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by Victorian policy makers who saw education matters as outside the remit of central
government. When the multitude of professional entry examinations led to the Dyke
Acland Report in 1911 with its recommendation of a single system of accreditation,
the existing university boards were charged with creating the structure of School
Certificates and Higher Schools Certificates. They were then installed as the majority
group in the Secondary Schools Examinations Council, established in 1918 to oversee
the system. Clearly, despite the move to a national examination structure, the Boards
had not only remained independent, but were virtually self regulating. Their status
continued unchanged for thirty years.
2 How did changes to the examinations system affect the Boards’ status?
With the 1944 Education Act and the replacement of the system of Schools
Certificates by the single-subject General Certificate of Education at Ordinary and
Advanced levels, the Boards experienced a first move toward central control over
their operations. Firstly, they were sidelined by their own chairman Sir Cyril
Norwood in the publication of his report on secondary education and examinations,
which went directly to the President of the Board of Education. When they did see the
report, they were alarmed to Ieam that Norwood had suggested that their examinations
be phased out, to be replaced by schools’ own assessments. That recommendation
never came to pass; on the contrary, examinations became ever more firmly
embedded in English educational culture. It was in relation to these examinations and
a particular instance of the “messy obscurity of policy processes'" (Ecclestone 2002:
174) that I was in danger of overlooking perhaps the most significant long-term effect
of the Spens/Norwood/Butler exchanges. This was the change from the School
Certificates, a grouped qualification like those common around the world, to single-