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Boards must decide how to pitch their fees so as to remain solvent but not imperil
their market. An official of a modern-day Board was well aware of the contrast: “T/'
you look at Boards at that time, ...they clearly were independent bodies, accountable
to [their respective] universities'' (AQAl 2000).
However, their independent status did not mean that they were isolated from the
schools they served. An important factor in ensuring the success of the School
Certificates was the system of consultation with the teaching profession that the
Boards developed:
All the examining bodies (except the Oxford and Cambridge Joint Board which
had a special problem since it dealt mainly with public schools) ...devised
machinery for consultation with official representatives of the four Secondary
Teachers ’ Associations and the Independent Schools Association.
(Brereton 1944: 100)
Looking back on this early period, Brereton could detect that this involvement with
teachers, perhaps even more than the move to a national examination structure,
changed the Boards significantly:
During a period of about fifteen years the examining bodies were transformed
from a set of university bodies considering themselves set apart from and above
the schools, to the present state in which they all included teachers and local
education officers among their members.
(Brereton 1944: 101)
This lesson is one that has been forgotten and will be returned to in my concluding
chapter. The role of teachers is an important one, for it became their decision as to
which Board’s syllabus suited their particular students. The assumption that teachers
have a right to select from a ‘menu’ of versions of national examinations is another of
the strands that has taken deep root in English educational terrain. No other country
offers its teachers and their students such a choice. It therefore seems important to
include their professional perspective within the structure - a concept which has been
lost sight of in the current practice of the “managerial state".