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

20

historical and assessment camps, but it is within the latter that her expertise is most
relevant to this study.

2 Assessment as the focus

Although the Boards may not have been the subject of academic attention, their
central activity certainly has. Researchers began to focus on assessment issues in the
early 1980s, when the growth of comprehensive schools meant increasing pressure for
a more egalitarian examination system. A major contributor to this developing body
of research literature in England was Desmond Nuttall, who seemed to be alone in
genuinely grasping the issues involved in the debates around norm and criterion
referencing in assessment. The pamphlet he wrote with Lea Orr in 1983 (Orr and
Nuttall 1983) provided a clear exposition of the inevitable interconnection of the two
approaches, and his article ‘Doomsday or a New Dawn?’ (Nuttall 1984) was a
balanced analysis of the potential and pitfalls of the single 16+ examination. Perhaps
the fact that it was published by the moribund Schools Council explains its failure to
penetrate the collective understanding; had it been more widely understood, the
annual outcry about examinations standards might have been mitigated.

A decade after Orr and Nuttall, Alison Wolfs occasional paper for the Further
Education Unit ably demonstrates the flaws in expecting criterion-referenced
assessment to avoid the need for assessors to exercise judgement (Wolf 1993).
Addressing the technical aspects of ensuring fair assessment, Professor Harvey
Goldstein’s work on multi-level modelling in assessment is recognised
internationally. His approach stimulates thinking about the theory behind assessment
but - apart from the volume cited above - is not for the faintly numerate.

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