Examination of Witness (Questions 480-499)
WEDNESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2002
MR MIKE
TOMLINSON
480. Will there be 50/50? (Mr Tomlinson)
I think that is a decision to be made when that is looked at.
I am not making the decision.
481. We heard from Sir William Stubbs he thought
piloting of the A2 would have been very difficult, do you agree
with that? (Mr Tomlinson) I do not know why it would
have been difficult. It would have been difficult in the time
scale given, it would not in essence have been difficult.
482. Given that there was no historical data
to compare— (Mr Tomlinson) There was not for
AS, that was piloted.
483. That was, but the A2s were not. (Mr
Tomlinson) I said in my interim report I thought that was
one of the mistakes made. A2 should have been piloted.
Paul Holmes
484. Very briefly to go back to the regrading
exercise, who was it that took the decision that you and the regrading
panels would only look at the minority of cases that were changed
with six marks and above rather than the majority of the changes
with a range of three, four or five marks? Was that your decision
or the recommendation of the Examining Board? (Mr Tomlinson)
That was me. The three boards gave me the data for their movements
of grades, mark boundaries this year, and they gave me data from
2001 and because most of the other stuff, remember the time scale,
was archived and not easy accessible, they did refer to it orally
but I did not see it on paper. It is not the case with all three
boards I worked on the plus or minus five mark because the three
boards were working differently and had different boundaries,
one board has plus or minus two, one board had plus or minus three
and the third board was plus or minus five. Most of it was bound
up in the way the system operated. The decision to look at it
was mine alone, based on that evidence and, as I already said,
the evidence from documentation, which indicated whether or not
the chair of examiners had been consulted about the changes and
had agreed them. That was the basis.
485. When the regrading panels had finished,
they looked at 75 different units covering 21 different subjects,
in the end the person who decided whether to accept and implement
the change was the accounting officer, the chief executive, which
was the very people you were investigating in the first place? (Mr
Tomlinson) They were the people. That is what the code of
practice requires. In my letter of 2 October to the then Secretary
of State I made it clear that that would be the case. It was a
public statement, it was not challenged by anyone as being not
the right way to go about it. That decision by the accounting
officer was not made out of that meeting, the accounting officer
made the decision in front of everyone else who was present, including
the Chair of Examiners for another board, including a QCA observer,
including an independent teaching association representative.
If he or she wished to maintain the grade mark they had to put
their arguments forward and at the same time it was looked at
to see whether or not the Chair of Examiners present was satisfied
with the argument as well. Where that was not the case further
work was done, and it was.
486. When Ron McLone sat here in front of the
Committee and said really the inquiry had vindicated him because
there was not that many changes to grades, he was the person who
decided there would only be a limited number of changes to grades. (Mr
Tomlinson) He had to sign off the ultimate decision. What
I am saying was very different from what was done during the main
part of the summer, that a decision was made by him, and him alone.
In some cases there was no reference to other people, certainly
no people present. What I am saying on the regrading is his decision
was made in front of, and argued in front of, all of those other
people and there needed to be agreement and ultimately there was
in all cases. In one or two it required further work to be done,
beyond that the regrading meeting was in order to satisfy everyone
that the evidence substantiated the decisions made.
487. In your response to a question from Kerry
Pollard you were saying, yes, we do need to draw a line and restore
confidence in the system. In paragraphs 73 and 74 of yesterday's
report one of the issues you talk about is about course work,
you say that was not the thrust of what you were looking at, it
was the issue of regrading, you talk about course work. There
are a number of schools that we have heard about, Knights Templar
School was visited by this Committee, where, for example, 14 out
of 20 of their students got U grades on their course work and
that brought it down, where they were getting As and Bs, they
got Us for course work. You have said in paragraph 75 that you
are concerned about the quality of communication and the feedback
from schools and colleges about the course work and what went
wrong. The head of Knights Nice Temple School was saying his teachers
are still no wiser as to what was supposed to have gone wrong.
He said they have had the course work back now with not one comment
or mark on it. I have marked course work for 26 years and the
rules are very strict, you have to annotate the work, you have
to say why you are giving the marks. Here you have an example
at the centre of a major control circuit about why they give 14
out of 20 kids U grades on one subject. They are not answering
letters. They have not answered three letters. They have sent
back course work with no evidence of being remarked, no comments
on why it was wrong and yet these kids are re-sitting in January
or the same teachers are teaching kids who are going to do the
exams next summer and they have no idea.
Chairman
488. That cannot be right. (Mr Tomlinson)
That is not right. They deserve, and we need, a better quality
of communication and feedback to schools and colleges. That school
is not the only school that is complaining about these issues.
I have had a number of letters. As you rightly point out, it is
not within my remit to deal with this. I have, in fact, by raising
it here and with side communication, it is not just an OCR issue,
it goes more widely than that, it may be the volume this year,
I am not sure, it is certainly the case that schools do deserve
full and clear communication of these matters such that they can
deal with any issues that may be about their understanding of
the standard, but equally importantly it may be issues that the
board have to deal with. The QCA and the board are, I believe
and I know, looking at this issue of guidance and criteria for
course work. What I found was I could not locate it to say it
was a system-wide issue. If they had all been brought down, if
there had been a total pulling down of grades associated with
course work one would have seen very high levels of failure across
the course work module. That was not the case. It was individual
schools, clusters of schools, individual pupils which forced us
into that conclusion that I have come to. Your fundamental point
that schools deserve and need scripts be annotated such that they
could be understood. My suspicion is that the fact that papers
are now returned makes examiners less willing to annotate their
papers.
Paul Holmes
489. Yet they require the teachers to annotate
and explain why they are rewarding the grades. (Mr Tomlinson)
This is about confidence in each other and systems.
Valerie Davey
490. The whole report is, I think, based on
a change of ethos that you are looking for. You are looking for
robustness in the QCA, you are looking for greater openness and
dialogue between the examining board, you are looking for a different
status for the Joint Council and throughout the report it is based
on greater trust, greater understanding, greater communication.
How is all that going to be enforced? Who is going to be essentially
responsible for taking forward your recommendations now? (Mr
Tomlinson) The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has
the main responsibility for that. I have every confidence in the
new leadership of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority,
Sir Anthony Greener and Ken Boston, and that derives from the
way they tackled the issue round my interim report. They have
tackled them with vigour and rigour, as well. It is obviously,
as you quite rightly point out, a change of attitude, a change
of ethos, a change of behaviour is really what this is all about.
It must be QCA, equally the Secretary of State is also involved
in this and has to be, quite rightly. He has already indicated
he has made money available to help on one front, he has equally
indicated he would be interested in costing for the increased
use of ICT, which I think is very important. Going back to marking,
with ICT you would be able to easily allocate scripts not just
on the basis of a schools' package but on providing the examiner
with a full range of the performance spectrum so that they were
able to see As and able to see Us. At the moment you get the whole
schools. Equally it would also mean that marks go up on the ICT
and you can then identify if you have any rouge markers and deal
with it. There is a whole set of things which would improve the
consistency and reliability of the marking and examining process.
I was pleased when he announced he was willing to look at that
as well.
491. The time scale for that, how do you see
this working and how long will it take to achieve the kind of
examining bodies, admittedly it being an art still and not a science,
which I take, as a former teacher, very much to heart. How long
is that going to take to achieve? (Mr Tomlinson) Some
of it will be achieved I anticipate over the next months, because
in January what will go into schools and colleges will be very,
very, very clear statements of the standards associated with AA
and AS supported by a whole range of exemplifications, including
student work from examination papers. That will be there in January.
Further material will come in later in the year. There is a training
programme for examiners, markers, and so on, in place to take
effect for next year's examinations. It will start there. I very
much hope that the code of practice changes will have an impact
through that. I cannot say how long it will take to fully gain
the confidence of every party involved, it is impossible to answer
that. It is important that it is done as quickly as possible.
I have stressed this. I know that QCA has a thorough plan in place
for communication. I think that it is vital over the coming weeks
that we find a way of communicating with all students currently
in the sixth form in a very simple, post-card way that says what
has changed, what is to change and how it will make sure that
what happened this year does not happen again. They need to understand
that, and their parents. Then we need to get through to the Institute
of Directors, chambers of commerce and the CBI about how they
could work to get communication to employers. Equally, their confidence
in what they are seeing on a certificate has been grappled with.
There is a huge communication issue that has to start now.
Ms Munn
492. I wanted to clarify one issue, we were
told by the head teachers who came to us that there were fewer
re-markings and re-gradings this year than in a normal year, what
was the process previously if a school was unhappy about the mark
that a young person had received? (Mr Tomlinson) The
school can make an enquiry but it has to have the approval of
the student before that happens, it did not use to require that
but it does now. You have to get the approval of the student and
that can sometimes cause difficulty because there are time limits
and they could be away on holiday. You get approval from the student
concerned and you then submit a request for remarking. At that
point it is understood that that request could result in the mark
going up or down and have the consequent impact on grades, it
is not an assurance that it will always go up. The difference
for me in my regrading process was the only movement could be
upwards.
Mr Chaytor
493. Mr Tomlinson, you have talked this morning
in your evidence about schools and sixth forms, a huge proportion
of A-Level candidates come from A-Level colleges— (Mr
Tomlinson) I mentioned colleges a number of times.
494. Obviously I was not listening carefully
enough. In the regrading exercise was there a distinction between
candidates in schools and in sixth form colleges? The impression
is certain schools have made more noise about this whereas sixth
form colleges seem generally content? (Mr Tomlinson)
There has been evidence presented to me that colleges—I
am broadening it beyond sixth form, to FE generally—that
they spent an enormous amount of time and effort getting ready
for Curriculum 2000 and ensuring adequate training of staff and
all of the rest of it. They felt, according to them, particularly
well prepared for that. I think that from the schools' side, I
am going to resist being critical, some of the issues are about
time for teacher release, and all of the rest, given the pressures
in schools. There is some evidence that some schools did not participate
in the training for Curriculum 2000.
495. That does not feature in your Report. (Mr
Tomlinson) I do mention the fact that not all attended. I
do understand their reasons, this is about the fact that at the
times they offered training it is very often hard to get teacher
release and the necessary cover.
496. Do you think in retrospect that needs a
higher degree of emphasis than you have given to it or has been
given by media coverage of these events? (Mr Tomlinson)
It might. You may well be right on that. That has to be part of
this whole issue that I dedicate one chapter to, that is professionalisation
of training. That is an issue I think cannot be tackled on its
own, it may have to be linked with discussions about teachers'
contracts, and all of the rest of it, that are going on at the
moment. You may know that the FE does say it is slightly easier
on occasion for them, given their size and capacity. It was not
a great difference, it was a slight difference.
497. You said the examining boards gave you
statistical information from 2001. In 2001 there were O-Level
exams and AS exams, so which was it? (Mr Tomlinson)
It was both. In some cases there were already module syllabuses,
the administration was slightly different because of the fact
we had AS and A2.
498. The question of the modular syllabus, how
do you respond to that? The unique thing about this year was that
the grade boundaries were sifted for individual modules, it was
not just for the aggregate scores? (Mr Tomlinson) Because
the aggregate scoring derived from the marks of individual grade
boundaries those had to be fixed.
499. Is there not inevitably a cumulative effect? (Mr
Tomlinson) There is. It is in some sense a perverse effect.
What you get is a regression. What you find is if you use only
the marked grade boundaries for the units and you did not look
at the broader statistics, this is something which people need
to understand, then you would have ended up with much lower numbers
of A grades because the regression causes that. That was one of
the reasons why you have to look not just at the mark, the unit
grade boundaries, but the aggregate as well. The code of practice
requires that to happen.
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