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While these critiques questioned marketisation as it affected schools, there was no
corresponding voice raised to ask whether requiring examining boards to form a more
vigorously competitive market would be of benefit to their performance. Once more
the Boards were overlooked by academia. However there was certainly disquiet
within at least one board:
...lam so out of sympathy with the notion that examination boards compete in a
market fashion: the notion or perception that they do. There has been an
increased emphasis on this, I think to the detriment of the educational qualities
and characteristics of the ...boards which in my judgement ought to be part of
the educational scene, and providing the service that gives voice and public
credibility to the attainments of students in schools. You could say that in some
senses competition in one form or another has always existed. But what has
happened in a very damaging way is that the emphasis on competition has come
as much from outside factors, in terms of the regulators, in terms of government
policy ...and boards themselves have had to look very much more to their
marketing as a means of ensuring that schools see them as the body that they ,ve
got to put their students into. But I think at the end of the day the only two real
factors which will attract students are the nature of the specifications
[syllabuses] and the service which an examination board gives.
(AQA2 2003)
Despite such reservations about the market, the Boards duly made attempts to market
themselves more effectively. Yet theirs was certainly not a market in the true sense.
The overall number of ‘clients’ was fixed. There was no real price sensitivity:
'' ...evidence suggests that marketing in the sense of pricing doesn ,t actually influence
the choices” (AQA2 2003), possibly because the teachers who select the syllabuses
don’t pay the examining fee. The ‘product’ was increasingly externally controlled.
The issue that arose as to which board should bear the commercial burden of running
uneconomic small entry subjects illustrates that market rules do not really apply. A
leading member of the regulatory body recalls that the “sense of providing a service”
won out over market considerations to resolve the matter:
A really good example of behaviour there was in the small entry languages,
where we [the regulator] actually weighed in. Do you remember, there were
nearly diplomatic incidents when Portuguese looked to be under threat? This
country ,s oldest ally? So, the sort of dealing that we did then was only possible