Education has always been vulnerable to psychometric incursions and influence, although less so now than before. Lacking a distinctive and self-confident view about the purpose of testing in schools and about what kinds of tests were suitable and unsuitable, it has, rather like a client state, looked on helplessly as psychometric doctrines and practices have been installed and put to work. Which is not to say that there have not been, at all times, as in all client states, individuals in education ready and eager to embrace psychometric assumptions and beliefs about how children differ, and to suppress curiosity about the children themselves.