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fact, although their chairman might have felt differently, their motives were based on
concern for those pupils of a weaker academic standard:
The majority of members of the SSEC certainly wished modern and technical
schools to remain free from any external examinations because of the
constraints which these placed on the curricula of schools. So far as the LEAs
were concerned, this feeling was reinforced by the apparent jealousy which
some of them had shown between the wars towards the influence of university
examining bodies on the curricula of ‘their' secondary schools.
(Gosden 1983: 63)
Certainly Sir Cyril felt that the curricular constraints imposed by the School
Certificates should not be allowed to blight the new technical and modem schools,
and his report recommended that examinations should become “...entirely internal,
that is to say, conducted by the teachers at the school on syllabuses and papers
framed by themselves" (SSEC 1943: 140). This was to be virtually the precise design
of the Certificate of Secondary Education which was introduced in 1965, but it won
no support in 1944. The Boards were, naturally, opposed to this recommendation for
their gradual disappearance. One of their number felt that implementing it could prove
to be “ ...a step which I believe would allow arbitrariness, favouritism and patronage
to raise their ugly heads again..." (Brereton 1944: 187). In fact, Brereton included in
his 1944 Case for Examinations, perhaps too late to have any influence, an
enlightened proposal for a move to a regional system in which:
...the existing examination bodies should pool their resources more completely
with the agreed object of making it easy for schools to transfer from one
examination to another nearer at hand [with aj...Curriculum and Examinations
Council to co-ordinate the examinations...and act as a link between these
[regional examining] bodies and the Board of Education.
(Brereton 1944: 189)
However, as has always been the case, the Boards’ thinking was not taken into
account. While they have been trusted to administer the system and the qualifications
they provide have become deeply rooted in the educational structure, their experience
has not been deemed relevant when reforms are being designed: another feature of