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

241

employment regulations required a major upgrade in the personnel records kept on
their seasonally employed temporary staff - the thousands of markers and university
student checkers taken on for basic clerical tasks.

To address all these pressures, AQA planned TT Project AQA15’, which was to
design software capable of handling all the entries, module and overall results, plus
personnel data for both permanent and temporary staff. The Director of the
Information and Communications Technology Division estimated in January 2003
that: “...project AQA15 will place even greater burdens on the team [likely to be
working on 10 to 11 other emerging projects], requiring 30 to 40 [external]
contractors at peak times.''’ In making a case for increased staffing in his Division, he
pointed out that staff were:

...currently managing both the technical infrastructure for the AEB and NEAB
legacy systems and the technical infrastructure for the new AQA systems. By
2005/06 AQA might expect to see some diminution in this workload as the
legacy syllabuses are de-commissioned. In the short term it faces the dual
problem of managing the old and new in tandem and also supporting the
development and implementation of the new technical architecture (including
the management of the transitional problems).

(AQA 2003a)

These pressing needs in terms of personnel and technology, of course, translated into
spiralling costs for AQA. Yet the Board was powerless either to control many of the
costs or to increase its income substantially: a position of undeniable stress for any
organisation. Perhaps the financial situation illustrates most clearly that the Boards
were no long in control as independent organisations.

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