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

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unchanged since its creation in 1951 for the 20% of pupils in grammar schools, was
supplemented from 1965 by the Certificate of Secondary Education, intended for the
next 40%. Virtually no contemporary comment addressed this arithmetic with its non-
recognition of 40% of young people. Adding to the pressure on the secondary system
was the raising of the school-leaving age to 16 in 1974. This long-awaited change
added to the ever-increasing numbers in secondary schools. Gosden observes: “In
1945 there were about half a million pupils in secondary schools. Thirty years later
there were four million” (Gosden 1983: 29).

Schools were given grants for building additional accommodation - of a minimal
standard - to cater for these extra pupils, but no parallel consideration had been given
to a suitably adjusted curriculum and qualification structure. Teachers in
comprehensive schools were faced with the impossible task of trying on the one hand
to build an educational community which included the whole range of abilities while
at the same time dividing the pupils at age 14 into O-Ievel sheep, CSE goats and the
‘non-examination’ rest. The system still reflected its platonic origins, certainly diluted
on the surface but essentially having the same effect on those going through it.

Pressure from schools for a common examination at 16 built steadily during the
1970s. Following approval in principle by the Schools Council in 1970, “...there
began one of the largest programmes of feasibility and development studies of a
proposed educational innovation ever mounted in England and Wales” (Nuttall 1984:
167). The examining boards - far from acting, in Whitty’s words, as agencies who
“tended to employ administrative devices as a way of restricting growth of new and
disparate Mode 3 schemes” (Whitty 1985: 127) - produced pilot schemes for a
common examination. Their responsibility for ensuring the reliability and validity of

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