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and agreed by trustees. All of these changes - in candidate entries, in modular results
and in appeals over those results - had to be produced by computer systems which,
though inanimate, were also showing signs of strain.
2 Upgrading Information Systems and Tracking the Data Explosion
Throughout the 1990s, all organisations were working against a background of rapidly
developing computer technology. For the examining boards, this meant the usual need
to replace typewriters with desktop computers, to ensure that electronic
communication reinforced telephone services - which teachers and examinations
officers now expected to be available whenever they wished to ask a question
(causing a near-revolt of switchboard staff in Manchester). AQA faced continual
problems in finding and financing the scarce and costly expertise needed to build
confidential data bases for the recording of results. Early experience with consultants
who failed to meet deadlines (which are not flexible in the world of examining)
demonstrated that the very specific needs of the examinations sector were best met by
ensuring a controlling role for AQA staff. Yet there was no spare capacity in the
staffing structure. If someone from the Information Technology and Communications
Division were to take on a particular development project, that individual’s work had
to be covered by finding a suitably qualified person in a very competitive employment
market at a time when widespread fear of a ‘millennium bug’ was raising the costs of
computer expertise ever higher. In order to address this problem, the AQA trustees
had to make an exception in the new organisation’s salary structure to provide
additional increments for the Information Technology division. This added another