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

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sociology has devoted to my subject, sociology has contributed to my theoretical
framework.

The sociological terrain

As McCulloch and Richardson point out, it is especially French thinkers, like
Durkheim, Althusser, Bourdieu and Foucault who have emphasized “the social
relationships within education and how these are in a dynamic with changing
contemporary concerns'' (McCulloch and Richardson 2000: 55). One can extrapolate
from the work of any or all of those thinkers that those who control examinations hold
significant power in a society. It therefore follows that the examining boards who
have long held that power in England merit close study. The examining boards could
be included as among Althusser’s ''‘ideological state apparatuses' designed...to
perpetuate ...cultural domination’.'' (Quoted in McCulloch 2000: 55) Michel Foucault
would undoubtedly place the English boards among the “ ‘capillary ’ levels of the body
politic” which perpetuate the humanist discourse (Windschuttle 1996: 139,141). As
cited above, Pierre Bourdieu, included examinations as instrumental in the
reproduction of cultural advantage.

The English examining boards can therefore be be included as one of the mechanisms
involved in the reproduction of cultural advantage. The providers of academic
qualifications are themselves, like teachers, successful products of the society’s
education system and are assigned the role of measuring and duplicating the standards
which reproduce their cultural advantage. In fact, Bourdieu’s reference to “the
examiners” being “generally obliged” to maintain standards Oflinguistic manipulation
that advantage the higher social classes (Bourdieu 1977: 73) could perhaps be said to
cast the English examining boards as the bankers of scholastic capital.

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