Consultation: teacher involvement in the development of confidential assessment materials
Read the full outcome
Detail of outcome
In line with our consultation proposals, we decided we will:
- Revise General Condition of Recognition A4 “Conflicts of interest” in order to make it an explicit requirement that awarding organisations must establish and maintain an up to date register of all conflicts of interest which relate to them.
- Allow awarding organisations to decide whether or not to publish information about the people who are involved in developing and delivering their confidential assessment materials.
- Make it explicit in General Condition of Recognition G4.1 “Maintaining confidentiality of assessment materials” that awarding organisations need to manage the risks of teachers disclosing information about confidential assessment materials
- Create a new section of statutory guidance which identifies a number of Conditions that place obligations on awarding organisations which are relevant to the risks around the involvement of Teachers in the development of assessments. It will outline some of the factors that will be relevant in an awarding organisations’ analysis of the strength of the safeguards it needs, and include examples to illustrate the different safeguards that an awarding organisation may choose to put in place for qualifications with different risk profiles. Awarding organisations must have regard to this guidance when determining their approaches in this area
Feedback received
Detail of feedback received
We received 35 responses to our consultation. 24 responses were from organisations, and the remaining 11 were from individuals. In four cases respondents did not indicate their identity – we have assumed these represented individual’s responses. A list of the organisations that responded to the consultation is included in Appendix A: List of organisational consultation respondents.
Three respondents expressed their views without specifically answering the questions asked. These responses were considered but were not included in the total numbers of responses to each question.
Original consultation
Consultation description
This consultation relates to our review of the risks and benefits of the long-established practice whereby some teachers who write or contribute to exam papers also teach the qualification.
We started our review following well-publicised incidents during summer 2017 when two teachers who were involved in writing examinations for Pre-U qualifications (an alternative to A levels) were found by the awarding organisations to have inappropriately disclosed or used information about the contents of forthcoming exams. While the 2017 issues occurred in general qualifications, teachers develop assessments in some other regulated qualifications too. We have, therefore, considered the risks associated with this practice in all types of regulated qualification.
We believe there are clear benefits of allowing teachers to be involved in the assessment process, and we require awarding organisations to take all reasonable steps to mitigate the risks of teachers inappropriately using information about forthcoming assessments. Our current rules are already demanding, but we believe there is room to strengthen them further. We are consulting now on our proposed amendments to the current rules and on the form of the extra statutory guidance we propose to put in place. Our consultation questions can be answered either online or in hard copy. We look forward to hearing from you.
Documents
Updates to this page
Published 14 March 2018Last updated 11 May 2018 + show all updates
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Published the final decisions document and analysis of responses.
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First published.