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

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north, who were really sort of put out by the amount we had taken from them.
Nonetheless, we actually did take more market from the south, and it was
London who was weakened by MEG ^,s strength, not the NEAB.

(0CR2 2003)

Although at the time such sensitive commercial information was kept very quiet,
persistent rumour suggested that both the AEB, responsible with the Oxford Board for
the Southern Examining Group (SEG), and the London Board’s London and East
Anglia Group (LEAG) had suffered serious losses of candidates and hence of income.
Long after the event, a former Secretary General of AEB admitted that:

In summer 1988, the first year of GCSE, the SEG lost one-third of the total entry
which the five original boards had attracted for O level and CSE examinations
in 1987, but the SEG was still operating in 1989 with the same number of office
premises and broadly the same numbers of staff.

(AEB 2004)

By working hard at improving unpopular syllabuses, buying out the Oxford Board’s
share of SEG and closing regional offices, the AEB managed to regain its market
share and recover gradually. Although initially bruised by its early experience of the
modem market, the AEB managed to adapt to the GCSE effect. It was the next
qualification change that would have more serious repercussions for this board.

The hard-hit London board, its location perhaps symbolic as a Supplicantjust outside
the gates of the University of London’s Senate House, had always been kept on a
strict financial regime by the university, and with the advent of GCSE faced a more
uncertain future. Its principal client group, the grammar schools, were a vanishing
breed as comprehensive schools gradually replaced them. Regional loyalty seemed
non-existent in the capital and the home counties, and its GCSE syllabuses failed to
attract new adherents. (Sturgis 2000: 34) It was clear to the inner circle of examining
boards managers at the time that London was in crisis, as one from another board
recalls:

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