Why is there more than 1 exam board in England?

username4200822

I live in Scotland, so obviously we only have 1 exam board with SQA but why is there so many like AQA and Edexcel?

Does the difficulty of the exam depend on the exam board? Do schools pick what exam board they use?

Reply 1

loginrunner

Original post by Beirut_Ewan

Im English and even I don't understand it😞

Reply 2

Telomere

Free market innit :biggrin:

Schools choose. Supposed to be regulated by Ofqual so they don't go too easy to get schools' business.

This is quite interesting on regional roots.

(edited 5 years ago)

Reply 3

999tigger

Original post by Beirut_Ewan

Historical there were just separate boards for different areas and they have evolved. These are the last ones left as they ahve already absorbed loads of smaller boards.

The exams are of the same level.
Sometimes the spec differs in course composition.
Teacher pick or rather departments decide which board they want to use. There are only 3 big ones. AQA is the largest I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_boards_in_the_United_Kingdom
the ones for wales and NI are niche.

Reply 4

Tolgash

Technically, they are called awarding organisations (I believed OCR even refer to themselves as an 'awarding body.'). They are all regulated by a quango called Ofqual, ensuring that standards are maintained equally between the four in England. There should be no difference in rigour in the specifications offered by different awarding organisations; any slight difference in difficulty between the examination papers from different awarding organisations is accounted for in adjustments to their grade boundaries. I do not believe that there should be any discrepancy in the values of a grade awarded by any of the four awarding organisations in England, your grade 9 with Edexcel is equivalent to a grade 9 with AQA and so forth.

Exam boards are an artefact of the English education system – they only really existed in the twentieth century.