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

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ensuring the validity, reliability and comparability of the grades produced through
these disparate schemes. A consequence of the lack of such control over CSE Mode
3s is expressed by an assessment expert who observed in a recent interview that the
freedom of teachers to create exciting new schemes was linked to the qualification’s
lack of recognition:

I know people sort of witter on about the golden age of CSE and Mode 3
syllabuses.... I read that, but that was because nobody really cared about CSE
anyway, so you could try any old thing. But - it ^,s the same fate as GNVQ: as
soon as it becomes important you have to tighten up on it, and tighten up means
you lose much of what made it attractive in the first place.

(QCA3 2004)

Whitty does concede that “there were also doubts about the quality and comparability
of many Mode 3 schemes in relation to Mode Is” (Whitty 1985: 128), but does not
acknowledge that the real chasm in public perception as to validity, reliability and
comparability existed between CSE of whatever mode and O level. As well as the
above evidence from the Associated Examining Board that, far from being a threat,
the CSE enhanced the value of GCE qualifications, there are other possible reasons
for the CSE’s decline.

Although Whitty’s analysis would probably characterise me as an “institutionalized
teacher within the board structure” (Whitty 1985: 128), I suggest an alternative
critique of CSE from the perspective of a teacher attempting to find a motivating yet
attainable goal for the new range of pupils staying on at school following the raising
of the leaving age to 16 in 1974. The initial enthusiastic adoption of the CSE may
have been due less to the professional autonomy it offered than to its answering an
urgent need. I contend that a major element in teachers’ eventual disillusionment with
CSE derived from their dissatisfaction with the negative effects of having to divide
pupils aged 14 into ‘О-level sheep’ and ‘CSE goats’. With parental concern that the

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