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A product of Matthew Arnold’s regime at Rugby, Brereton aimed to achieve
improvements in agricultural practice through the education of young farmers. He
advocated a structure of schools similar to that adopted by Woodard in Sussex, but
with the added factor of an annual county examination for the awarding of prizes and
scholarships. His ambitious plans for a iiCounty Education'' system, published in
1856, proposed a structure of schools for boys and girls between 12 and 15, then a
college for boys from 15 to 17, all supported by a combination of fees and the pupils’
labour on an attached farm. iiThe keystone of the whole system would be an annual
county examination... at which youths between sixteen and twenty fbur ...might sit for
a ‘County Degree’" (Roach 1971: 52). This idea was the genesis of the first Oxford
Local Examinations in 1857. One of history’s many ironies is that the English
examining system which in 2006 has yet to incorporate successfully the assessment of
applied skills grew out of a scheme for agricultural improvement.
Brereton’s west country schools won the support of Lord Ebrington, an influential
landowner and Whig supporter of social reform, who iioffered a prize of £20 for the
best examination passed by a young man between eighteen and twenty-three years
old, the son or relative of a Devonshire farmer" (Roach 1971: 50). Members of the
Bath and West Society agreed to help organise the project, and the examination took
place at Exeter in Easter week of 1856.
The scheme caught the attention of T D Acland, already involved in the National
Schools movement. He recognised in such an examination a means of building in
standards in the vexed area of the middle-class schools. He convened a committee
which proposed in January 1857 the creation of a wider system of examinations and
prizes based on the Exeter model. Through his status as an Oxford double first and