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

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fellow of All Souls, he won the support of Frederick Temple - fellow of Balliol, then
chaplain to Queen Victoria, next to be Headmaster of Rugby and eventual Archbishop
of Canterbury. Temple in turn wrote to the Master of Balliol to enlist Oxford’s
examining experience in setting up the project. Temple’s letter of 25 February 1857
provides a blueprint of the eventual English secondary schools examinations system:

...The University should appoint a competent Board of Examiners; that these
examiners should be prepared to examine all boys between certain ages
presented to them under certain regulations; ...that the expenses of the
examination should be covered by a small fee from every candidate.

If Oxford began, Cambridge would soon follow. In this way the universities
would give guidance to those schools which is sadly needed.

(Roach 1971: 69)

Oxford accepted the plan - although there followed the inevitable arguments about
issues such as the title to be assigned to the qualification. Associate of Arts (A. A.) had
been proposed, but provoked opposition because it would devalue the Bachelor of
Arts (B.A.) which cost graduates’ parents £100. In what seems from the perspective
of modem timescales a very short time, the University of Oxford Delegacy of Local
Examinations came into being and held its first examination in June 1857. It
continued to fulfil that function until ‘absorbed’ by the Cambridge Syndicate in 1996.
This prototype of the English examining board was the model that other universities
followed subsequently with virtually no variation on Temple’s brief outline.

As Temple had predicted, the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate
(UCLES) held its first series of examinations in December of 1857. The following
year both universities decided to hold their examinations in June, the practice that has
been followed since that date. At the outset, a move to a single series of examinations
for the whole country was a definite possibility. Suggestions that the two universities
should combine forces and offer a single series of examinations led to joint
discussions. However by 1860 they had been unable to agree on the ever-vexed

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