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

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completed. Students could also study vocational subjects through a revised GNVQ
structure and were expected also to work on Key Skills in literacy, numeracy and
information technology.

The process of schools and colleges adjusting to these changes was researched by Arm
Hodgson and Ken Spours, and analysed in their 2003 book Beyond A Levels:
Curriculum 2000 and the Reform of 14-19 Qualifications. As longstanding advocates
of a unified qualifications framework, they make the point that the reform:

...could more accurately be termed ‘Qualifications 2000’ [with its] voluntarist
approach, [leaving] market forces to determine which of the new qualifications
blocks schools and colleges would offer, what learners would decide to take,
and what higher education institutions and employers would recognize.
(Hodgson 2003: 160)

They concluded that “New Labour committed a fundamental political error in
choosing the compromised, partial and short-term perspectives of Dearing rather
than the more radical, comprehensive and longer-term approach of Aiming Higher”
(Hodgson 2003: 159). They attributed the new government’s decision to the demands
of “...Third Way politics...playing to both traditional and progressive educational
opinionsT They felt that some of the design flaws of the reformed qualifications
derive from the fact that they “were never seriously discussed with education
professionals whose experience of delivery might have ground out some of the most
obvious mistakes'" (Hodgson 2003: 160). As seems always to be the case with such
academic overviews, the writers do not include the awarding bodies among
“education professionals'”. They characterised the period following the consultation,
which ended in spring 1998, as “followed by a protracted period of silence of almost
two years while ministers and the officials from the DfEE, QCA and awarding bodies
discussed the designs of the new qualifications.” These discussions “took place
largely behind closed tZoor5^,,,(Hodgson 2003: 160).

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