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

206

boards comes from a 1997 DffiE summary of the powers gradually assumed by the
regulatory bodies from 1993 in the interests of assuring standards:

SCAA and NCVQ, both individually, and through their Joint Committee, have
done much to take this agenda forward through their work on quality
assurance:

Codes ofpractice for GCSEs, GCE A levels and GNVQ.

Scrutinies of standards across all three qualifications.

GCE A level subject cores and GCSE criteria, specifying syllabus coverage and
ground rules for assessment, and external assessors.

Common criteria for GNVQ centre approval and external verification.

Joint moderation sessions between awarding bodies for GNVQs.

‘Pre-awarding’ meetings between GCSE awarding bodies to reinforce the
consistency of grading standards.

Common GNVQ tests, run jointly by the awarding bodies.

Common elements in GCSE examinations.

(DffiE 1997a: 21)

When following the Dearing Report, SCAA and NCVQ were brought together in
1996 to form the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), one interpretation
from an examining board interviewee was that:

...the fundamental change...was the statutory regulation that came with QCA.
And the fact that you’ve got statutory regulation means that you’re backed up
by a law which means they could step in, they could come and see our books for
no...very strong reasons, really. I think that changed the relationship quite
significantly.

(OCR2 2003)

This view that the principal effect of QCA’s power having statutory status was to
enable the agency to “see our books” seems extraordinarily naive - and perhaps
related to the fact that QCA did in fact carry out an audit of OCR in 2000 to
investigate the source of that board’s problems in 1999. [See Figure 4.4] In fact, on
reflection this same individual did recognise that the statutory status of QCA’s powers
marked a major shift of control from the Boards to the regulator: “Now challenge you
could do, until it became statutory. But once you ^,ve made them [regulatory powers]
statutory, challenges become very difficult, because there ^,s no appeal mechanism”
(OCR2 2003).

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