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

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through the newly created GNVQ. Its solid reputation among further education
teachers as an established provider enabled BTEC to become also the favoured brand
for staff in schools who were faced with selecting a provider from among the three
vocational bodies offering the new qualification. The other two were City & Guilds
and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). City & Guilds was well known for its
vocational qualifications but viewed with some misgivings by teachers who’d been
involved during the 1980s with its Foundation Courses and then the Certificate of Pre-
Vocational Education; its organisational infrastructure had been inadequate and there
were doubts that it would cope successfully with a new style of qualification.⁷ The
RSA’s examinations section had a strong reputation for its clerical skills certificates,
but it had no record in new GNVQ areas like Health & Social Care, or Leisure &
Tourism which most post-16 institutions intended to offer.

The result was that BTEC garnered the lion’s share of entries for the GNVQ’s initial
five subject areas. By 1999, when the newly-formed AQA was faced with buying out
City & Guilds’ GNVQ qualifications, they learned that Edexcel [BTEC^,s merged
title] was providing 70% of GNVQs nationally. This success was financially very
rewarding since the entry fee per student was set at £65 and the only external
assessment BTEC provided for the fee took the form of brief multiple-choice tests,
with a one-off visit from a BTEC moderator to check final portfolios whose detailed
marking had been done by teachers. This meant that, atypically in the world of
qualifications, BTEC was in a sound financial position.

With a new Chief Executive from outside the examining board world, BTEC was
about to set in motion another feature of the commercial market: the takeover. What
had been happening gradually within the Boards since the introduction of GCSE

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