Despite having no experience as an examiner, Tattersall successfully applied to be an assistant secretary at the Associated Lancashire Schools Examining Board, the smallest of England's 13 regional CSE examination boards, beginning employment in 1972. She worked her way up to deputy secretary before becoming secretary of the ALSEB in 1982. Tattersall jumped directly from the smallest CSE board to the largest when she became head of the neighbouring North West Regional Examinations Board in 1985. The same year, the NWREB entered into a consortium with the ALSEB and three other local exam boards, forming the Northern Examining Association to offer the new General Certificate of Secondary Education qualification, which replaced the O Level and CSE from 1988. In 1990, Tattersall moved to become leader of the oldest member of the NEA, the Joint Matriculation Board. As well as providing GCSEs through the NEA, the JMB also offered A Levels independently. The JMB merged with the other four members of the NEA – the ALSEB, the NWREB, the North Regional Examinations Board and Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Examinations Board – in 1992, creating the Northern Examinations and Assessment Board. The merged organised appointed Tattersall as its chief executive. While Tattersall led NEAB, it grew to be the biggest provider of GCSEs across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. By the late 1990s, Government policy was to reduce the number of exam boards in the UK, replacing them with larger awarding bodies offering vocational, as well as academic, qualifications. Thus, in 1997, Tattersall led NEAB into a federation with AEB/SEG and City & Guilds called the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance. AQA, the UK's largest awarding body, appointed Tattersall as its first director general in 1998. She continued this role when NEAB and AEB/SEG formally merged under the AQA name in 2000. During her time at AQA, Tattersall was also chair of the Joint Council for General Qualifications, an umbrella group representing all British exam boards. In this role, Tattersall sought to ensure that examiners' professional judgements, rather than statistics, were used to award grades when revised A Level exams were introduced in 2002. Tattersall retired from AQA in 2003, the same year she was awarded an OBE for services to education. She soon came out of retirement, however, to become chair of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, a professional body for examiners, in 2005.
Chief regulator
In 2008, Tattersall was appointed the inaugural chair and chief regulator of Ofqual, the new exams 'watchdog'. Initially, Ofqual operated as part of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in London, but moved to Coventry and became a non-ministerial government department in 2010, still led by Tattersall. At Ofqual, Tattersall was open about the difficulties of comparing exam results over time and urged better communication between exams authorities and the general public. Tattersall resigned from Ofqual with immediate effect in July 2010, two months after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition governmentcame to power. In her resignation letter, Tattersall stated it was 'clear that the Government is bringing a fresh perspective to public policy, in education as in other areas' and it was 'in the best interests both of Government and of the education sector for Ofqual to have a new chair'.
Later life
Tattersall was critical of exam reforms under Secretary of State for EducationMichael Gove in the early 2010s. In response to Gove's later-aborted plans to scrap GCSEs and replace them with a new qualification only accessible to higher ability students, she said:
No one who is responsible for the education of young people should be proud to introduce a system which will result in a greater number of students leaving school with no qualifications. Education is about encouraging success and the raising of aspirations, not the writing off of a generation, which is what this new, untried, untested policy, based on prejudice and untruths, will bring about.
