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



265

Board that standards must be maintained. In fact, he went so far as to make a
statement to the press that seemed to be a confession of his responsibility for the grade
changes to anyone who knew of his earlier insistence on the equal weighting of AS
and A2 modules:

QCA chairman Sir William Stubbs said on Wednesday that the three awarding
bodies ‘had it made perfectly clear to them that they had to maintain standards
over time, that the standards of A-Ievel were not expected to go up, nor were
they expected to decline, and they have been reminded of that a number of
times.

(bbc.co.uk 18 September 2002)

To quell the outcry, Education Minister Estelle Morris requested that QCA conduct
an immediate investigation into the grading process. Ken Boston, in post at QCA for
barely a fortnight, took charge and reported on 20 September that
“some teachers or
schools ...might not have understood what was expected of pupils under the new A-
Ievel exam system”
(bbc.co.uk 20 September 2002) This suggestion raised the level of
outrage in schools still further. Many of the schools involved were in the private
sector and had a financial interest in protecting the reputation of their teachers as
above reproach. The result was that the Minister asked Mike Tomlinson, former Chief
Inspector of Schools, to carry out another investigation into the affair. EIe was to
report initially by 27 September with recommendations for solving the grading
controversy so that aggrieved students would have their status clarified. Then he
would continue his investigations to produce a full report by the beginning of
December.

The heat was taken out of the crisis with the publication of Tomlinson’s Interim
Report on 27 September. He broadly exonerated both QCA and the Boards, who
clearly had felt under pressure from QCA to
“deliver outcomes largely in line with the
performance of students in 200Γ',
but did acknowledge that “the actions taken with



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