STOKE D'ABERNON
By REGINALD LENNARD
THE recently published Report of the Select Committee on Estimates deserves more attention than such documents usually receive, for it deals with the machinery employed in the recruitment of the Civil Service and particularly with the work of the Civil Service Selection Board at Stoke d'Abernon, which was criticised with so much vigour in the House of Lords last May. On the whole, neither the Report nor the published evidence will do much to allay misgivings about the Stoke d'Abernon experiment. It is true that only two members of the Committee consider that the work of the Board should be terminated before the end of the financial year, while the majority recommend that it should be "retained for the present " ; but even the majority are of opinion that it should be run on less expensive lines, should "continue to act only in an advisory capacity" and "should not be given the power of selecting or rejecting candidates." They also remark that, "though- some of the tests are most valuable, the system as a whole tends to favour can- didates who are quick at dealing with intelligence tests, but who may lack some of the qualities especially valuable to the Govern- ment service " ; and they mention the fact that the First Civil Service Commissioner himself expressed regret at "the Foreign Office decision to recruit all their Senior Branch by this method "- a decision which appears from the evidence to have been due to a personal ruling by Mr. Bevin.
It may perhaps be doubted whether the Select Committee (which is mainly concerned with financial matters) has fully appreciated the strength of the case against the new methods as a means of recruiting the higher branches of the Civil Service. The methods are, of course, an adaptation of those employed by the War Office during the war in the selection of candidates for commissions. But then it was a question of weeding out a minority of unsuitable persons and of passing all who were likely to make good subalterns in a very short time, and not at all a question of picking out potential generals. In the case of the Civil Service the problem is entirely different ; and the chief comelaint against the methods of recruit- ment in use before the war is precisely that they admitted mo large proportion of men who failed to rise above the rank of Principal— that is to say, persons whose abilities did not eventually justify their promotion to posts carrying (at present rates) a salary exceeding some £1,200 a year. Sir Percival Waterfield, in his evidence, went so far as to say that "people who fail to rise above the rank of Principal ought not to have been recruited" and that the exclusion of such people is the object of the new technique.
On the face of things this sounds almost like trying to choose university professors on the results of the Higher Certificate exami- nation; and though no one doubts that the Selection Board (whose zeal and ingenuity are not disputed) have done their best to adapt the War Office methods to their very different tasks, one cannot feel other than sceptical as to the possibility of making an effective use of similar tools for such very dissimilar work. It is urged that many who have visited Stoke d'Abernon, and seen the Board in action, have been very favourably impressed. One visitor, indeed, having spent forty-eight hours there, said, "From what I saw at Stoke d'Abernon the best undoubtedly comes to the top in this test and was unerringly recognised." But what value can such a judge- ment possess ? Either the writer is claiming an infallible intuition which tells him who is in fact "the best" (an intuition which inci- dentally would make the work of the Board superfluous), or else he can only mean that those who did best in the tests were given the credit for so doing—in Other worios, that the examiners do not cheat. But it is the method of examination, not the honour of the examiners, that is in question.
One should not perhaps attach much importance to this egregious example. But it increases one's misgivings to find that 'Lord Pakenham, when defending the new methods in the House of Lords, cited the favourable impressions of journalists who had been to Stoke d'Abernon in the preceding week, and that the Committee on Estimates (whose approval of the system was in any case subject to serious qualifications) "reached their conclusion mainly on a study made by Members of the tests employed and their observa- tion of the candidates undergoing them." Sir Percival Waterfield is more cautious. In his evidence he said: "If the Sub-Committee were to ask me whether I am satisfied that we are doing better by our present more complicated and more expensiv. e methods I cap only say that I hope we are doing better, but I shall not know for another ten years or so what Departments think."
It is in the light of this frank admission that one must consider the reports that have been obtained on the work done in the Departments by the first 147 candidates for the Administrative Class who were successful in the Stoke d'Abernon tests. Ninety-seven of these were described as " outstanding " or "very good," forty as "good," eight as "satisfactory with some shortcomings" and only two as " poor " ; and Sir Percival Waterfield explained that " pour " really meant "not likely to progress beyond the rank of Principal." This last figure (2 out of 147) he ventured to compare with the I31 per cent, of the Administrative Class who during the past forty years have in fact failed to rise above the rank of Principal. But these figures cannot be accepted at their face value. The reports appear to have been made after six months' work ; and it can hardly be doubted that, among those who in the past failed eventually to attain the higher ranks, a good many were not so obviously " poor " that a kindly chief would declare them to be incapable of such attainment some six months after they entered the service. But, further, the 147 were ex-Servicemen, and as such cannot fairly be compared either with pre-war or post-war candidates. As the Esti- mates Committee observe, they were "older and more mature," and "often possessed much greater experience in handling difficult problems." It would therefore be surprising if these men had not proved exceptionally dexterous at the outset a their careers in the Civil Service. But efficiency in the lower stations of a profession is a poor index to a man's capacity for the highest ranks ; and the most patent danger of the new methods is that they will tend to select men of ready but limited ability, who may be the comfort of their chiefs in their fifst years of service, but make inferior successors of
those chiefs in the future. - The Stoke d'Abernon process evidently leads to results very different from those reached by the former methods of selection. In the past the results of the Civil Service examination were more or less in harmony with the academic ranking of the candidates ; but, as the First Commissioner indicated in his address at Oxford, there is a marked disharmony between that ranking and the Stoke d'Abernon ranking. And this disharmony is surely a additional reason for doubting the value of the new technique. For the old methods, with all their faults, have given us, as Lord Cherwell said, "the finest Civil Service in the world." Those methods can perhaps be improved. It is surprising that so much of the present contro- versy has been conducted on the assumption that the only alterna- tive to Stoke d'Abernon is a written examination counting for a thousand marks combined with a short interview counting for three hundred marks. It might be well to attach more weight to the interview (and to the reports from candidates' university tutors which are considered in connection with the interview) ; and more time could be allotted to the interviews at much less cost than the £26,000 a year now spent on Stoke d'Abernon. But if the old technique may be improved, it is hard to see how the methods of the Civil Service Selection Board can fail to become rapidly less effective. The value of intelligence tests, whatever it may be, depends much on their novelty and unexpectedness. But as the types of test become more widely known, candidates will be prepared for them by skilful crammers.
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