Please explain exam boards to me: why so many? Why doesn't the DofE do it?

[ParentOfOne]

This is going to sound a very banal question, but can someone please explain the concept of exam boards?

In many other countries, it's the Department of Education that sets the national curriculum and prepares the national exams (GCSE, A-levels and equivalents).

• Why do we have various boards in the UK?
• Are they all private entities?
• Who pays for them?
• Has it always been like this, or was there a time when it was all done by the Department of Education?
• How meaningful are the differences between exam boards? Eg how much of a difference is there between Edexcel maths and AQA maths?
• Is each secondary school free to choose which exam board to follow?
• How comparable are the programs and the difficulty? Does this create an unfair advantage, if getting a high score is easier with one board than another?
• If there are no meaningful differences, why do we have multiple exam boards?

I have seen that Wikipedia provides some history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_boards_in_the_United_Kingdom but doesn't address the main questions

Gove wanted to have a single exam board for each subject but failed - if he couldn't do it then it probably isn't possible. I'm sure I heard anti-monopoly laws came into it.

Scrapping the exam boards and nationalising exams would be way too expensive.

Exactly as I said in my first answer, multile boards prevent a monopoly and yes Gove failed due to anti-monopoly rules amongst other things ie expense.

@noblegiraffe Why would it be too expensive?
We currently pay for multiple private exam boards (which charge fees to schools, ie to us taxpayers) plus for Ofqual to oversee those boards.

Why would it be more expensive to pay for Ofqual + a single entity (be it part of the DfE or else)? I'm not sure I follow

@twistyizzy I am no legal scholar, but what does anti-monopoly have to do with it? If you outsource to one private company only, OK, I can see it.

But if you nationalise the service, what does anti-monopoly have to do with it?

Because destroying a system and setting a whole new one up is more resource-intensive than maintaining the status-quo.

I'm not a commercial lawyer so I have no idea

The problem is, if you nationalised it which board do you nationalise?

there’s three big ones. Suppose you nationalise OCR. Let’s leave aside the difficulties that the people who write the papers for OCR almost certainly write IGCSE and other papers as well and that questions go through the OCR testing process.

edexcel and the others are now banned from competing in the U.K. market.

that’s clearly unfair. The government would essentially have chosen one to nationalise and the others to just stop doing what they are doing.

it would be subject to various legal challenges - restraint of trade etc.

consider if it was car manufacturing. The government nationalises Land Rover - fine. It then bans all other cars from sale in the U.K. so that everyone has to use Land Rover - not fine and breaks any number of laws.

so they could nationalise OCR. But they can’t ban the others from writing and selling their exams.

when Gove introduced the new GCSEs most state schools switched to IGCSE - the old ones that the exam boards were still running and were still
available.

Gove had to say that the IGCSEs didn’t count in the league tables to force state schools to switch, and most private schools still haven’t because the reformed GCSEs aren’t noticeably better and in some ways are worse.

the exam boards make a good living writing and selling qualifications that the U.K. has abandoned - o levels, IGcSEs (old style GCSEs) etc.

@Octavia64 consider if it was car manufacturing. The government nationalises Land Rover - fine. It then bans all other cars from sale in the U.K. so that everyone has to use Land Rover - not fine and breaks any number of laws.

This comparison is utterly irrelevant.
The government's job is to provide a legal and regulatory framework. It is not to build cars.

However, it is the government's job to provide state education, to set the national curriculum and to oversee exam qualifications which are recognised nation-wide.

That's why I said that privatisation makes sense in some areas but not with exams.

Would it make sense to have multiple General Medical Councils, each with similar but slightly different rules and exams, and a government department to oversee that the various councils are similar enough? Of course not, it would be utterly bonkers!

the exam boards make a good living writing and selling qualifications that the U.K. has abandoned - o levels, IGcSEs (old style GCSEs) etc.

And they would be absolutely free to continue selling whatever services to whatever entities or governments want to buy those services from them

It seems to me that in this country we get to combine the worst of privatisation with the worst of state ownership

Its probably amongst the many things that should never have been privatised in the first place.

Surely the way you'd nationalise would be to merge the exam boards. Because id bet its not a case of one is better at everything they'd each have their strengths.

I think it's a good question OP, and I don't think the 'why' (which some pps don't seem to understand you were asking) has been adequately answered yet.

• anti-monopoly rules: as you say, what is gained by having these? We don't argue that say Ofsted has a 'monopoly' in being the only English inspectorate, for example.
• the exam boards also set international exams: ok, that's essentially a commercial decision- doesn't mean the DfE needs to support a system that does that.
• expensive to set up- again paying private profit making companies Is likely to be more expensive long term.

And I think the key is in the phrase 'long term'. Our system is short-term, quick fix. Education being the political football that it is in the volatile political system that we have. Many other countries have more 'grown up' systems where the focus is more on running the country than scoring political points.

It's not that one's easier than the other, but different a syllabus can help schools with different demographics. E.g because of being more heavily weighted for or against practical or coursework, or because of the texts chosen, or the actual subjects covered.

At DD's private school, they choose the boards that they thought provided the best GCSE syllabus for continuation into A level, and the best A Level for continuation to university. So we ended up with, I think, four boards for GCSE's, and two for A Levels.

Agee with pp, boards also chosen for selection of texts in English, for example, or time periods in History.

parent of one said:

However, it is the government's job to provide state education, to set the national curriculum and to oversee exam qualifications which are recognised nation-wide.

octavia answers:

this is an opinion. Many people have lots of different opinions on what the government’s job is.

until the 1980s there was no national curriculum in England. You believe it is the government’s job to set a national curriculum. Many people do not. In particular the national curriculum is not now statutory in the vast majority of schools as academies don’t need to stick to it.

so the UK has had a national curriculum between 1988 and it’s slowly fading away. It’s almost non existent now.

so you have an opinion that a government should provide a national curriculum.

you also have an opinion that it is the government’s job to provide state education.
again, a lot of people including most current politicians do not agree with you.
worldwide much education is not state provided and lots of people think that is good.
in the U.K. some education has been provided by local (not national) government however as schools have academised and are now in academy chains this is getting smaller and smaller.
only 17% of secondaries are now state owned and 53% of primaries.

i get that you think that the government should set a curriculum and provide education and have a single exam board but in England we don’t.

and when you say it is the job of the government that is just an opinion.

Just to point out that UK education is a devolved matter. Therefore there are 4 different school systems - from curriculum to assessments, from teacher employment to building ownership.

England is by far the one which has sold most to private companies - from exam boards, to academisation, to PFI building ownership etc. It is also the one with the most extreme knowledge based curriculum.

Up here in Scotland schools are owned and managed by the local authority generally (A few PFI buildings, a few Episcopal and Catholic church oversight schools), one curriculum, teachers are only employed by the local authority, on national pay scales, with one exam board (which is owned by Scottish Government), one education authority (Education Scotland), one teacher professional body (GTCS) etc.

The question is what is the problem with the status quo? It seems strange but they all all businesses who make money on the back of the exams so whether or not they are duplicating tasks is moot. I think schools having choice is a good thing as they can pick the one that suits their children best. I think whether or not one is easier or another is again, moot, as the grade boundaries will move and the grade profile will be broadly in line with one another. It isn’t like one board will all get 9s and another all 3s. I doesn’t work like that.

And actually that is good isn’t it?. It would be boring for the world if every child studied the same texts and the same historic period. The fact that there is a variation in what is studied is surely better for society as a whole.

Precisely

@BananaPeels And actually that is good isn’t it?. It would be boring for the world if every child studied the same texts and the same historic period. The fact that there is a variation in what is studied is surely better for society as a whole.

That's a silly exaggeration. Do you think that all schools following the same exam board teach the absolutely same identical content with absolutely no variation? Of course not!

TBH the idea of all public school exams (and therefore an exact requirement of what is to be taught in schools) being entirely in the hands of one government department is not something that I am remotely comfortable with!

Leaving aside questions about duplication of effort, and costs etc, I don’t think that it’s actually a bad thing that schools have some small amount of freedom to choose an exam board and curriculum that they think is best, whilst still keeping within the bounds of the overall national curriculum.

Of course they do because the content of the syllabus is in the exam and most schools teach to the test 🙄 The fact you aren't even aware of that! But that's what happens when you rank schools by results

Um pretty much they do. That’s the point of a GCSe syllabus. There is a Little bit of choice but not much.

@Octavia64 i get that you think that the government should set a curriculum and provide education and have a single exam board but in England we don’t.
and when you say it is the job of the government that is just an opinion.

Good point. let me rephrase then: regardless of our opinions on what a government should and should not provide, the fact remains that we have a very odd and inconsistent system, where on one hand we seem to welcome "competition" and diversity by allowing multiple exam boards, but on the other hand it seems to be a false and deceiving choice, because we also have a government department (Ofqual) whose job it is to oversee all these exam boards and ensure they aren't that different in the end. See my point?

So you are saying that, among the schools following the same exam boards, there are no differences?

The same content can be explained in multiple ways. There will always be differences from school to school. No two lessons will be exactly the same. Especially now that, unlike other countries, we have de facto got rid of official textbooks in many cases.

and ensure they aren't that different in the end

Ofqual ensures equivalence - that’s not the same as “aren’t that different”. Different boards will cover entirely different periods for History etc.

Actually…. That is pretty close to what happens.

can’t comment about other subjects, but in maths there’s a couple of very popular schemes of work (white rose is very popular at the moment and works well with Edexcel) and the vast, vast majority of schools will follow one of those two.

when I was teaching and my school became an academy and we no longer had to follow the national curriculum we wrote our own curriculum and it was great as a maths teacher because it could be rejigged thematically so that all the groups were looking at the same topic at the same time but at different levels. National curriculum in maths had some really really odd decisions in it.

being able to adapt it really made a difference. We were able to introduce some trickier concepts at a much earlier age than the national curriculum did but using different methods and metaphors and it meant when they hit gcse they were much better prepared.

we pulled a lot from both the Chinese methods and New Zealand.