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

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significantly inhibited their ability to compete. This control derived from the reputed
benefits which ‘clients’ (whether the state or the ‘consumers’ of examinations) would
earn from unification, regulation and increased accountability.

The first of these orthodoxies was the notion that large units delivering economies of
scale were more efficient market mechanisms than several small organisations. This
popularly accepted objective was at least one of the motives for moves to the uniting
firstly of government agencies and then of the examining bodies. Some hoped initially
that these mergers, which they saw as “part of a -wider movement towards national
organisational unification”.. .signalled a “possibility that they could have a significant
effect on the further reform of qualifications” (Spours 1998: 2). Although
qualification reform did follow with the introduction of Curriculum 2000, it was more
post hoc than propter hoc. The virtues of unification seemed related more to bringing
commercial practice into the public sector than to qualification reform. This was the
revised view of Hodgson and Spours in a later publication, who had come to the view
that: “Part of the national regulatory agenda accompanying marketisation has been
the trend towards the ‘unification’ of national regulatory agencies” (Hodgson 2003:
8).

A concomitant of the move towards unification was an increase in regulatory control:
another contradictory function of the market. Because government agencies were held
accountable for the ‘products’ of the system, they felt they ought to ensure that those
products were ‘quality controlled’. Again, one analysis suggested that this increase
was a necessary response to “concerns about awarding body entrepreneurism and the
possibility that this could compromise ‘standards’ ” (Spours 1998:12). However, seen
over a longer timescale, it seems less an effect of marketisation than the continuation

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