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

58

negotiation of the church school issue was his great contribution to what became
known as the Butler Act” (Lowe 1988: 73).

Both its supporters - Anglicans and Roman Catholics, who controlled about one-third
of existing schools - and its opponents - nonconformists who provided few schools
but many Labour MPs - felt passionately about the existing ‘dual system’. Butler
managed, by proposing what today seems the curious system of aided and controlled
schools, to win the support of Archbishop Temple, yet simultaneously to avoid
ruffling nonconformist feathers. The legacy of this divided system can be detected in
current debates over ‘faith schools’. Although this issue has no direct connection with
the examining boards, its influence has had the effect of strengthening social class
divisions and the hierarchical view of learners referred to above which the examining
system reflects. The final factor in the English mindset is, again, one where social
class is central: the separate existence of the private school sector.

The lasting influence of the private schools

In 1864, the Clarendon Commission - established to investigate public school
standards because their products were proving unreliable as administrators of empire
- reported that classics should remain as the core curriculum. This centrality of
classics served to set the private sector apart from state schools for the better part of a
century. As the education historian Brian Simon put it, the Clarendon Commission
'"created an efficient and entirely segregated system of education for the governing
class - one that had no parallel in any other country” (Simon 1974: 318). In another
historian’s view, it was the very prestige of the public schools, faults and all, which

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