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

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An additional factor that magnified the usual merger difficulties any organisation
faces was that the formation of AQA involved the extra complexity of the intangible
but nonetheless real ‘north/south divide’ as embodied in the two very different but
equally distinctive organisational cultures of the Northern Examining and Assessment
Board with offices in Manchester, Harrogate and Newcastle and the Associated
Examining Board located in Guildford and Bristol. This had the effect of exacerbating
- and for my purposes highlighting - the internal pressures that all three new unitary
assessment bodies faced.

The first internal problem I shall examine was one involving what is known in
commercial parlance as ‘human resources’. As the only significant resource of an
examining board is the quality of its staff, personnel problems of any sort are a serious
matter. During the 1990s such problems occurred for AQA at two levels. One was the
disruption to permanent staff resulting from mergers at the same time as they were
adapting to changes in the qualifications they administered. The second was the
gradual reduction in the number of teachers willing to participate in the marking
process. The effect of these two problems was to affect the delivery of examination
results and add to questions over the Boards’ reliability.

The second issue was one experienced by virtually every organisation during the
1990s: the escalating demands for ever-more-complex technology. Mergers inevitably
complicated technological issues further because of the need to ensure that newly

merged and usually very different systems were compatible. From the perspective of a
regulator, this was very often the source of difficulties, particularly when mergers
were involved:

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