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

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examinations has regularly been interpreted as an unwillingness to consider change.
This involvement showed them as flexible although aware of the challenge involved
in examining across a wide ability range. The pilot schemes were increasingly popular
in schools, particularly in the north. An examining board official recalls that:

By the time GCSE was introduced in 1987, the proportion of students taking the
‘pilot’ 16+ examinations through either the JMB or the five CSE Boards
serving northern LEAs was greater than that taking O levels and CSEs.

(AQAl 2000)

Politicians of either complexion were unwilling to respond to the pressure for a single
examination until perhaps the most unlikely of them all yielded. Sir Keith Joseph, a
major guru of Margaret Thatcher, became Secretary of State for Education and made
what seemed an uncharacteristic concession in 1983. However, a closer scrutiny
reveals that there was a sting in the tail of that concession. The Minister agreed to
allow the development of a single examination to replace O level and CSE - if the
criteria which underpinned it were “acceptable”. It would be a government-appointed
agency, not the Schools Council, which would define acceptability. For the first time
the Boards would have to yield to a central agency in matters which had hitherto
formed an essential aspect of their professional judgement. This was a much more
overt move towards central control over examinations than they had experienced
following the 1944 Act.

The Schools Council was replaced by two bodies, all of whose members would be
appointed “by the Minister”-, the School Curriculum Development Council (SCDC)
and the Secondary Examinations Council (SEC). The latter was to vet the
acceptability of each syllabus for the new examination submitted by what were to be
known as ‘examining groups’: four regional consortia [See Figure 3.4] of the former
GCE O-Ievel and CSE boards who would administer the General Certificate of

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