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

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encouraged them, they said “Patently, we think this is a good idea. ” But there -
I suppose there were implicit threats that something unpleasant might happen if
the boards didn’t want to go that way. But Γm not quite sure what they might
have been because, had the boards stood their ground and said, “Actually, no,
we’d rather do it this way, I guess ...they could have done that. And it’s
interesting to speculate what might have happened had they chosen to do that. I
presume, since they didn ^,t do that they broadly agreed with the philosophy: that
a degree of rationalisation, and certainly a degree of greater coherence
between the general and the vocational was desirable. So they went along with
it - I mean, apart from all the sort of difficulties of deciding which partners
quite to work with - there didn ^,t seem to be any objection in principle to the
idea of that degree of unification.

(QCA2 2003)

It is particularly curious to note that this experienced member of the regulatory body
didn’t recall that the ''something unpleasant that might happen if the boards didn’t
want to go that way” was indeed a very significant power in the hands of that very
regulator: a Board could lose its accreditation as a recognised provider of
qualifications in England. While Cambridge, with its sound international business
stream, might have been able to survive such a loss, it would have been instantly fatal
to any other awarding body. This evidence indicates that at least some in the
regulatory body were not acknowledging the degree of control they had acquired over
the Boards. Equally, the process of general or academic and vocational awarding
bodies coming together was "fairly mysterious” only in the case of Cambridge -
which has always moved in a mysterious way. The other two instances of takeover
and merger were based - from the examining boards’ perspective - on simple
survival. Before moving to a detailed consideration of these moves, it is important to
note the influence on the Boards of yet another strand in the 1990s marketised
Zeitgeist', the idea that the merging or unifying of disparate entities strengthened them.

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