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two parent Boards have called on their years of examining to provide an outline of the
landmarks over the 100 years since the founding of the JMB and 50 years since the
creation of the AEB - the organisations now merged as AQA
Once these resources have yielded their insights, the Boards’ development must be
traced through the terrain of histories of secondary education and its related
qualifications, the area where they operated, albeit unacknowledged for the most part.
The pre-eminent figure in providing an overview of English educational history is
Brian Simon - described posthumously as “the leading and best known historian of
education ever produced in this country” (McCulloch 2004: 3). Simon combined the
seemingly contradictory positions of a communist party member and a major figure
within the ‘education establishment’. His passionate commitment to comprehensive
education was the motivating force in his historical writing, which is based in the
struggle played out between the forces of conservatism and the challenge of a growing
socialist movement. Of particular value is his volume on the rarely considered years
between the first and second world wars: The Politics of Educational Reform 1920-
1940 (Simon 1974). Simon makes it clear that it was the dominance of traditional
views within the education department during this period that influenced the 1944
Education Act. However, his analysis touches only tangentially on developments
within the field of examinations and not at all on the Boards that provide them. He
seemed to see them as a given part of the terrain but by no means a principal factor in
his concern with the wider issue of the structure of secondary education.
Harry Judge is another champion of the comprehensive school who has chronicled his
practical experience in A Generation of Schooling: English Secondary Schools since
1944 (Judge 1984). As a head teacher in Banbury he created an all-ability school from