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

147

the Government had instigated. However, the fact that the Headmasters Conference
was not among the supporters of Higginson was believed to weigh heavily in
government thinking - an instance of the continuing influence of the private sector on
the state system.

The shortcomings of their new qualification had become apparent to the Secondary
Examinations and Assessment Council (1988 successor to the SEC). In 1991 one of
its committees proposed another structural change which would mean that a student
might take five or six AS exams in her or his first year in the 6^th form and continue
with two or three of the subjects as A-Ievels in the second year. This virtual reworking
of the Schools Council’s 1969 Q & F proposals was to resurface in 1999 as
Curriculum 2000: there is little that is new in English qualification development. But
at the beginning of the decade, just as they had been opposed to Higginson’s
recommendations, the Head Masters’ Conference - the voice of the private sector -
saw the SEAC proposal as yet again a threat to A levels. That voice was always a
powerful one with the Conservative Government, and ⁱⁱHMC was influential enough
for the proposal to be immediately rejected' (Hodgson 1997: 47). The private sector
retained the influence necessary to sway qualification debates.

A First Attempt at Embedding Core Skills

A final effort to make limited structural changes while retaining the A level in its
1953 format was the plan to embed ‘key skills’ as an element to be assessed. This was
an attempt to address what had become known as the ‘skills deficit’. Regular
complaints from industry about the education system’s production of young people
with inadequate levels of literacy and numeracy led John McGregor, Secretary of
State for Education in 1989 to promote what became known as ‘core skills’. He

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