Art reviews: The Art of Intelligent Ageing | Andrew Cranston: But the Dream Had No Sound

In May 1931, an international conference was held in Eastbourne, focusing on how best to assess and track the ability of schoolchildren. Scotland, England, France, Germany, Switzerland and the USA were all represented, and at the end of the conference it was decided that each nation should conduct a different research exercise and report back. Scotland was tasked with trialling an intelligence test, and so, in the summer of 1932, all the children in Scotland born in 1921 – 87,498 of them aged ten or 11 – were tested. The exercise was repeated 15 years later, in 1947, with a new set of children. The tests were then put away and forgotten, although by one account they were invoked in the arguments that led to the abolition of the Eleven-Plus.