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

56

When in 1965 Antony Crosland as Labour’s Secretary of State for Education issued
Circular 10/65, it eschewed compulsion in favour of a request to local authorities to
submit plans for comprehensive reorganisation. This low-key approach was a great
disappointment to comprehensive advocates like Brian Simon, who saw the voluntary,
and non-funded, tone of the Circular as ''hardly reflecting a serious determination to
bring about fundamental change in the structure of secondary education" (Simon
1991: 281).

This avoidance of diktat has often been considered positive evidence of the nation’s
democratic credentials. For example, in 1895 the Liberal Party, then in opposition, set
up the Bryce Commission to report on secondary provision in England and
commended its “freedom, variety and elasticity". Green, like Simon, comments that
other constructions could be put on those qualities:

...Elasticity had meant ad hoc and unplanned; variety had meant class
differentiation and freedom meant the unchecked authority of the powerful to
provide education solely in their own interests.

(Green 1990: 307)

Voluntarism was closely connected to and regularly resulted from the third factor in
the national culture: the religious denominational divide which to a considerable
degree followed the fault-lines of social class.

Inter-denominational rivalries as a brake on reform

For the better part of a century, the suspicion that existed between the two principal
denominational groups obstructed change. The entrenched opposition between the
Anglican establishment and Dissenters nurtured mutual suspicion. Both opposed any
education plans which might benefit the other. Margaret Archer’s perceptive

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