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

83

disclosed. Sixty years later an official of the same board made virtually the same
observation in an interview:

The key thing that we ^,ve got to get to grips with is, Ts what he [Tomlinson] is
talking about the education and training of our youngsters and representing
what they’ve achieved or is it about university selection? And please don’t
pretend you can use one for another without it distorting one or the other.
(OCR2 2003)

The inopportune timing of the Spens Report’s publication just before the outbreak of
war meant it was shelved in the same way as the Hadow Report had been by the
economic depression. However Spens’ proposals were dusted down in 1941 and
offered to the Norwood Committee as a basis for its deliberations. The Norwood
Report’s recommendations opened the doors of secondary education to all young
people through the 1944 Education Act. An indirect outcome of this reform was the
first of the series of inroads into the examining boards’ independence in favour of
growing central control. The Victorian distaste for government involvement in
educational matters was becoming a distant memory in post-war England.

Part 3: The slow shift to central control of the examining boards 1944-1988

Among the major changes to English secondary education resulting from the 1944
Education Act was an apparently minor adjustment to the membership of the
Secondary Schools Examinations Council. This particular regulation significantly
affected the examining boards, but was of little interest in the wider world. However
this proved to be the first move in a gradually accelerating process of tightening
central control over the independent examining boards. This section will narrate the
process of change that led to that shift in control, once again mapped by a matrix [See
Figure 3.2] detailing the series of changes both to examinations and to their

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