In 1938, two meetings took place that were to become significant in their effects in UK education. One took place in the imposing Hotel Royal at Dinard, near St Malo, and the other in a small flat in Finsbury, north London. In their own ways, these two meetings provide a context in which Brian Simon was to work postwar. The meetings were focused on evaluation and the discussion method - both of which were significant new ideas in education. The meetings produced effects that shaped postwar education either in the hegemonic notions of intelligence and its testing or in the common school and its methods. The Dinard meeting was the final one for an important group of American and European educational researchers, working on aspects of examinations and intelligence testing, a project that had occupied them for some years. They had begun their work in the early 1930s and, although the group varied in number, they represented several European countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Finland and Switzerland), as well as Scotland and England. They were led by Paul Monroe, the historian and comparativist from the International Institute, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the first two meetings were chaired by Sir Michael Sadler, the great English comparativist of the early twentieth century, at that time in Oxford. Many of the participants in the meetings, and organizers of their linked, national research projects, were leading scholars at the edge of the new technology of intelligence testing.