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

160

External Issues Affecting the Examining Boards

I must again make it clear that I am in no way claiming that the examining boards
were alone in facing these pressures. As organisations functioning within the culture
of the 1990s they were of course subject to the prevailing winds of policy, commerce
and social change. However, I believe it is valid to consider the effects of these
general trends on a particular group of organisations which had functioned for a
century virtually untouched by such environmental influences. The first and yet most
intangible of these I wanted to consider was the effect on the whole terrain of
secondary education brought about by the introduction of a post-16 ‘market’.

1 The Examinations Market: Old loyalties to examining boards
disappear

The market as applied to English examinations is perhaps best described as a version
of what Whitty has termed:

...quasi-markets [which involve] a combination of parental choice and school
autonomy together with a greater or lesser degree of public accountability and
government regulation.

(Whitty 2002: 46)

In the case of the examinations market, one can substitute in Whitty’s description:
teacher choice and departmental autonomy, accountability in the form of schools’
examination Teague tables’ and tighter central regulation of the Boards. The evidence
for the argument in this section is based on data gathered from a variety of sources but
also on the researcher’s close involvement in the issues. Following Yin’s advice, cited
above, concerning bringing “...your own prior expert knowledge to your case
study^,dfCwι 1994: 123), I contend that here too personal involvement can offer certain

<<   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   >>

More intriguing information