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

96

(Gosden 1976:238)

Certainly the examining boards interpreted the change as the flexing of muscles by

the newly promoted Ministry. James Petch observed that:

When working on the 1918 scheme [School & Higher School Certificates], the
Board of Education had asked the existing university examining bodies for their
help and had benefited from their experience. The prestige of the universities
and their examining bodies was then needed by Whitehall. In deciding what the
1951 scheme was to be the Ministry of Education chose to pay little attention to
the universities and to ignore completely the examining bodies.

(Petch 1953: 163)

While James Petch can in no way be considered an objective witness, he had been
long involved in the management of the Joint Matriculation Board, so his perceptions
are based on experience. He was unequivocal in his view that the shift in control was
far from being purely symbolic:

The outstanding difference between the new examination and its predecessors is
the amount of control over it which is being exercised from the centre. Circular
113 announced the Ministerial intention of taking charge and charge has been
taken.

(Petch 1953: 163)

As well as wounded pride, the Boards had professional reasons for objecting to their

exclusion in designing the new examinations. Their experience had taught them that:

...the precipitate changes in the nature of school examinations did not allow
sufficient time to consider the adequacy for the new purpose of the measuring
device hitherto used. A separate subject examination calls for greater precision
of measurement than was satisfactory for a certificate examination....

(Petch 1953: 213)

This was the first indication of what was to be a corollary of the shift to central
control: a failure to appreciate the intricacies of the assessment devices which the
Boards had developed.

Ellen Wilkinson did not have the opportunity to exercise her new authority because
she died suddenly just eight months after the publication of Regulation 113.
Nevertheless, the shift in control proceeded. It was effected through a restructuring of

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