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

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Chapter 4 The Examining Boards in the 1990s: Under
pressure and losing control

By the beginning of the 1990s, the English examining boards had experienced two
significant shifts in the balance of control over examinations: firstly with Ministry
nominees replacing them on the Secondary Schools Examinations Council after 1944
and then with the creation of the Secondary Examinations Council in 1983. The 1990s
were to see control over examinations continue to move inexorably towards the centre
with a concomitant imposition of changes both to their own organisational structure
and to the qualifications they provide. It is during this decade that one can trace the
effects on the examining boards of the '’'permanent revolution” that Clarke, Gewirtz
and McLaughlin have identified in their book on the ''continuing reconstruction of the
■welfare state in the United Kingdom” (Clarke, Gewirtz 2000: 1). Their analysis finds
the process of modernisation and reform begun by the Conservative Government in
the 1980s to have been carried on with equal enthusiasm by the New Labour
Government after 1997. Although forming an agency of the “educational state” rather
than of the welfare state which is the focus of Clarke, Gewirtz and McLaughlin, the
examining boards in particular and the education world in general experienced the
effects of the general zeal for centrally generated change.

This chapter will analyse how the various changes the Boards experienced during the
1990s brought to them a point where their long-established qualifications were being
questioned. They were losing their status as one of the accepted “conglomeration
of ..agencies” within “the educational .s√6z∕C^,(Ball 1990:20). I will suggest as the
explanation for this change that by the end of the decade the imperatives of the “new
managerialism” had virtually stripped them of their independence. Greatly increased

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