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

164

London’s motives were simply to find someone who could bail them out.
Financially they were in a very difficult position, and [London Board’s Chief
Executive], who I know very well, told me at the time that if he hadn 't pulled
this off, which is the one [merger] with BTEC, he was simply going to say, ‘The
system just can ^,t stand it; we ^,ve got to have the one, single awarding body. ’
Now actually I don ^,t think that would have solved the problem either in that
context, but that ^,s what he said to me.

(OCR2 2003)

In the highly marketised ambience of the 1990s, the London Board’s still-solid
academic reputation linked to financial weakness made it an attractive target for
takeover.

As the education market began to take hold, it should be made clear that the
marketising of public services as a fundamental part of the Conservative
Government’s ideology was being widely criticised. Many voices were raised to
question the efficacy of the market philosophy within the public sector generally and
specifically within education. To take just three examples: in 1992, Edwards and
Whitty reflected on the concept of parental choice and questioned “[the] optimism
about the capacity of a free ’ educational market to guarantee a raising of standards
and a breaking up of the ‘monolith’ for the benefit of alΓ^, (Edwards and Whitty 1992:
114). Others, who examined the conceptual terrain and found that market proponents
claimed ⁱThat there is general benefit from competitive self-interest”, concluded that
“ultimately, markets operate according to the logic of profit, only in certain sets of
interests and let the ‘weak’ go to the wall.” (Kenway, Bigum 1993: 120) In a
statistician’s criticism of the validity and reliability of the Teague table’ comparisons
of schools which marketisation introduced, the creator of multi-level modelling
suggested that “these contributions have so much statistical uncertainty attaching to
them that it is impossible reliably to make valid comparisons between most schools”
(Goldstein 1998: 8).

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