75
Incontrovertible evidence that they were becoming well regarded was the appeal from
the newly-established Headmasters’ Conference to the old universities to offer a
separate examining body for their pupils in the private sector. They had overcome
their instinctive antagonisms to form their organisation in 1870 because of their alarm
at the 1868 Taunton Report. As well as proposing a three-level system of secondary
schools, the report had recommended as a method of regulating these schools the
creation of a system of state-controlled examinations. Countering Matthew Arnold,
who supported the Taunton proposals, ''Goldwyn Smith, the Professor of Modern
History at Oxford, came out strongly against the continental practice of placing
authority for inspection or examination at the centre of power" (Montgomery 1965:
53). Goldwyn Smith’s stance prevailed, and the 1870 Forster Act omitted any
recommendations regarding either secondary education or examinations.
Instead, the great majority of English children received only an elementary education
until after the Second World War. Had the Forster Act included the Taunton
recommendations regarding secondary education, the course of English educational
history - and the related examinations system - might have been very different. The
historian who has made a study of this period concluded that the failure to act on the
wider recommendations of the Taunton Report “...can be regarded as a major
disaster for English education" (Roach 1986: 110).
In place of a central national system, university examining boards proliferated. The
result of the Headmasters’ Conference request was the establishment in 1873 of the
fourth examining board: the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board, which throughout its
existence served the private sector. Critics who felt that even this would cramp the
independent schools’ freedom were assured by the headmaster of Winchester that the
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