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

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3 What evidence is there of a shift in control from the Boards to the State?

They have served their purpose of guiding my research; as I have attempted to answer
them, I have begun to discern certain deeper movements of which the narrative I have
constructed is a manifestation. I have answered the first question in this chapter, and
identified evidence which begins to answer the second and third. The evolution of the
English examining boards has been shown to be less a matter of policy than of
pragmatism. The changes to the system after 1944 and 1983 were accompanied by
greater central control but did not actually affect their role. Clear evidence of a shift in
control to the centre has been identified in 1947, when the Boards were ejected from the
Secondary Schools Examination Committee and excluded from designing the GCE
examinations, and again after 1983, when their GCSE syllabuses and examinations were
subject to government-appointed regulatory approval.

However, I believe that beneath these developments one can detect indicators of a
gradual breakdown in public trust parallel to that which in her Reith Lecture of 2002,
Onora O’Neill identified as apparently lying behind politicians’ “quest for greater
accountability” which she locates “over the last fifteen years” or “in the last two
decades” (O'Neill 2002). While not entering the argument as to whether the breakdown
in trust is apparent or actual, I believe the case of the examining boards fits O’Neill’s
description of “the new accountability ...distorting the proper aims of professional
practice” (O'Neill 2002) In considering the changes which affected the examining boards
following the Second World War, I have detected from the 1970s early fissures in the
foundation of public trust on which the eccentric structure of qualifications providers
operated.

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