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

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in the guise of a state-appointed regulator. Additional and, I suggest, conclusive
evidence for this power shift forms the core of the next chapter.

However, reflecting on my initial assumption that this power shift formed part of a
wider strategy of marketisation, I must acknowledge that the evidence suggests a
different interpretation of what happened to the examining boards during the 1990s.
Although marketisation may have been altering other sectors of the “educational
state”, the Boards experienced a virtual suppression of their established market.
Their freedom to trade as providers of English qualifications was dependent on a
regulatory licence, their products were controlled, and their prices subject to
regulatory capping. This reversal of a general trend has become clear only as a result
of assessing the evidence.

At the same time, I believe I have provided glimpses of the gradual decline in trust
which I suggested at the end of the previous chapter is the underlying shift that is
taking place in England. The State, in its quest for accountability, invokes ever-
tightening central regulation as the means to that end, without taking cognisance of
the cost of suppressing professional responsibility - whether in examining boards,
teachers or medical staff. I argue in the next chapter that the events of September
2002 provide clear evidence of such a cost in overriding the professional judgement of
experienced assessors.

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