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

242

3 Not Calling the Tune, but Paying the Piper: The internal financial
pressures resulting from externally-generated change

It is difficult to credit in view of the dominant role of the English examining boards
within the financially hard-pressed English education system, but “their finances are
shrouded in secrecy. They are non-profit making organisations: limited companies
which also have charitable status'' (Smithers 2002). Somehow the confidentiality
which they had acquired as professional examining bodies had covered their entire
operation. Never from their origins in 1903 (JMB) and 1953 (AEB) until the summer
of 2001 had any government agency investigated either board’s finances. As
charitable bodies, they filed accounts annually with the Charities Commission, but
apart from confirming probity, such accounts reveal very little.

Then in 2001 QCA carried out an audit of the board’s general qualifications
operation. AQA’s Council, while confident that despite the ongoing restructuring
exercise the administration would stand up to such scrutiny, assumed that this was a
signal that government attention was beginning to look very carefully at the
organisation’s finances. The Boards’ curious status as non-profit-making bodies with
charitable status whose business was virtually entirely within the public sector meant
they received no state subsidy even for the costs of government-instigated
development. Over the years they had always tried to retain a prudent level of
reserves, a practice virtually unknown within the education sector and one that QCA
might well query. However the report in February 2002, while it commended the
“committed senior management team supported by equally committed staff' (QCA
2002a), no reference was made to the Board’s finances.

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