ABSTRACT
During the Second World War, Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) had little influence on policy making and this attitude evidently continued for some time after the war. The 1977 Management Review of the departments of education (DES) had enhanced the position of the Inspectorate within the department by recommending the creation of a third major policy group, the Policy Group for Inspection (PGI), which was established in 1979. Lawton and Gordon have pointed out that earlier authors had a tendency to identify too closely HMI and DES civil servants as part of the same system of central control of education. National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) helped to plan the survey and a DES statistician was attached to the HMI team for two years. The publication of HMI reports and the increasing interest of central government in education both created greater pressure on the independence of HMI.
