Goldstein and Heath 2000)
Studies of the social (Lowe 1988) or administrative (Gosden 1983) history of
education treat them as a given part of the landscape. Their absence, although
surprising, I proffer as a principal justification for my research. Therefore it is
essential to discuss in detail the search I have conducted of the literatures of the three
disciplines at whose conjunction I had set out to locate this study.