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

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speeches and before the small group discussions with practitioners seemed indicative
of the curious lack of any feeling of responsibility by the Department. One wondered
whether Estelle Morris as Secretary of State for Education would have felt her civil
servants were serving her well by this failure to listen to practitioners who had been
invited at government expense to offer their experience of the realities of examination
marking. Certainly representatives of the examining boards and QCA took careful
note of what was said. However, none of the evidence of existing pressures had any
immediate effect. It took the crisis of September 2002 and the simultaneous arrival of
a new ChiefExecutive at QCA to do that.

Faced with the huge increase in the demand for markers, AQA established a unit of its
workforce dedicated to the recruitment of examiners and managed - just - to ensure
that all papers were marked by the August 2001 deadline. This, of course, meant
diverting the staff from other work and resulted in yet further costs to the
organisation. However, the staffing problems did not end when the papers had been
marked.

During the 1990s, the substantial increase in appeals over the grades awarded had
been a corollary of the increasing importance in those grades as ‘gatekeepers’ of
young people’s future progress. What had once been a minor feature of the post-
results period was becoming a major activity for the Boards, absorbing staff time and
once again adding to costs. Then because the new AS∕A2 awards of Curriculum 2000
had not earned any public confidence, the trickle of appeals became a flood. In
summer 2001, AQA had handled 29,757 Enquiries about Results; in 2002 the number
was 44,034 - a 48% increase (AQA 2003a). This enormous increase again was an
unbudgeted cost factor which meant yet more funds had to be found by senior staff

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