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

155

In 1992 the Department of Education and Science launched its newly conceived
General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ) - which, “unlike any of the other
public examinations in the UK... was designed from scratch entirely by government
agencies, in this case NCVQ...’’(Wolf 2002a: 220). While I would suggest that what
was virtually a government agency had designed GCSE, there is no question that the
National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ) controlled the design of this
new qualification. It was to be offered by the three vocational awarding bodies -
BTEC, City & Guilds and RSA - with the NCVQ as their regulator. This new post-16
qualification would be the factor that precipitated the eventual reconfiguring of the
examining boards.

The General National Vocational Qualification

The NCVQ had been established in 1986 to address concerns about both the
multiplicity and the quality of vocational qualification providers in Britain. The
solution was to create a regulatory body modelled on the German system despite the
fact that Germany’s “industrial structure, main industries, political organization,
school system and employer-union relations are all so hugely different" from
England’s. (Wolf 2002b: 71) The existing vocational qualifications were to be
analysed in terms of levels of ‘competences’ and rebranded as National Vocational
Qualifications (NVQs). Just as the Secondary Examinations Council and its
successors were empowered with regulating the examining boards, NCVQ was to
bring the vocational awarding bodies and their multitude of qualifications to heel.

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