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

22

accepted normative assessment. Astute and stimulating, these papers do address some
of the ideological issues underlying assessment.

3 Education Policy and its Critiques

The stream of policy papers emerging from the education department, together with
various reports, has been a major source for this research. The 1991 White Paper
(DES 1991), the 1996 Dearing Report (Dearing 1996) and the 1997 consultation on
the awarding bodies (DffiE 1997a) were, of course of fundamental importance in
understanding the changes to post-16 education and the examining boards during the
1990s. Critiques on these policy papers have come from analysts working broadly in
the field of post-16 education and qualifications. The work of Michael Young,
initially as an individual (Young 1971) then as a mentor for researchers within the
Post-16 Centre at the Institute OfEducation (See for example Spours, Young 1998),
has provided an informed critique of post-16 education for the last quarter of the 20^th
century. In such critiques, the edited volume can provide an overview of a subject
with a range of expertise from particular fields. Such a volume is the analysis of the
recommendations of the Dearing Report edited by Ann Hodgson and Ken Spours
(Hodgson and Spours 1997). From their position as advocates of a modular
qualifications framework rather than the three parallel tracks espoused by the 1996
Dearing Report, their contributors are firmly grounded in the field and provide
valuable detail for the researcher. The issues they address are those that preoccupied
teachers in schools and colleges in 1997. Later research by the same team into New
Labour’s Educational Agenda (Hodgson and Spours 1999) and then into how
institutions were responding to the reforms introduced by Curriculum 2000 (Hodgson
and Spours 2003) have offered a critique of developing policy. A recent sign that new
researchers may be starting to investigate the effects of policy on the examining

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