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

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regulatory body during this period. As indicated in the matrix, the period will be
considered in three phases:

• 1944: Education Act, GCEs and SSEC without the Boards;

• 1964: Schools Council, ‘golden age’ and ineffectual examination reform;

• 1983: shift to central control as the price of GCSE

An appreciation of the wider issues determining the direction of change will explain
how policies that had a major impact on the examining boards were devised with
other objectives as their aim.

A The 1944 Act and the birth of the GCE

On 18 September 2003, in a Radio 4 retrospective assessment of the achievements of
the post-war Labour government, Will Hutton suggested that ⁱⁱIf health is the great
success, education is the great failure of the Atlee government." He was referring to
Labour’s failure to address the dichotomy of state and private schools. This
judgement would fit the category of what Gary McCulloch sees as a revisionist view
of the 1944 Act "predicated on the notion of something akin to an Establishment
conspiracy, dedicated to the maintenance of social inequality through tripartite
divisions in education" (McCulloch 1994: 54). I have indicated at the outset of this
chapter that the acceptance of a separate path for the private sector is deeply grounded
in English thinking. Therefore I tend toward David Cannadine’s term “temporal
parochialism" (Cannadine 2002) for this form of distorting the past through the lens
of the present. In order to avoid either revisionism or temporal parochialism, it is

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