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Evidence of the unusual power of civil servants in the DES comes also from a
politician who had experience of ministerial briefs in several departments. When he
came to Education as Secretary of State in May 1986, Kenneth Baker commented on
the “formidable intellectual bullying" (Quoted in Jenkins 1996: 117) of Walter Ulrich,
head of the Schools Branch. Baker felt that Ulrich had held Sir Keith Joseph and his
Junior Minister, Chris Patten, under the spell of his “fine Wykehamist mind". Both
ministers had tended to “concede the intellectual point rather than persist with the
political argument" (Jenkins 1996: 117).
In exactly the same manner 40 years later, the proposals in the consultation paper
Guaranteeing Standards regarding changes to the examining boards and issued by
Conservative Gillian Shephard were enacted unaltered by Labour’s Tessa Blackstone,
evidently persuaded by civil servants of the merits of the policy they had drafted. The
involvement of a particular civil servant in ensuring his - or at least the department’s
- desired outcome in this instance was mentioned spontaneously by two different
examining board officials in the interviews I conducted in the course of this research:
I can remember when [a named senior official], DfES - or DfEE, rather - came
into a room...to tell us about what was going on and [said], ‘There ’ll be three
[awarding bodies]’. It was in the basement of Sanctuary Buildings... and he
made this statement. We ,d had a meeting with him, and this was right at the
end.
(OCR2 2003)
A second recollection of the same meeting was equally precise:
And I do recall, and I even recall the date on this: the twelfth of December
1997, sorry 1996, a meeting in the Department where [the same named official]
really made it clear that the expectation would be that there would be only three
unitary awarding bodies.
(AQA2 2003)
This covert civil service influence is significant for this study, which posits the growth
of such influence in the form of the modem “managerial state" (Clarke and Newman