Looking back on his experience as Minister of Education, Anthony Crosland reflected that ‘it's a general truth that new ideas and intellectual breakthroughs normally come from the outside academics… Academics are paid to have new ideas, civil servants are paid to administer’. Between the wars, most influential ‘new ideas and intellectual breakthroughs’ were the work of professional psychologists.

The Board of Education's Consultative Committee provided psychologists with an ideal vehicle for turning ideas into policy. Set up in October 1900 and instructed to recruit two-thirds of its members from schools, universities and other educational bodies, it was something of a hybrid, part semi-official think tank, part ‘high-level pressure group for the educational world’. The committee was suspended in the latter part of the Great War, but revived in July 1920, with a permanent membership of twenty-one appointed by the President of the Board for a period of six years, and with Sir Henry Hadow, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, as Chairman. It examined whatever reference was handed down to it, calling witnesses, soliciting advice, and, after mulling over the evidence, producing a detailed report. The committee did little more than outline what it thought to be the best educational policy and the soundest educational theory; it was up to the Board of Education and the Local Education Authorities to interpret the proposals, rejecting them, adjusting them, or implementing them as they thought fit. Yet there is little doubt that it exercised a powerful and enduring influence over educational policy, shaping the opinions of Ministers and backbenchers, and checking the domination of a static bureaucracy.