The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

99

In its subject panels the S.S.E.C. has devised an arrangement which allows the
group of three or four individuals which deals with each subject to indicate ex
cathedra their disapproval of syllabuses, question-papers and methods of
marking. Inevitably their criticisms are founded on a narrower experience than
that out of which have grown the syllabuses, question-papers and methods they
criticise, and much energy is devoted to attempts to enforce an undesirable
uniformity of detail. What may have still more serious repercussions is that
subject panels can be stamping grounds for individualistic specialists where
each ‘subject ’ is considered without much regard to its place in the curriculum
as a whole.

(Petch 1953: 174)

This observation could well have been written in the mid-1980s, when a virtually
identical process took place during the creation of the General Certificate of
Secondary Education (GCSE) which replaced the GCE Ordinary level. Despite their
long years of successful performance, the Boards are not trusted when it comes to
planning change.

The new examination was rolled out in successive stages: the Ordinary level for 16-
year-olds in 1951 and the Advanced level for 18-year-olds in 1953. As mentioned
above, entry to the examinations was restricted to the 20 per cent of pupils selected
for the grammar schools. Yet with secondary education now open to all, post-war
English society expected the attainments of all to be accredited. Pressure for change
began almost immediately.

An early attempt to respond to this pressure was to widen access to examination
success by creating a different type of examining board. This was the idea not of the
established university-based Boards, but of the East Midlands Union, one of four
regional bodies which accredited attainment in technical subjects. They proposed to
the Secondary Schools Examinations Council that, with technical schools now
forming a substantial segment of the new secondary structure, “z7 would be beneficial

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