In 1858, the University of Cambridge (estb. 1209) promoted the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) to raise standards of school education in the UK by administering exams for people who were not members of the university. In that year, 370 school students in seven English cities wrote exams set by UCLES. In 1864 in the heyday of the British Empire, UCLES began examining students internationally, and ‘public’ (i.e private, exclusive) schools established in India by British administrators and missionaries such as the Lawrence Schools in Sanawar and Lovedale (Ooty), Bishop Cotton Shimla and Bangalore, St. Paul’s, Darjeeling among others were quick to affiliate themselves with UCLES to write the board’s Senior Cambridge high school exams.
After independence it took an epic struggle in the courts by the country’s small Anglo-Indian community led by Frank Anthony, MP, to assert the right of religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer schools of their choice, i.e, English medium schools governed by the Interstate Board for Anglo-Indian Education which later morphed into the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE), which currently has 2,019 schools countrywide affiliated with it. In the mid-1990s after the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy (1991), Cambridge Assessment International Examinations — the successor of UCLES — made a quiet re-entry into Indian school education. Since then, it has rapidly established itself as the country’s most popular offshore international examinations board and has affiliated 389 schools which offer CAIE’s deeply-researched syllabuses and IGCSE (class X) and ‘A’ level (class XII) examinations. Some CAIE facts and figures:
• CAIE is the world’s largest provider of international education programmes and qualifications for 5-19 year-olds
• Over 10,000 schools in more than 160 countries offer Cambridge programmes and qualifications.
• The Cambridge Primary Years Programme is taught in more than 1,200 schools in 100-plus countries
• Every year, CAIE receives 620,000 subject entries (number of students multiplied by number of exam papers) for its IGCSE (class X) exams
• Cambridge Assessment International AS and A Levels are written in 160 countries with more than 495,000 entries each year
• CAIE runs over 1,000 teacher training programmes and events worldwide annually
• CAIE sets 5.7 million exam question papers every year.
