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the boards have been guilty of keeping their methodology a professional secret. Yet
my inquiry to an AQA official as to current practice elicited a clear response:
...the year-on-year statistical guidance is now our norm. We expect the
statistics to be within 2% of last year ,s outcomes, but approvals are given to
larger rises or falls if the qualitative evidence is convincing.
(AQA 2004)
Certainly, as the 21st century began, the Boards were increasingly being held to
account. Ironically, by that time they had lost the power to act independently even if
they had wanted to. However they were preoccupied by immediate concerns that
threatened their capacity to deliver the results of the examinations they administered.
The focus of the next section will narrow to consider some consequences of these
internal pressures that were particularly affecting the Boards’ operations.
Internal Stresses Preoccupy the Boards
From the external factors which affected to varying degrees all organisations, I turn
now to the related but essentially internal factors the Boards had to deal with during
the 1990s. These resulted indirectly from the external pressures and were therefore
largely beyond the control of the examining boards. It will be suggested that the need
to cope with these immediate problems occupied the management and trustees of the
Boards at a time when they might otherwise have been able to mount some resistance
to the increasing control to which they were subject.
While they were being buffeted by the various external pressures that the 1990s
brought to bear on all educational institutions, the examining boards were of course -
again like other parts of “the education state” - dealing with internal stresses that, I
will suggest, absorbed a disproportionate amount of management attention. An