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The most fruitful by far was education history, and this has determined the focus of
my thesis. Together with that history, the literature of assessment has clarified the
technical issues which I believe have been an unacknowledged factor in the recent
concerns over the Boards. Then policy papers and critiques of those policies have
been of fundamental importance. My major disappointment was the discovery that
education sociology has not seriously addressed the examinations system, still less its
providers. Despite the signals of Bourdieu, Bemstein and Young referred to above,
education sociologists regularly cite examination results as indicators of, for example,
social exclusion, but I have not been able to find a significant body of work that has
delved more deeply into the structures which produce them. This has been a
disappointment and has meant that my planned triangulation of
historical∕political∕sociological analysis has had to be adjusted and has instead
become essentially a historical-political account.
1 The History OfEnglish Secondary Education and its Examinations
To create the necessary overview of the English examining boards, I needed to
construct a historical framework which placed them within the development of
English secondary education and its examinations, which they administered.
(a) Primary Sources
In researching that history, three early primary sources - the Taunton Report
(Commission 1868), the Clarendon Report (Schools 1864) and the Bryce Report
(Education 1895) - respectively provide valuable insight into Victorian thinking on