60
been asked to “inquire into how to bring the public schools into a closer association
with the general system, ...the outcome was disappointing" (McCulloch 2004: 61).
The Fleming Report was published two months after Butler’s education bill, so losing
any implication that the two were related. This manipulation of events suggest great
skill on the part of either Butler or his civil servants in managing to avoid yet again
coming to grips with England’s divided educational structure. Fleming recommended,
in the favoured English manner, “the voluntary association with the general
educational system of all Public Schools" (McCulloch 2004: 61). Thus the English
reliance on voluntarism maintained class divisions and the separate private sector.
The hidden influence of educational eminences grises
I have tried to establish that the four factors outlined above have formed - and to a
degree still form - an essential part of English educational attitudes. However, I shall
also suggest that their survival through changes both in government and in other
national attitudes is strongly related to the influence of civil servants in the
department of education. Evidence for this statement is, naturally, difficult to unearth,
but I have found repeated instances where those who have acquired expert knowledge
of a particular area of education have detected such influence.
Perhaps the best known and most widely acknowledged of influential civil servants is
Sir Robert Morant. In his role as Permanent Secretary of the Board of Education,
Morant drafted the bill that became the 1902 Balfour Education Act. The first in a
long line of influential civil servants in the education department, Sir Robert was “a
controversial but outstanding figure" (Sharp 2002: 99). His admirers acknowledge a
certain high-handedness in his approach, but praise his achievement in shaping
Edwardian secondary education as:
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