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

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academic pupils.” Further Education colleges were the main beneficiaries of the
AEB ’ s non-traditional syllabuses, “a partnership which was to strengthen rapidly and
indeed last till the present day” (AEB, 2004)

However, the technical schools never became firmly established on a national basis -
partly because of post-war financial stringency, partly because of the English distaste
for applied education and partly because of the growing movement for comprehensive
schools. The new examining board grew increasingly indistinguishable from the
others. Yet at the same time there was growing pressure for more young people to be
accredited through external examinations. The Norwood Committee’s expectation
that external examinations would wither had misjudged completely the national trend.
In fact the opposite had happened, and schools which entered pupils for external
examinations were seen to:

... ‘derive substantial public esteem as a result, and indeed the teaching staff in
such schools tend to argue that the examinations are desirable rather than
undesirable. from a Memorandum of observations for submission to the
Minister of Education, 22 December 1955.

(Quoted in Gosden 1983: 68)

Instead, qualifications were becoming increasingly important currency in English
society. One writer commenting on this aspect of the English social climate refers to:

...the power of ‘credentialism’ - the expectation that what pupils learnt at
school would be authenticated by some external certification, and that this,
whether relevant or not, could then be used as a discriminatory instrument for
recruitment.

(Maclure 2000: 56)

Certainly teachers were increasingly uncomfortable in following a syllabus designed
to select the potential academic elite and simply watered down in secondary modem
schools. Before the end of the new examinations’ first decade, the Central Advisory
Council for Education (England), which was primarily interested in secondary school

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