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

119

was coming from the education department, with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate not far
behind.

The growing ambition of the department was signalled in the final paragraph of the

Yellow Book in the form of “a plea for a more direct mandate to intervene”'.

It -will also be good to get on record from Ministers and in particular from the
Prime Minister an authoritative pronouncement on the division of responsibility
for what goes on in school, suggesting that the Department should give a firmer
lead....

(Quoted in Maclure 2000: 194)

Two people writing at the close of the 1970s, Brian Salter and Ted Tapper, suggested

that the DES had become an "ambitious bureaucracy”. Their analysis found that:

Throughout the 1970s, the DES was engaged on a process of policy enclosure
which effectively re-drew the old tripartite partnership of DES, LEAs and
teachers ’ trade unions. As policy making was progressively internalized within
the Department’s ‘rational’ planning procedures, the LEAs and teachers’
unions were increasingly made aware that they were subordinate, rather than
equal partners [as had been the concept in the past],
(Salter and Tapper 1981: 34)

This view has been confirmed variously by Peter Gosden, Denis Lawton, Stuart

Maclure and Geoff Whitty and was succinctly summed up by Clive Chitty when
looking back from his perspective in 2004. He was clear about the policy implications
of the Yellow Paper: “7Z ended with a suggestion that the Department should give a

firmer lead” (Chitty 2004: 42).

A quarter-century later, this ambition has been fulfilled. The "managerial state”
controls and regulates education closely. In the case of the examining boards, they
experienced a second major ratcheting-up of this control, tighter than that following
the 1944 Act, as the price of the long-sought merging of the divided 16+ system of O
levels and CSE into a single examination.

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