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

16

titles of the first qualification. Roach paints with a broader brush, and identifies the
themes which formed a constant in early English education policy formation: the
dominance of an Oxbridge-centred network of influential men, the hierarchy of class,
the mistrust of state interference and the clash between the established Church and
Dissent. Roach’s account of the beginnings of English examinations was augmented
by his authoritative narrative of the faltering development of the nation’s secondary
education in the 19^th century (Roach 1986). Apart from these two accounts which
touch on the emergence of the examining boards, they virtually disappear from view
except for what could be termed ‘insider’ histories of particular Boards by their own
loyal servants, who make no claim to objectivity.

The most useful of these is that produced by James Petch (Petch 1953). His Fifty
Years of Examining: The JMB from 1903 to 1953 is a first-hand and very personal
account of one major Board’s history written just at the point when the first tightening
of the grip of central control was being felt. By contrast, H G Earnshaw’s little
booklet The Associated. Examining Board for the General Certificate of Education:
Origin and History (Eamshaw 1974) tends towards hagiography, but nonetheless does
give an account of the early days of the only board to be created independent of a
university. J L Brereton’s 1944 The Case for Examinations (Brereton 1944) was
presumably written as a contribution from the perspective of the Cambridge board to
the debate that produced the 1944 Education Act. It may have been published too late
(there is no indication as to the actual date of its publication in 1944) to affect the Act,
passed in July of 1944. Certainly none of its ideas was incorporated in the Butler Act.

A recent edition in this category is AQA’s Setting the Standard (AQA 2003c),
published to mark “tz century of public examining". Various contributors from AQA’s

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