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

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examining boards remained entirely independent in this respect. It is at the very least
an anomaly, in an education service which has always been hard-pressed for funds,
that this remains the case (AQA3 2005).

The new qualification did provide significant autonomy for the teachers involved in
devising the internally-assessed Mode 3 syllabuses, and it did endorse the attainment
of many more young people. However, one analyst attributes its failure to achieve
widespread acceptance to the fact that it did not fit:

...the dominant method of examining English school leavers in the twentieth
century [which] had entailed the use of externally devised syllabuses and
unseen examination papers, set and marked by examiners employed by
university-based boards who had no part in teaching the candidates.

(Whitty 1985: 128)

Certainly cultural expectations about a qualification are of critical importance.
Whitty’s neo-marxist analysis goes on to ascribe the eventual decline of the CSE to
the examining boards’ perception of the teacher-controlled qualification as a threat to
their power. Unfortunately, by using the phrase “examining boards” his critique fails
to distinguish between the CSE boards and the GCE boards: the latter did not in fact
exercise significant power over CSE. He sees the Boards as traditional agencies who
“tended to employ administrative devices as a way of restricting the growth of new
and disparate Mode 3 schemes” (Whitty 1985: 127). This could not apply to CSE, as
revealed by an extract from a Schools Council Examinations Bulletin of 1976:

At present the two types of boards have very different degrees of control over
Mode 3. On the one hand the GCE boards are able to control content and
means of assessment of a [GCE] Mode 3, with total power to accept or reject a
scheme; on the other hand, the CSE boards have virtually no power to reject a
scheme which is correctly titled and capable of being assessed and moderated.
(Quoted in Spencer 2003: 125)

The Boards’ role in restricting the growth of Mode 3 [ie teacher devised] O levels can
perhaps be interpreted differently if one takes account of their responsibility for

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