ABSTRACT
The first secretary to the Committee of Council on Education, Dr James Phillips Kay, was an extremely able administrator. He had been, among other things, a Sunday school superintendent, a doctor in charge of a cholera hospital in Manchester, a writer on The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, and an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner; he had studied educational systems abroad, had been concerned at home with the provision of education for pauper children and had undertaken practical experiments to improve the training of teachers. He represented a new and necessary factor in the government of a modern state : the high civil servant, well-briefed, semi-permanent and therefore in a position to advise ministers new to their tasks – and to survive their fall. He was, above all, able to propose policies of the highest political importance as being inevitable consequences of existing precedents and commitments, right reasoning and the impartial, expert study of the facts.
