The business of exams

Are British children over-tested?

They certainly take many more exams than ever before. A generation ago they took just two public tests (O- and A-levels) at 16 and 18. In 1988 the new National Curriculum introduced Key Stage tests (known as SATs) at ages seven, 11 and 14, and replaced O-levels with GCSEs; Labour later added another test at age five. The old oasis of an exam-free lower sixth-form year - prized by students and teachers alike - no longer exists. In 2000, the old A-level course was divided in two. Students take AS levels in the first year. If they pass (they can re-sit as often as they want), they sit the harder A2 exams in their final year.

So who sets all these exams?

Thirty years ago, they were set and marked by a welter of small university boards, enabling schools to pick and choose O- and A-level syllabuses to match their own preferences. But by 2000, these had consolidated into three huge non-profit bodies covering England (one of which, the OCR, merged the old Oxford and Cambridge Boards with the Royal Society of Arts). All three are supervised by an agency set up by Labour in 1997 called the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which monitors standards and sets the curriculum (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own boards).

Did the system cope with the sheer volume of testing?

No, not least because, while the number of exams skyrocketed, the number of qualified markers has remained almost unchanged. The annual series of exam crises that ensued culminated in the A-level grading fiasco of 2002, in which thousands of sixth formers were given the wrong marks. That led to the resignation of Education Secretary Estelle Morris and the demand that the QCA overhaul the whole system of marking and make it much more business-like.

And what steps were taken in pursuit of that goal?

A tough new chief executive for the QCA, Ken Boston, who promised root-and-branch reform of what he dubbed "a 19th-century cottage industry", was parachuted in from Australia. And a few months later, when a well-known commercial company - the media giant Pearson, owner