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

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fact see an inexorable tightening of central power. Chitty posits a three-way control
structure: the DES, HMI - “the organic intellectuals of the DES” - and the Downing
Street Policy Unit. (Chitty 2004: 93) Michael Barber, who was to become an
influential figure in that Policy Unit following the 1997 election, acknowledges that
the 1988 Act was radical, but suggests that he, like other opponents of its reforms:

...had missed two fundamental points ....Firstly, we offered no credible
alternative to what was perceived by the public at large ...to be an inadequate
existing state of affairs. Secondly, we had completely failed to identify a series
of underlying social changes which would sooner or later have forced a radical
shift in education policy whether we liked it or not.

(Barber 1996: 37)

His view was that “the partnership model of decision-making, after which many
educationists still foolishly hanker, was demonstrably inadequate by the
∕9<S^,fts'"(Barber 1996: 49). He suggests a list of six problems that made what he terms
“a cultural revolution” inevitable: growing social diversity, dissatisfaction with the
high level of failure, concern about national competitiveness, the need to control
public spending, the need for accountability, and the painfully slow rate of decision
making. (Barber 1996: 49) The Thatcher Government’s radical combination of market
forces with centralisation was the result of an ideological position; but the status quo
was not an option.

For the examining boards, the centralising tendency had resulted in the complex
process of reorganisation they were required to set in train following the introduction
of the GCSE. This first step in upsetting their established sharing of the market had
left them as organisations ill prepared for yet more externally generated change during
the 1990s. In this sense, then, the changes of the 1990s had to be implemented by
organisations still absorbing the effects of policy decisions made in 1983.

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