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

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simply accept the status quo because it is not addressing the needs of English young
people. How will the inevitable change come about?

Worst Case Scenario: Nationalisation by default

I believe that the following consequences could flow directly from the Boards’ loss of
independence. Some of these I base on the evidence I have submitted, particularly the
interviews I carried out. Others are signalled in the White Paper of February 2005
which itself is a response to the Tomlinson Report of October 2004.

The likely outcome of this first scenario is that two Boards may restructure to protect
their independence, while the third will have no option but to become the franchised
provider of English qualifications. While AQA lacks other means of survival, both
OCR and Edexcel are poised to develop their respective specialisms which will both
evade the tight control of QCA and generate the income that their position as part of a
larger business requires. An official from another board summarised the Edexcel

position following its takeover by Pearson International:

The way I see London Qualifications operating...is that BTEC is positioning
itself as BTEC [and] is now deliberately strengthening the brand and separating
the other activity. Now I don’t think Pearson would have bought the whole thing
without actually wanting this other activity, because that ^,s what they want to get
into. [The Chairman of Edexcel], on the other hand, is vocational to the core.
Indeed I think [his] personal ambition was to throw off the general
qualifications, sell them to somebody, and he would do what he wanted with
BTEC. Now, he wasn ^,t able to deliver that, so he ^,s chairman of this foundation
which has got largesse from other people.

(OCR2 2003)

Since that interview, the Edexcel website reports that the short-lived ‘London
Qualifications’ title has been abandoned in favour of ‘Edexcel Limited’. Its emphasis
is on its international role in delivering “owr qualifications to more than two million

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