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

90

report. When in the event they were completely bypassed, their consternation was
understandable.

The Norwood committee was not given carte blanche, but - prompted by his
parliamentary secretary, the educationist Chuter Ede, a Labour MP - Butler tabled the
1938 Spens Report as a starting point. This is a clear indication that there existed a
form of political consensus around the three-level structure. After deliberating for two
years, the Norwood committee completed its report in 1943 and sent it directly to
Butler as President of the Board of Education, circumventing any input from the
SSEC on the proposals which had major significance for the examinations they
controlled. An official from the Cambridge board suggested that a reason for this
slight might be that “...the complete cessation of the activities of the Secondary
Schools Examinations Council during the war may be an indication of its
unsatisfactory constitution'' (Brereton 1944: 170). He did not elucidate the nature of
this unsatisfactoriness. A later suggestion was that “the boards were seen as too
defensive, so their bypassing by Norwood was not all that surprising"" (Gosden 2000).

No such anodyne explanations for this inexcusable treatment came from the Joint
Matriculation Board. In his history of that organisation written after time might have
cooled his emotions, James Petch described the bypassing of the Boards as “official
chicanery” (Petch 1953: 165). However it might be said that this pique at a perceived
insult was misdirected, for the report effectively recommended their eventual demise:
the Norwood report recommended the phasing out of external examinations.

The Norwood Report and the subsequent Butler Education Act have regularly been
blamed for their elitist restriction of examinations to pupils in grammar schools. In

<<   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   >>

More intriguing information