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

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When one considers that at that point the Boards were fully occupied in managing the
final series of the School Certificate examinations while simultaneously working on
drawing up the new GCE to whose design they had not been invited to contribute,
their lukewarm response to the news of a government-endorsed competitor is not
surprising.

Eamshaw listed their various objections. The London board raised the question of the
acceptability of the proposed new body’s results for university entrance; Durham
feared that the new Board would ’''cause the GCE to be sharply split into two types
depending not on ability ...but on the place of origin of the candidate viz., Grammar
School or Secondary Technical School.” Cambridge felt that “cooperation among
existing boards and the technical examining bodies provided a more promising
approach” (Earnshaw 1974: 4-5). Innocent at that time of the realities of the market,
the Boards did not explicitly raise the real problem with an additional Board: the
number of candidates was fixed, and there was no way that they could, to use the
modem idiom ‘grow their business’. This issue lay dormant, hidden by the increasing
numbers of students that schools were entering for examination, until the 1980s, when
the limited size of the market translated into financial pressure on some Boards.

Meanwhile the momentum for a new Board continued. City & Guilds agreed to
finance and service the ‘ninth board’, and on 8 May 1952 the Joint Examinations
Board for the General Certificate of Education came into being. The Ministry
immediately insisted on a name change as there were already two ‘joint’ boards;
instead it became the Associated Examining Board (AEB).

This was to be the only adjustment to the structure of qualification providers, with no
corresponding change in those qualifications, following the entry of a huge new

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