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

89

individual’s attainment. Examinations in individual subjects would serve as a short-
term measure to allow time for the new internal assessment system to take shape. It
was by this means that a central objective of the well-known Norwood report was
definitively lost as examinations flourished as never before, while the largely
forgotten Spens’ promotion of examinations in single subjects has become an
essential feature of English education. The single-subject structure of English
qualifications, now deeply embedded, sets them apart from virtually all other
comparable national systems. This could well be the most significant, though
unintended, result of the Norwood Report and the 1944 Act.

Neither report had touched on the issue of private schools. Norwood, as a former
headmaster of Harrow, had a keen interest in the matter, but had agreed with Butler’s
request to restrict his committee’s focus to “the scope of Grammar Schools in the
wider field of Secondary Education” (McCulloch 1994: 120). This concession on
Norwood’s part “ensured that discussion would continue to be framed generally in
terms of grammar, technical and modern schools: that is in a tripartite pattern of
[state] provision” (McCulloch 1994: 120).

It was in 1941 that R A Butler became President of the Board of Education in
ChurchilTs coalition Government and set in motion his plan to bring about the long-
delayed reform of secondary education. To head the committee which would produce
a report on which to base a bill, Butler appointed Sir Cyril Norwood, a long-serving
headmaster⁴ and chairman of the Secondary Schools Examinations Council, from
which most other members of the committee were also drawn (McCulloch 1994:
119). This choice of what was effectively a sub-committee of the SSEC led the
examining boards as the dominant group in that body to expect to receive the eventual

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