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

57

comment, referring to the fudged settlement of 1870, sums up the situation that
prevailed for so long:

Non-decision-making was of paramount significance, for the party political
defence of vested interests had militated against the introduction of a single
national system of education.

(Archer 1984: 76)

The 1861 report of the Newcastle Royal Commission, charged with investigating
“The State of Popular [elementary] Education in England] advocated some form of
local distribution of funding, but “the idea of applying local rates did not survive the
denominational antagonism of the times” (Montgomery 1965: 40). In this instance,
the source of the antagonism was the distrust of the many parents and teachers from a
lower middle-class dissenting background for public funding of the National Schools
which provided specific Anglican teaching (Roach 1986: 48). Confirming the
negative influence of this division was the view of Charles Dickens, who maintained
“that religious sectarianism, even more than the national indifference and inertia,
was responsible for the many postponements of a state system” (Quoted in Collins and
Philip 1963: 74).

When a limited form of secondary education was introduced by the Balfour Act of
1902, there was a major outcry that this meant ‘religion on the rates’ because state
funding would go to existing church schools - who were equally forthright about their
right to continue within a state-funded system.

The historian Roy Lowe, in assessing the contribution of R A Butler to the 1944
Education Act, recognised Butler’s skill in managing at least partially to resolve the
thorny problem of church involvement in state education which had dogged English
education policy for the better part of a century. “Butler’s patient and skilful

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