Selection and the Social Background of the Administrative Class: A Further Comment
| Date | 01 June 1956 |
| Author | KENNETH ROBINSON |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1956.tb01486.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1956 |
Selection and
the
Social
Background
oj’
the Administrative
Cluss:
A
Further
Comment
By
KENNETH
ROBINSON
AM
sorry if
I
was wrong in supposing that Mr. Kelsall considered it more
I
important that the Administrative Class should be more equally “represen-
tative of the various social strata
”
than that its members should display the
qualities needed in this small group of people if our political system is to
work well. That
I
was not alone among reviewers of his book in getting this
impression may be due to the fact that he nowhere explicitly discusses the
meaning of the criterion of
“
social representativeness,” its significance in
assessing the suitability of the members of the Administrative Class for the
performance of their role in our political and administrative system, or its
relationship to other criteria. He does, however, often use expressions which
appear to imply that
“
social representativeness
”
is an overriding criterion
:
for example, the pre-war
viva
“
continued to prejudice the chances of direc-t
entry to
the
Home Administrative Class
of
people who would most probably
have provided a valuable social leaven
”
(p.
75)
which suggests that it was this
consideration which made
it
desirable that they should have been accepted
rather than the fact that they had scored higher marks in the written examina-
tion than some of those who were.
In spite of Mr. Kelsall’s reiteration of his views on the pre-war open
competition,
I
might, perhaps, be allowed to point out that in my article
I
did
not support the pre-war interview and am, indeed, rather more sceptical than
he is of the post-war one. On the contrary,
I
believe both to be somewhat
unreliable, though
I
do
not know of any study of the reliability of the post-war
interview as used in Method
I,
or of the final interview as used in Method
11.
I
am sceptical, however, about the particular argument used by Mr. Kelsall
to support his contention that the written part of the pre-war examination by
itself afforded a better guide to
“
career-success
”
as it does not seem to me
that this can be at all reliably gauged by the time taken to reach the rank of
Principal before 1939 or even that
of
Assistant Secretary between 1939-50
since, apart from the elimination of the totally unsuitable,
I
should have
supposed that promotion in the first case was wholly, and in the latter case
almost wholly, by seniority within the Department, and that, in any particular
Department, the number of vacancies available, and the time they were avail-
able, were determined by a wide range of factors, none of them related to the
merits of those awaiting promotion in the Department.
Mr. Kelsall writes
:
“
To Mr. Robinson, there is apparently something
both expected and inevitable about the existing social composition of the
Higher Civil Service.” In fact, what
I
wrote was that if tests more reliable
than the present interview in Method
I
in assessing such personal qualities
as
“
sound judgment, common sense, resourcefulness and resolution
”
were
devised,
‘‘
it would not be surprising
”
if they were
“
found to give a preference
to candidates from independent and boarding schools, just as the purely
written examination in all its varieties, has been found to give a preference to
172
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