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

166

because people did have a sense of providing a service. And people shared the
pain, didn ^,t they? There was also the recognition that if you wanted access to
the market, if you wanted to be one of these organisations that was given the
right to offer GCSE English, for example, then there was an expectation that
you offered a fuller portfolio: that you couldn’t really cherry-pick. That wasn't
going to be sustainable and there'd be public opprobrium if you did that -
certainly ministerial opprobrium and doubtless regulatory opprobrium too. So I
guess it’s a bit of a mix really, of old-style service mentality and recognition of
the realities, the market realities.

(QCA2 2003)

Nevertheless competition in the qualifications market was about to become more
intense.

In a clear instance of the inter-relationship of developments in this period, the
incorporation of Further Education and 6^th-Form colleges was underwritten by a new
funding mechanism. Their funding, provided by a new national Further Education
Funding Council (FEFC), would be directly related to student numbers and
‘successful outcomes’ - which meant attaining qualifications. The consequence was
that all post-16 providers began to compete seriously for students. Once again, this
market was not a real one. The cohort of traditional A-Ievel students tended to follow
the route their predecessors had taken, whether to a school sixth form or a college.
Thus it was the non-traditional 6th-formers who, as a form of ‘floating voter’, became
the prime targets for competitive recruitment. Since so many of these students were
likely to choose or more often be guided towards the new GNVQ courses, there was a
clear opportunity to promote to teachers a particular provider’s version of that
qualification.

At this point, the vocational body BTEC found itself in the advantageous position of
being the ‘brand of choice’ for providing GNVQs (Edexcell 2000). Long successful
within further education through its Certificates, Diplomas and HNDs, BTEC was
able to acquire an instant foothold within the much wider market of sixth forms

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