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

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Department for Education and Employment. A QCA official expressed the view that

the Boards did have other options:

[The creation of current unitary authorities was] 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 [by]
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 encouraged them, they said,
“Patently, we think this is a good idea. ” I suppose there were implicit threats
that something unpleasant might happen if the boards didn ^,t want to go that
way. But Tm 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. (QCA2 2003)

However such a robust stance would have required the Boards to produce a
coordinated joint response, and as Edexcel had already been created and OCR was
taking shape, there was no chance of that option. Certainly both AEB and NEAB felt
that if they were to survive as organisations, they had to work out some means of
cooperation with City & Guilds, the only remaining GNVQ provider who could
enable them to retain accreditation as providers of English qualifications.

The long-drawn-out series of meetings and negotiations between AEB and NEAB
forms the central section of my September 2000 Masters Dissertation (Sturgis 2000)
and will not be rehearsed again here. In summary, in autumn 1997 the two Boards
formed a Joint Venture with City & Guilds entitled the Assessment and Qualifications
Alliance (AQA) Almost immediately City & Guilds withdrew. The other two then
bought out City & Guilds’ GNVQ provision, and following two years of negotiations,
in April 2000 officially merged the two parent bodies in AQA. Instead of pursuing the
detail of the entire process, I will focus on the observations of three different

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