‘Independent’ QCA to be made… independent again

nick cowen, 26 September 2007

Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has just announced that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will be overhauled into an independent watchdog equivalent to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England or the Food Standards Agency. This rather raises the question of what exactly the QCA is at the moment, considering that it is barely ever mentioned by ministers without the accompanying authoritative claim that it is an independent ‘guardian of standards’, and that an even more independent international panel has described the resulting exam system as one of the most tightly regulated in the world. Just how much more independent can you get? Apparently, much more.

In this respect, Balls does deserve some credit. He has acknowledged the conflict of interest in the current QCA, which manages exam standards and alterations to curriculum qualifications. In an environment where there is tremendous political pressure to increase participation and achievement in these qualifications, this centralisation of powers generates a tremendous incentive towards lowering exam standards indirectly by altering the curriculum. So Balls intends to separate these powers under the new system. In addition, the new organisation will report directly to parliament rather than to ministers as the QCA currently does. Ministers, however, will continue to make senior appointments so the organisation will not exactly be independent of political control.
Ministers are still holding fast to the line that academic standards (especially at A-level) have been maintained despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary from genuinely independent research. On Radio 4’s Today programme during the announcement, Balls claimed the QCA told him so. He seems instead to think that the problem is not so much with the exams:
‘this summer we saw a debate about whether standards in qualifications had been maintained, even as the QCA and others provided reassurance that they had been. But the fact that the QCA reports to Ministers can make it harder to demonstrate that it is acting wholly independently in carrying out its regulatory role…as we develop new qualifications such as Diplomas and pilot new tests, we need to make sure not only that they are of the highest quality, but that they are seen to be so by employers, universities and the public’.
It is not the exams but the way some people (well, everyone who is not directly associated with the present system) see the exams that are the problem! Thus this line of spin, perhaps the most ludicrous this Government has ever stuck to, that exams are no easier than 20 years ago, continues. This argument is tragically out of step with reality and even as this welcome drive towards independence approaches, we have to question whether, with such poor premises present at its inception, whether it will deliver more transparency or just another layer of whitewash. We will just have to see how this plan is implemented in practice.
The idea of making government organisations independent of politics is a popular notion (it is touted as being a solution for just about every struggling department at the moment), but none of this will make schools any more independent of the central bureaucracy. A far more useful shift for long term improvements would be to set schools free of the restrictive curriculum and allow non-government organisations to set exam qualifications.