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

140

operate. However, the interaction of these broader factors with particular issues the
Boards faced internally meant they were experiencing continuing strains. These
strains might have gradually eased had it not been for the major upheaval to their core
product resulting from the restructuring of A levels through Curriculum 2000.

What will be characterised as ‘external’ issues derive from the fundamental change to
the world of education resulting from the introduction of marketisation and
competition with the related expectation of accountability. This was an essential
aspect of what is often termed the neo-liberal agenda. Geoff Whitty summarised this
political stance:

For the neo-liberal politicians who dominated educational policy-making in
Britain and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, social affairs are best organised
according to the ‘general principle of consumer sovereignty ’....

(Whitty 2002: 79)

Taking the longer historical view of developments since 1944, Gary McCulloch does
include the Boards in his analysis, and confirms the changing relationship between the

Boards and the State:

Exam boards and the State have maintained the uneasy tension over the
management of public exams that emerged from the 1940 settlement, although
with increasing signs of instability in this arrangement. In the contest for
control and authority over secondary school exams in the early 1990s, the State
was again in the process of asserting itself. Whereas in the 1940s it had done so
on behalf of a notion of ‘teacher responsibility’, however, in the 1990s it was on
behalf of the very different notion of ‘public accountability ’.

(McCulloch 1994: 144)

Exerting increasing central control in the interests of public accountability formed one
element of the paradox that saw the State simultaneously advocating the liberating
influence of the market while steadily inhibiting public sector independence.

Although technically forming part of the "educational state”, the Boards had always
formed a competitive market, if one which avoided strident rivalry. Yet during the
1990s, apparently flying in the face of market theory, increasing central control

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