Ministers propose fines for exam board errors

Ofqual could be given the power to hand out fines to boards that make mistakes setting exams Exam boards are facing fines from the government’s qualifications regulator after a string of errors in this summer’s GCSE and A-levels. Ministers will on Tuesday propose an immediate change to the law to allow Ofqual to impose a financial penalty – capped at a certain proportion of an exam board’s turnover – if they make mistakes in the future. But the move was questioned by a head teachers’ leader, who said any fines would simply be passed on by the boards to schools, adding to already large exams bills. The boards themselves believe the move, to be introduced in an amendment to the education bill currently in the House of Lords, pre-judges an inquiry by Ofqual into this year’s mistakes, which is due to report by the end of the year. Ofqual launched its investigation in July, after this summer’s GCSE and A-level results season featured at least 10 mistakes, affecting tens of thousands of pupils. One error was a printing mistake by the AQA board, leading to some schools receiving GCSE maths papers, taken by 32,000 pupils, which included questions from a previous version of the exam. In another case, an OCR maths AS level paper with 6,790 candidates featured an impossible question worth 11% of the marks available. Four boards serving schools in England and Northern Ireland apologised for errors. Ofqual already has power to take strong sanctions against them, ultimately it can ban an exam board from setting exams. However, two weeks ago, Nick Gibb, schools minister, wrote to the boards to tell them that Ofqual’s current powers “inhibit swift action and do not serve as an adequate deterrent to problems such as we saw this summer”. He said the government would change the law to give Ofqual the power to hand out fines. The government believes that Ofqual needs additional sanctions because the watchdog’s current power to ban a board from operating is to much of a “nuclear” option, with potential to cause major disruption for pupils and schools. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Ofqual’s review is not due to publish until December, and it seems strange to pre-empt the findings in this way. “A fine on awarding bodies will simply turn into a fine on schools and colleges, since they pay for all the costs of examinations through exam fees. Institutions are already spending large sums on exam fees, and any further burden would be a perverse consequence. It would be completely counter-productive.” Schools A-levels GCSEs Education policy Warwick Mansell guardian.co.uk

Posted by on October 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.