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

65

in an editorial in The Manchester Guardian of 17 August 1937, of the equally
exceptional English public schools:

...the very term...caused ‘perpetual astonishment to foreign observers’. Yet to
most Englishmen the system they form appears a feature of the social landscape
at once so inevitable and so edifying that only impiety or malice will venture to
challenge it.

It is still the case that these organisations are largely taken for granted as fixtures of
the English secondary system. I believe that this is because they developed as organic
creations of their society and have, until recently, broadly retained their distinctive
character. With the objective of making the case that they have now lost an essential
element of that character, I shall trace their history from their origins until the end of
the 1980s: a history that falls into two broad periods: from their origins to 1944, and
then from 1944 to 1988. The third, most recent period becomes the focus of the fourth
chapter of this study.

Part 1: A Victorian selection device become a national system

One of the distinguished historians of English education began his chronicle of
examinations in 19th century England with the sentence, ⁱⁱPublic examinations were
one of the great discoveries of nineteenth-century Englishmeri" (Roach 1971: 3). This
Sweepingly Eurocentric claim overlooks the major role examinations have played in
China from the time of the 7^th-century T’ang Dynasty, with merit-based examinations
a continuing selecting device throughout the country’s history. (Spence 1990)

Although comparatively late on a global scale, then, certain eminent Victorians
familiar with examinations from their experience at Oxford or Cambridge did indeed
conclude that adapting the notion of the university examination to accredit a wider

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