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Tomlinson Committee in autumn 2004, discussed in the final chapter. For the
‘Cambridge Brand’, its international A levels were more important than OCR’s share
of the English market.
The interviewee’s response to my questions as to external pressures on the board
during the 1990s reinforced these themes, and indicated that:
The biggest external pressure was, of course, when OCR was formed. We were
not [saying], “Oh Government wants three awarding bodies, what do we do
now?” We’d been working with them [RSA] for some time. So when...in ’97
there was this notion that there has to be three built on the GNVQ for us just
then to say to RSA, “Well, we’d better sort of find some way of working
together. ” And we actually thought that it was going to be a joint venture. But
the RSA...came along and said, “Well, don’t know about that. What about
actually creating a single institution?” And the University of Cambridge of
course has got only one answer to that: the University of Cambridge is the only
owner when it comes to it. And the RSA itself [ie the ongoing Royal Society of
Arts] were happy to accept that. They got a generous deal... out of it.
[Although] it was a logical outcome, it [creating OCR] happened much faster
than it would otherwise have done, I’m sure of that, because of the
Government ,s... Guaranteeing Standards.
(OCR2 2003)
This rather rosy version was not altogether the way it appeared from the RSA
perspective. Because Dearing had excluded NVQs from the one-stop shops,
discussions about unification involved only GNVQs for RSA Examinations, a definite
disappointment for that body, as an official explained:
That...was very damaging in terms of the discussions, negotiations and
relationships that went on because it shifted the power. Because after all, [if]
you ,ve got two organisations that are thinking about merging in some way or
other, one of the factors that’s going to determine who dominates...is to do with
power, it ,s to do with money. What ,s the volume of the turnover? Well the value
of GNVQ... was trivial; whereas if you then said to an organisation like RSA, as
it was, “But actually, no, we ’re not talking about the £2 million from GNVQ but
we ’re talking about the £22 million from all of the qualifications... it would have
significantly shifted the balance.
(OCRl 2000)
It seemed that circumstances had again favoured Cambridge in the negotiations
preceding the creation of OCR. In considering the whole series of takeovers or
absorptions that Cambridge negotiated, it appears that they were in a sense
endogenous and barely connected with the 1990s mergers culture - although the