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

268

The Daily Telegraph also assumed varying levels of rigour among the Boards:

Schools that choose the OCR ~ and they are by no means all fee-paying - do so
precisely because it is seen as the most rigorous of all the examining boards.
(The Daily Telegraph 17 September: 21)

Although it would seem logical for a school determined to exploit differences among
the Boards to select the one most likely to produce the most favourable grades, this
suspicion that one was “more rigorous¹' than another had survived virtually from the
Boards’ creation. One of the aims of merging the examining boards had been to put an
end to concerns about comparability. It seemed that the grading crisis had resurrected
such concerns, and cast a shadow over the Boards.

The Boards may no longer have been in control of the qualifications they
administered, but a subtext in the media coverage suggested that they were somehow
both incompetent and financially motivated in introducing Curriculum 2000. A
headline in The Times of 24 September claimed that “Schools pay £40m a year to
boards”. Although the article stated correctly that “costs have risen sharply under the
Government’s ‘Curriculum 2000’ reforms'”, there was no indication that there would
have been corresponding increases in the costs to the Boards of administering all
those modular units.

Gratuitous blows were aimed from other quarters. Conor Ryan, who had acted as a
special adviser during David BunkletCs four years as Secretary of State for Education
- and presumably been involved in establishing QCA, wrote severely in The
Independent:

There is no justification for having three competing boards. Competition has
produced little innovation, and their credibility was poor before recent
allegations.

(The Independent 26 September: 2,3)

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