Tlb
and consequently focused attention on the reliability, validity and comparability of
examination grades. Because government ministers were increasingly being held
responsible through constant media pressure for any problems with the system, they
tightened central control through a series of changes to the regulatory body to ensure
that central scrutiny over the Boards became ever more rigorous. I have identified this
tendency as an aspect of the approach to public service accountability of the
“managerial state '. (Clarke, 1997 #287)
Reflecting on my analysis, I believe I have been guilty of imposing the orthodoxy of
the time on a body of evidence which - reconsidered objectively - suggests a quite
different interpretation. Anticipating that the generalised effect of marketisation
would have had an impact on the examining boards, I tried to present the evidence I
was amassing to fit that assumption. Yet a clear assessment of that evidence leads to
the unavoidable conclusion that - far from being changed from a quasi- to a fully-
fledged market, the Boards’ freedom to act as a market was being steadily restricted
by regulation to the point where it had virtually disappeared.
If I now accept that what happened to the examining boards was in fact the reverse of
the effect of marketisation, I must then question whether the undoubted shift in the
balance of power between the Boards and the regulator resulted from a conscious
policy or whether it was, as it had been in the past, the unintended consequence of a
series of attempts to mend flaws in the system. It must be admitted that the latter case
is the more likely within the modem context of policy formation - as described
above by one interviewee as: “.. .that whole fascinating thing about how decisions are
made - and rarely are they made on sifting carefully the evidence,
because... everybody’s moving from one meeting to the next so quickly that nobody