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more specific in identifying the role one individual played in ensuring the survival of
the three-level system in England:
As the twentieth century progressed and the Board of Education committed
itself increasingly to a tripartite organization of secondary education, other
civil servants devised, in official reports, an account of the history of English
education which emphasized the appropriateness of a divided system. R.
Fitzgibbon Young was perhaps the most notable, as the author of the historical
sections of the 1926 Hadow Report and the 1938 Spens Report. Young served as
secretary of a number of influential Consultative Committee reports during the
inter-war years and repeatedly offered accounts of the development of English
education which reflected favourably upon Board of Education policies,
showing them as the natural outcome of gradual and almost inexorable policies.
(Lowe 1983:27)
Throughout the 20th century, there has existed this close connection between
education policy and individuals within the Board of Education in its successive
forms. In the 21st century the connection has if anything become closer, and the
impulse for government to take greater control over education has accelerated, as will
be shown in the following chapter.
To return to the reports, the thinking behind the Hadow Report can be discerned in the
Spens Report that followed a decade later. The Consultative Committee on Secondary
Education, chaired by Sir Will Spens, published its report at the end of 1938. It
carried forward broadly the structure advocated in the Hadow Report. It did include a
proposal that “the curriculum of the existing grammar schools should be broadened
but also recommended that junior technical schools should be upgraded to secondary
school status to become ‘technical high schools’” (McCulloch 1994: 74). In regard to
examinations, the report was judged from an examining board perspective to have
“failed to disclose the real trouble, which was that the simple School Certificate
Examination did not differentiate sufficiently between the better and the average
students” (Brereton 1944: 106). However, that particular trouble still remains to be