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

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Coda: The English problem with vocational education

Because in the next chapter I will suggest that one pressure on the examining boards
resulted from the attempt to unite the divided worlds of academic and vocational
qualifications, I shall here trace briefly the quite separate development of vocational
qualifications and their providers in England. As was established at the outset of this
chapter, English practical education and training have remained quite distinct from
school-based education. I have mapped the developments in the accreditation of
vocational attainment in England [See Figure 3.5]; this section expands on selected
aspects of that matrix.

Since its creation in 1878, the principal English body offering accreditation for
practical training has been the City and Guilds of London Institute for the
Advancement of Technical Education (City & Guilds). The use of the term ‘guilds’ in
its title was no accident. Gladstone advocated the term because he saw “the
traditional structure of the guilds as a means of making some progress" toward his
aim ofimproving the nation’s technical and vocational training. (Bush 1993: 8) While
City & Guilds has predominated in this field, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA),
created in 1754, established an examining section which began by accrediting those
trained in the Mechanics Institutes which began in the 1820s. The RSA continued to
be a significant provider of commercial qualifications in particular until it sold its
examining section to the Cambridge board in 1995. A third body, created in the
1880s, that has continued to accredit business-related skills is the London Chamber of
Commerce, which as LCCI merged in 2002 with Goal plc to form Education
Development International.

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