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

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there is major competition for higher education places, examining boards will be able
to release candidates’ marks, which would facilitate the selection process. If this
practice were to become widespread, however, it could have significant unintended
consequences. Certainly it would obviate the market for a new selection test.

This picture leaves only AQA with no alternative direction to pursue. That
organisation has no alternative qualification provision, no international market, and no
financial resources except its fee income. An analogy could be made with MG Rover,
whose collapse in April 2005 was inevitable, according to the analysis of De Matthias
HoIweg and Professor Nick Oliver. In their book Who Killed MG Rover? they suggest
that, "Without a strong [financial] partner, a slow death was inevitable'' (Quoted in
The Guardian, April 27 2005). In the case of AQA, continuing to provide increasingly
costly English qualifications without some form of financial support could lead to
economic collapse. Such an eventuality could force the Government to save the
system by effectively nationalising the Board as it quietly did, to take another
analogy, when it created Southeast Trains after dismissing the French company
Connex. A glance at the most recent market share statistics reveals that AQA remains
to a significant degree the largest provider of general qualifications in England:

For the summer 2004 examination series these three awarding bodies
produced:

5.35 million GCSE examination results (AOA 59%, Edexcel 21^o∕o and OCR
27^o∕o)

700 000 GCE A level examination results (AQA 47 %, Edexcel 26 % and OCR
27%)

959 000 GCEAS examination results (AQA 49^o∕o, Edexcel 24 % and OCR 27^o∕o
(QCA 2005)

These statistics indicate that for the system to continue in anything like its present
form, AQA must survive in some form or other. A second glance explains why
proponents of the abolition of the GCSE have not grasped the economics of the

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