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

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2 The Unification Principle

The desirability of unification seemed to apply whether in the case of a high-street
bank like the Midland, bought out by the Hong Kong and Shanghai International
Bank to add to its global brand HSBC or trade unions like NALGO and NUPE, which
merged to form the giant UNISON. Within “the education state”, the first significant
move demonstrated a symbolic acknowledgement of the growing conviction that the
nation’s economy was going to be linked increasingly with its ‘human capital’ in the
form of the skills level of its workforce. Early indications of this trend dated from the
mid-1980s when the Manpower Services Commission section of the Department of
Employment had devised - and funded - experiential learning schemes like the
Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) described above. The merger of
the Departments of Education and Employment (DfEE) in 1995 was concrete
recognition of the perceived inter-connection of these two agencies.

An interpretation of the pressures for unification based on purely educational factors
suggested that:

The unification process in England can be seen...as an evolving reaction to a
range of pressures - problems of maintaining standards and creating parity of
esteem in a divided qualifications system [such as the] effects of the
marketisation of awarding bodies.... It can be argued therefore that pressures
to regulate and co-ordinate a divided and voluntarist system set in motion a
rolling and evolving process starting with the merged DfiEE, the formation of
QCA and then the rationalisation of awarding bodies.

(Spours 1998: 13)

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