The Council itself consisted of some 60 members drawn from a wide range of bodies with an interest in education [citation needed].
This Council appointed a director and arranged for some basic funding to come from government local authorities, but the EIS provided free accommodation and secretarial assistance.
For more than 20 years, most of the work was carried out by groups of teachers on a voluntary basis.
Throughout these years and on into the 1980s Council staff and associates made distinguished contributions to educational research, often setting world standards.
The authors of the council's early publications make up a who's who of the greats in this field — Godfrey Thomson, Drever, P.E.Vernon, McClelland and Boyd.
They found worthy successors in later years — Maxwell, Fraser, Clark, Nisbet, Hope, Dockrell, Patricia Broadfoot, Spencer, John Raven, Ian Deary.
In later years the council's research programme came more and more under government control with the Council itself finally being disbanded and the few remaining staff moved to an all-but non-existent renamed Scottish Center for Educational research within the Faculty of Education of Glasgow University.
Some indication of the scope of the council's more recent work may be derived from the list below.
Although several are not Council publications they indicate the nature of some of the work ... and refer to subsequent developments built upon it.
Uses and Abuses of Intelligence: Studies Advancing Spearman and Raven’s Quest for Non-Arbitrary Metrics.
Unionville, New York: Royal Fireworks Press; Edinburgh, Scotland: Competency Motivation Project; Budapest, Hungary: EDGE 2000; Cluj Napoca, Romania: Romanian Psychological Testing Services SRL.
A list of some 70 publications by a previous Director, W. Bryan Dockrell, will be found in a link cited on that page.
The Level and Trend of National Intelligence: The Contribution of the Scottish Mental Surveys.