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

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qualifications. His 1996 report recommended that the necessary rigour of GNVQ
assessment could best be assured by entrusting the process to the examining boards,
whose experience in providing rigorous assessment was proven. (Dearing 1996: 138)
A wider benefit of this step would be the perennially desirable one of bridging the
academic∕vocational divide. It was by this route, then, that a vocational qualification
became a factor in the world of the examining boards in the mid-1990s. It was to have
a profound effect on their organisational structures. It was also incontrovertible
evidence of growing central government involvement in a field previously quite
outside its remit. In her overview of 20^th century qualifications and assessment, Wolf
stresses this point: “...What the history of GNVQ does demonstrate...is the
progressive nationalization of assessment and examination policy, and the direct day
by day involvement of ministers in decisions" (Wolf 2002a: 221).

SCAA, OFSTED and Dearing

In 1993, the examination boards’ regulatory body was reorganised again: the
Secondary Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) was merged with the
National Curriculum Council (NCC) to form The Schools Curriculum and
Assessment Authority (SCAA). [See Figure 4.2]. While this move was widely seen as
an educationally desirable marrying of the curriculum and its assessment, for the
Boards it meant adjusting to a reconfiguration of this important relationship and the
uncertainty that such change engenders.

In that same year, the Government made a change to the system of school inspection
that was to have a significant if indirect effect on the Boards. As part of the general

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