The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

54

An inevitable corollary of the elevated regard for those capable of abstraction has
been a corresponding lack of status for applied or vocational education. Until the
Dearing Report of 1996 recommended a limited rapprochement of vocational and
academic qualifications, the two fields had developed quite separately in England. A
vehement critic of this division has been the military historian Corelli Bamett. He
named Cardinal Newman as the model of the influential Victorian who exemplified
“the lack of interest in industry and industrial success displayed by the dominant
British educational establishment” (Barnett 1986: 238). However, he saved his
bitterest criticism for what he labelled the “New Jerusalem attitudes” of Labour party
reformers after the Second World War. He castigated their complete failure to
consider the requirements of British industry when implementing the reform of
secondary education. Certainly this attitude has profoundly affected the nation’s
examination system.

Voluntarism rather than central direction

In his comparison of the development of state education systems, Andy Green cited
English reluctance to impose any form of national system to be the factor which
differentiated English (although he saw it as ‘British’) practice from that of Prussia,
France or America. As the 19th century proceeded, “...the overwhelmingly dominant
values of the Victorian era were those of individualism, enterprise and laissez-faire
liberalism” (Green 1990: 228). He illustrated his point by quoting John Stuart Mill,
who in On Liberty scornfully dismissed the need for a national education system: “A
general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like

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