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The examining boards were undoubtedly established institutions and certainly subject
both to change and to criticism during the 1990s. Stephen Ball’s three causal factors
behind these changes would also identify the examining boards as likely targets for
criticism:
(i)...ideological shifts and changing patterns of influence within the
Conservative Party, institutional ambitions of the DES, and... the impact and
commitment of Secretaries of State and their ministers. (U) Some notion of
‘correspondence(s)’ between education and the economy.... (Ui) the role of
discourses (the key concept of Michel Foucault) [wherein the] ‘discourse of
derision ’ acted to debunk and displace not only specific words and meanings -
progressivism and Comprehensivism, for example - but also the speakers of
these words, those ‘experts ’, ‘specialists' and ‘professionals ’ referred to as the
‘educational establishment’. These privileged speakers have been displaced...by
abstract mechanisms and technologies of ‘truth’ and ‘rationality’ - parental
choice, the market, efficiency and management.
(Ball 1990: 17-18)
The preceding chapter has shown how, after a first shift to more central control, a
1980s policy decision had made serious inroads into the Boards’ independence. This
was Sir Keith Joseph’s introduction of the single examination at 16+ in 1986 with the
requirement that all syllabuses for the new courses be vetted by the Secondary
Examinations Council. For the first time in their history, the Boards were not to be the
final arbiters of syllabus and assessment design. A second result of Sir Keith’s
decision affected the Boards’ established balance. In a statement that was to be
repeated ten years later by Ron Dearing, the policy paper announcing the new
examination “emphasized that, under the old dual system [O level and CSE], there
were ‘too many awarding bodies and too many syllabuses (Quoted in Wolf 2002a:
226) The requirement that there be four GCSE examining groups in England
destabilised their previous implicit sharing of the qualifications market and left at
least one board in serious financial difficulty. In the view of one informed observer,
“In a sense there were never really four Groups’ worth [in England]. And...it really
goes way back to 1988 that the Government set up too many GCSE Groups” (OCR2