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

203

(AQAl 2000)

This last interviewee was quoted above as perceiving that the major shift to increasing
central control came with the GCSE and its criteria requiring government approval.
Replacing the Schools Council with the Secondary Examinations Council (SEC) and
the School Curriculum Development Committee (SCDC) for another analyst was ^tia
very centralist decision" particularly because “members of the two committees would
be Secretary of State nominees not representatives of any of the organizations that
had made up the Schools Council" (Lawton 1984: 10). From the standpoint of the
regulator, too the advent of GCSE signalled tighter central regulation:

...SEC [1984] was a bit harder edged, and began to take an interest in 16 [16+
qualifications] of course, but that was because SEC was instrumental in putting
GCSE on the road. ...I think, actually, that was quite a landmark because - do
you remember, GCSE was approved by Keith Joseph on the condition that there
were ground rules: general and specific criteria - those hotels around Russell
Square.... So there was a regulatory instrument in the GCSE criteria....

(QCA2 2003)

When in 1988 the Secondary Examinations Council and the School Curriculum
Development Committee were replaced by the Schools Examinations and Assessment
Council (SEAC) and the National Curriculum Council (NCC), ^tiSEAC was the first
statutory body" which meant that the “process became elevated in status because of
its statutory nature" (QCA2 2003). Although SEAC was indeed a statutory body and
therefore of an entirely different level from the easy-going Schools Council, its
control was still relatively minimal, but it bred a taste for ever-greater intervention by
the regulator in the details of the examining process. Speaking in 2000, the Chief
Executive of the regulatory body was very clear about this tendency to need ever
more central control:

...from 1989 to 1993, SEAC had increased its control, its regulation. The first
GCSE Code of Practice -1 mean, that was a major step in regulatory control of
awarding bodies. And this sort of thing snowballs in the sense that when you

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