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

150

Rainbow reflected ruefully that "...one of the consequences of the increased
centralisation of education in England and Wales is a reduction in its flexibility”
(Rainbow 1993: 100).

The ending of the Wessex Project was a matter of regret to staff at the AEB who had
been involved in the scheme. They had been learning to adapt to the "shift in
emphasis away from the AEB as an external arbiter to its role as a partner in the
process of assessment” (Rainbow 1993: 99). Ending this positive development
seemed a retrograde step. But once more, it made clear that the power of reform lay
with neither schools nor Boards, but with the Government’s regulatory body. If
marketisation had truly been operating, this ‘product innovation’ should have been a
sign of the commercial health of at least one Board. The Wessex affair can perhaps be
interpreted as the first indication that, wherever else market theory was operating, the
examining boards were experiencing just the opposite.

Of all the attempts to reform A levels, these incremental changes within the
established A-Ievel framework were by far the most successful. Yet the Boards were
not given any credit for their success, and at the end of the decade a radical change
was designed by the regulatory body with the Boards involved only nominally.

Education in the 1990s: The policy generators of change

In the world ofEnglish education, the final decade of the 20th century began:

...a period of reform that is unprecedented since the rise of modern schooling in
the nineteenth century, both for its trenchant criticisms of established
institutions and values, and for its concern to change the entire culture of
schooling towards new ends.

(McCulloch 1994: 36)

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