Examination of Witnesses (Questions 91-99)
MONDAY 28 OCTOBER 2002
KATHLEEN TATTERSALL,
JOHN KERR
AND RON
MCLONE
Chairman
91. Can I welcome you, and start with Kathleen
Tattersall, who is Director-General of AQA, John Kerr, who is
Chief Executive of Edexcel (in the centre position); and Ron McLone,
who is Chief Executive of OCR. We thought we would have you all
in together to get a little more spontaneity than just having
separate sessions. Just to explain to you that these proceedings
are held under Parliamentary Privilege, and so you can say anything
you like and have all sorts of protection, but you must not repeat
it; if you say anything that you want to be careful about, do
not repeat it outside, even though you have said it here. So I
want to make it clear before we start that we are not conducting
a repeat of the Tomlinson inquiry. Of course, as the elected representatives
of Parliament, with the role of inquiring into anything and keeping
to account the Department for Education and Skills, and regularly
meeting with both yourselves and the QCA, of course, we want to
find out not only what is going on in the world of examining boards
and the QCA and the relationship between them, but we will be
looking to the future, about the way in which we better govern
our examination procedures and the way in which perhaps we better
organise the accountability of the system. So of course we will
be asking you some things that reflect on the past, but we will
also be trying to learn lessons. So can I start really by asking
you not just for an opening statement, Kathleen Tattersall, but
to say, you are something in the public eye at the moment, are
you not, as examining boards, and some of us would say better
to be out there doing your job in a kind of low-profile way, because
what the public want and what parents want and what students want,
teachers and everyone else involved in the education system want,
is a quiet system that delivers reliability without any fuss,
and they do not want to hear a debate on quality of standards
on Radio 4 every morning, which they have had fairly recently.
Why do you think we are where we are at the moment, what do you
think has caused these problems?
(Ms Tattersall) In the first year of
a new examination, inevitably, there is more of a focus on the
examination than might be the case in the examination that has
been running for some time; we also know that whenever we publish
results then there is an interest in those results and quite a
public debate about them. In this, the first year of A level,
when the results were published on 15 August we were all very
pleased that the day passed as well as it did, because the focus
has to be on the students who have attained the grades in question,
and, indeed, my recollection of that day is that there was a welcome
for the new examination. I recall The Guardian leader of
the day, for example, that there was a welcome for the examination
and that things had gone so well. What happened since was that
there was clearly some concern, dissatisfaction, on the part of
some schools, with the grades which their students attained and
a questioning of those grades, and that has led to the re-opening
of various issues, some of which were very much firmly in the
past, but nevertheless a concentration on those issues, which
has led to where we are today.
92. Did this process lead you to feel anxious
about your role as an examining board?
(Ms Tattersall) No. Looking at AQA as a board, I believe
that the job that we have done in this first year of A level is
exactly the same job that we have done in all the previous years
of the old A level. And, thinking about it from my own personal
perspective, where I have been a chief executive for 20 years,
and indeed seen the coming of GCSE, for example, in 1988, the
first year of that, and knowing some of the problems that people
foresaw at that time, I believe that AQA has done an extremely
good job. If you look at what AQA was asked to do, as a result
of the Tomlinson inquiry, it was to examine only two of the 1,008
boundaries which we set at A level, and the inquiry, which was
very open, very public, very transparent, has reaffirmed the boundaries
which I set as a result of looking at the Chair of Examiners'
recommendations. So AQA can be very proud of its record of bringing
in the new A level, and, of course, as a board, we are responsible
for something like 45% of the grades awarded in A level this year.
93. So you are feeling quite comfortable; but
it is quite a small world, the examinations, because we are down
to three examining boards in England, are we not, and you people
meet together a great deal, both informally and formally, and
you all have a relationship with the QCA. And how is it that you
seem to be very comfortable about the process, but something went
wildly wrong, it seems; what went wrong between the three of you?
You are all on very close, first name terms, you seem to be great
friends, when I look at you chatting together; it is a very small
world, very well communicated. What went wrong, in your view?
(Ms Tattersall) It is a small world, in that there
are three chief executives, as you say, and, of course, we have
also got to remember that the system operates in Wales and Northern
Ireland, so there are also two other chief executives who are
involved. All of us work within the Code of Practice, which is
laid down nationally, it is laid down by QCA, drawn up by QCA
in consultation with ourselves, and all of us work against the
criteria which are determined for A level. We were all working
together to try to establish the same standards across the awarding
bodies, as we are charged to do, because three awarding bodies
have to ensure that their grades and their awards are in accord
with each other. We met over the period of the four years, or
so, leading up to the new A levels, on several occasions, there
is the Joint Council for General Qualifications, that is the forum
in which we meet together, and also with QCA, to try to establish
all those difficult technical issues which have to be resolved
when the new qualification comes into being. And this, remember,
was a qualification which was quite different from the qualification
that went before it; here we have a qualification made up of two
parts, the AS examination and the A2 examination, AS being a qualification
in its own right, and A2 being the second half that makes up the
A level. I believe we worked as best we could to try to establish
those standards, and it is only really in retrospect that some
of these problems now begin to emerge, which at the time were
not seen as real issues.
94. The people we represent, you would understand
them saying to us that everyone knew a new examination system
has a lot of problems, its teething problems are obvious, and,
you have just said, you have been planning for a long time this
transition. Indeed, the Committee has just come back from New
Zealand, where we looked at exactly a parallel situation of introducing
a new set of examinations in that country, and, yet again, a great
deal of work had to go into that transition, and a lot of bad
feeling about those guinea-pigs who went through the first years
of the transition. If I can turn to Ron McLone then for a moment.
Dr McLone, can I ask you, you were at all the meetings, the three
of you and the meetings with the QCA, but your board seemed to
have more problems and seemed to go off at more doing your own
thing than the other two; now can you explain why that was?
(Dr McLone) We do things slightly differently, that
is absolutely true. We have all worked, as Kathleen said, to the
same Code of Practice, we have worked to the same procedures,
and in the end we all come to the same outcome, in terms of the
comparability of the results. We do it slightly differently. Where
we have started, we start from looking at what the examiners do
first and apply statistical evidence afterwards; not all the boards
work in exactly the same way, and therefore it becomes more evident
in the way, I suspect, we have done it than perhaps in the others.
But I think the important thing is that we do work together in
looking at the technical issues, that is absolutely true; but
it is the way they have been set up in the context of the whole
of the implementation of AS and A2 which I think has led us to
where we are now.
95. But, if we look at it forensically, here
you are, you have all seen this coming for a very long time, you
have all worked together and you all have a relationship with
the QCA, indeed you have meetings with the QCA together; how come
it seems your interpretation, of your board, seems to have been
different? I would not say that Kathleen Tattersall was being
smug, she was saying, "I think we did it right; a very experienced
board, I am Chief Executive, I have been here 20 years and, more
or less, we haven't had any problems." And she has not said
anything nasty about the other two boards, certainly, Dr McLone,
about you; but you could not say the same thing as Kathleen Tattersall,
could you, you have had real problems?
(Dr McLone) I would say that we have not had real
problems, but we have worked exactly to defining an A level standard,
in the same way that OCR and its predecessors always have. We
have always worked to getting to the examiner judgements first
and then looking at statistical evidence, to make sure that we
can compare year on year that we are getting to the right overall
standard. I think I do go back to the question of AS and A2; we
did not know exactly, all of us, where exactly A2 was. There is
a real tension between trying to set boundaries at A2 and yet
carrying forward a standard which is not A2, since we do not have
any archive evidence at A2, there is nothing of that kind, but
we do have to carry forward the A level standard, which is a combination
of the AS and the A2. So therefore it has been a tension, in trying
to establish all of that. The setting of the standard is actually
QCA's job, of course.
96. That is exactly where we are trying to get
to. If the QCA was setting the standard, and the QCA is talking
to all three of you, how come that all three of you do not seem
to operate in exactly the same way? It seems, to someone from
the outside trying to look in, that two of you seem to read the
mind of the QCA in one way, whereas, Dr McLone, you and your board
read the QCA's mind in a different way?
(Dr McLone) I think it is possible, in applying the
Code of Practice, to be looking for what is the overall standard
and trying to define what A2 really means, in a way in which all
of us were trying to get to the same place, as Tomlinson said,
all of us did our best to get to the same place; if you have not
got a definition, and there was no definition written down, as
to what you are really trying to get with A2, then I submit that
we will be looking to do our best to get there.
97. Mr Kerr, do you concur with that view?
(Mr Kerr) I have certainly listened very carefully
to what my two colleagues have said, and, in fact, I am in full
agreement. In terms of setting the standards, I have one year's
experience, and clearly I would not claim that Edexcel has not
had its problems in the past; but, for this particular year, I
am very confident we set the grades professionally, we set them
accurately and we set them in accordance with the Code of Practice.
98. So how do you explain the degree of unhappiness
about recent events?
(Mr Kerr) I think, to answer your first question,
what has gone wrong here, clearly, 90,000 students had to wait
nearly two months to get their grades confirmed, and clearly that
is unacceptable. In terms of my own board, we did not change any
of the grade boundaries, we co-operated fully with the Tomlinson
inquiry, we thought it was very important that we did co-operate
and that there was seen to be a public scrutiny of how the grade
boundaries were set. At the end of that, I saw no reason to change
any of my grade boundaries.
99. What I am trying to get out of the three
of you is, if we know what the events of the last two months have
been and you all say, "Well, we operated in terms of our
Code of Conduct and full professional standards," what guarantee
have the public that this will not all happen again next year?
None of you seems to be saying, "It was me, Guv, and we made
a mistake and we'll put it right." If none of you admits
to any mistakes, how can you improve on what happened this year?
(Dr McLone) The system was flawed, if I may, and I
think we are all trying to operate in a flawed system, that really
we need to deal with; and I have to say that, personally, I have
great confidence in Ken Boston, in putting forward these new committees,
that he is putting forward, to try to right what was not done
in the past. Tomlinson and Ken have been very clear about that,
and I think that we do need to get to the root of those flaws
in the implementation of the system that, in my view, and I think
in Mike Tomlinson's view, from what he said, exist.
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