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

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subject O levels and A levels, which made English qualifications unique. In
retrospect, the embedding of English students’ right to choose the subjects they study
has led to the series of varied but unsuccessful attempts to build in a general education
core requirement that generated the qualification reforms that I have chronicled.
While I have touched briefly on the significance of the change to single subjects, this
is an area of English qualifications which further research could illuminate, as it has
so regularly been designated as a problem and regularly addressed by futile solutions.

At the time, however, for the Boards it seemed that the significant effect of the 1944
Act was the removal of their representatives from the Secondary Schools Examination
Committee, to be replaced by civil servants from the newly designated Ministry of
Education. This was the first step in what I suggest has been the gradually
accelerating shift in control from the boards to the centre. Despite this perceived
undermining of their position, the Boards managed successfully to devise the GCE
qualifications to whose overall design they had not been invited to contribute. This
pattern of the Boards’ reliability in fulfilling their professional task, although
overlooked in qualification design, has been a consistent feature of the English
qualifications scene.

The only change to the configuration of examining boards following the opening of
secondary education to all was the creation of a new Board with no university
affiliation. Intended to answer the needs of the technical schools and further education
colleges, with no accompanying reform to widen access to qualifications, the
Associated Examining Board gradually became a clone of the others because of the
English reluctance to accept applied and theoretical learning as of equal worth.

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