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could in hindsight be described as a series of takeovers and mergers. But they had
proceeded at a decorous pace and above all were instigated by the Boards without any
outside prompting. During the 1990s the pace accelerated rapidly and for those
reluctant to move there was external pressure, if not directly from a Minister, at least
very definitely from one civil servant whose diktat impressed representatives of two
different Boards:
I can remember when [a senior DfEE official], DfES - or DfEE, rather - came
into a room...to tell us about what was going on and “There’ll be three
[awarding bodies], ” It was in the basement of Sanctuary Buildings ...and he
made this statement. We ,d had a meeting with him, and this was right at the
end. And [AEB’s Secretary General] then went to [NEAB ,s Director] and said,
“... We ,ve got some serious talking to do!”
(OCR2 2003)
A second version of the incident was equally precise:
...I can ,t remember whether there was any... whether it was ever said that there
had to be a merger of some bodies in order to create those boards, but the
writing was very much on the wall that that sort of coming together was needed.
And I do recall, and I even recall the date on this: the twelfth of December,
1997, sorry 1996, a meeting in the Department where [a senior DfEE official]
really made it clear that the expectation would be that there would be only three
unitary awarding bodies.
(AQA2 2003)
The external pressure was therefore made very explicit to the Boards, and although
markets encouraged choice, in this instance there was to be no choice if a board
wanted to continue to be accredited as an English awarding body. Yet there remained
within the regulator the rather naive impression that the mergers were all voluntary on
the part of the Boards:
I think there ,s some sort of educational logic underpinning the linkage between
general and vocational, which was part of the story anyway that led to the
creation of current unitary authorities. I remember - I think I might have even
coined the word ‘unitary’ in that context at the time - and that sort of
stimulated, on the one hand by evolutionary pressures that arose from just
review and reflection on the examining system and how well it was working but
on the other hand political pressures, with ministers having views about what
might constitute an appropriate number of awarding bodies. Then those two
things coming together in a fairly mysterious way to lead to the creation of the
unitary bodies. And that was interesting, because, of course, ministers have no
power to tell the examining boards to do this. They put pressure on, they