Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Oxford University Press
Executive Summary
OUP has serious concerns about the commercial activities of awarding bodies and their links with publishers. The boundaries between awarding bodies and publishers are increasingly blurred, giving rise to very real conflicts of interest. These clearly affect the perceived worth of the exams and, in OUP’s view, are also likely to undermine their actual worth, by encouraging narrow focussed teaching with no scope for differentiation of approach, undermining the scope of a pupil’s educational experience and genuine attainment. Public confidence in the administration of exams is also affected by concerns about these issues, and must be restored.
The commercial activities of awarding bodies reduce the choice of resources available to meet the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools. A “one size fits all” approach to education will inevitably lead to a fall in standards. Effective competition in the provision of resources for exams should be promoted to ensure quality, innovation, plurality, choice and value.
There are clear conflicts of interest that arise from the relationship between an awarding body and a publisher. As a result, freedom of choice for teachers and schools is reduced, and confidence in the system undermined. OUP agrees with the article annexed, which states that: “[awarding bodies] have moved some distance from the line of being impartial assessors to becoming businesses, dedicated to giving clients what they want.” OUP believes that the priority for the administration of exams should be excellence in education and the achievement of each and every pupil. This can only be achieved by a return to impartiality, and an appropriate separation between the supply of educational materials and the administration of exams which accurately reflect true educational attainment.
1. Introduction
1.1 Oxford University Press (“OUP”) is a department of the University of Oxford. OUP’s mission is to further the University’s objectives of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing materials worldwide in furtherance of those objectives. In particular, we fulfil the University’s objective of excellence in education by publishing content resources for schools in England and Wales.
1.2 OUP provides resources across a range of subjects and levels for pupils and teachers preparing for exams for 15 to 19 years olds in England. In view of its mission and the University’s objective, OUP is committed to providing resources that assist and encourage the development of skills, knowledge and understanding so as to further excellence in education.
1.3 OUP welcomes this inquiry’s focus on the commercial activities of awarding bodies and their impact on schools and pupils. These comments reflect OUP’s concerns that the boundaries between awarding bodies and publishers are increasingly blurred, in particular where there is common ownership and resources are branded with the awarding body brand. The actual and perceived conflicts of interests affect public confidence in the administration of exams. We are concerned that certain commercial activities will inevitably also reduce the choice of resources available to meet the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools, leading to an overall fall in educational standards. The very real nature of OUP’s concerns is borne out by the findings of the investigative journalist Andrew Gilligan in the article attached at ANNEX A [not printed].
1.4 A failure to address these concerns means that pupils will complete their secondary education without having reached their potential.
2. The Need for a Range of Awarding Bodies
2.1 OUP strongly believes that there should be a range of awarding bodies as explained below.
2.2 Only a choice of awarding bodies for a given exam can guarantee that the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools are met. A range of qualifications following varied curricula allows schools to choose the approach that best suits them and their pupils. For example, the requirements of a teacher in an inner city London school for GCSE Science may be very different to those of a country school in Yorkshire. Another example is GCSE Geography: a thematic exam like GCSE Geography for AQA A works well in traditional independent schools, whereas an issues-based specification like GCSE Geography for Edexcel B is arguably better able to meet the needs of some lower achieving schools. Facilities, life experience, access to external resources, the level and quality of parental support and general socio-economic factors will influence the resources and educational approach that are most likely to provide an effective education.
2.3 Competition and choice are also key to delivering value for money and driving down costs, as acknowledged by the Government.1 Competition among awarding bodies is therefore necessary to ensure that the qualifications market provides value for money.2
2.4 The most effective way of encouraging innovation by awarding bodies (and others active in the sector) is to encourage and ensure effective competition and choice. Competition and innovation lead to strong and effective markets which are essential to improving educational standards.
2.5 Having a single national body or awarding bodies franchised to offer qualifications in particular subjects cannot guarantee that the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools are met, that value for money is delivered, or that innovation in qualifications is encouraged. Only a range of awarding bodies with competition between them that will spur innovation and differentiation can guarantee these outcomes.
3. The Commercial Activities of Awarding Bodies
3.1 The last decade has seen increasingly close links between awarding bodies responsible for the administration of exams, and publishers who supply the resources for use by pupils and schools. These links have taken the form of vertical integration (i.e. common ownership with a publisher), exclusive arrangements with a publisher, or the explicit or implicit endorsement of a publisher by an awarding body.
3.2 The commercial activities of the three major awarding bodies and their links with publishers are explained below.
(a)
As a result, a single Pearson/Edexcel employee will be responsible in parallel for: (i) developing a particular Edexcel exam; and (ii) creating the accompanying Edexcel’s own materials. In addition, given that the Edexcel awarding body and publishing operation have been merged together, all sales and marketing functions fall under the responsibility of one senior management team. Thus a sales consultant in a school represents both the awarding body and the publisher.
This integration makes it very difficult for other publishers to compete. Edexcel’s own materials are inevitably published before those of competing publishers. Despite having various non-exclusive endorsements in place with other publishers, Pearson/Edexcel clearly promotes its own “official” resources in preference to those of other publishers. OUP hears in schools on a regular basis that a teacher has chosen to adopt the Edexcel textbooks as they are the official texts. In practice, teachers and schools are pressured into purchasing “official” Edexcel’s own materials (see paragraph 3.4 below).
(b)
(c)
OUP’s concerns: conflicts of interest and public confidence
3.3 OUP believes that it is vital for the public to have confidence that the administration of exams is untainted by any suspicion of conflict of interest. However, the commercial activities of awarding bodies are increasingly blurring the distinctions between awarding bodies and publishers, in particular when the exam and publisher resources are jointly branded, as for Edexcel’s own materials.
3.4 When an awarding body promotes an “official” text, the public understands that pupils and teachers will be advantaged if they use it to prepare for exams. Parents, teachers and employers already fear that, although objectively exams may be as difficult as in the past, the standard of education and skill required to achieve a satisfactory result is lower. More focussed exam preparation with close links between those who set and assess the exams and those who prepare, write and publish the supporting materials therefore encourages “teaching to the test”. This in turn results in a narrowing of educational reach and an inevitable lowering of broad educational standards. The perception is understandably that pupils are “spoon-fed”, in effect being given the answers.
3.5 Annex A highlights the commercial activities of Edexcel examiners who run courses teaching people “examination techniques”, “how best to present [their] solutions and answers” and “helpful hints”. Public confidence in the administration of exams is irreparably damaged by these conflicts of interest.
OUP’s concerns: freedom of choice and plurality of resources
3.6 OUP believes it is vital that the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools are matched by a plurality of approaches to educational resources. A range of resources to suit different backgrounds and needs is key to educational achievement: not all pupils respond equally well to the same materials; not all teachers are comfortable with the same resources.
3.7 Schools and teachers’ freedom of choice is compromised when an awarding body appears to be dictating which resources to buy to achieve the “best” results. Although in principle an awarding body may endorse a range of materials, in practice its commercial interests will mean that its preferred publisher’s resources are pushed as the “official” materials.
3.8 Furthermore, once non-preferred publishers have been excluded by awarding bodies, it is difficult for these publishers to gain a foothold with schools given that schools only make publishing decisions on 3-5 year cycles.
3.9 If diversity of approach and plurality of materials are reduced through a lack of competition and choice, this could have serious consequences for effective education and achievement by pupils.
OUP’s concerns: Edexcel example
3.10 OUP’s concerns are illustrated by its experiences with Edexcel in 2009. While this is a single example, it represents the potential risks when the links between publishers and awarding bodies are unregulated.
3.11 It concerns an individual who is both a Pearson author and an Edexcel chair of examiners for a particular subject. The individual in question: (i) is paid by Edexcel to develop exams; (ii) is paid by Pearson to create the accompanying Edexcel own materials and very probably receives a royalty from Pearson for the sales of his Edexcel’s own materials. The individual is also involved with training related to Edexcel examinations.
3.12 As part of its sales strategy, Edexcel runs free promotional events. In principle, these promote its exams, but they were also used to promote endorsed materials. Before June 2009, the guidelines made available to publishers by Edexcel made it clear that one sales representative per endorsed publisher could set up a display at its promotional events.
3.13 In June 2009, this all changed. Edexcel blocked OUP, an endorsed publisher, from attending a series of events where Edexcel presented the Edexcel own textbook by the above individual. There was no mention of other endorsed textbooks, giving attending teachers the sense that this textbook was the only official text. It was also explained to teachers that this individual’s textbook would be sent out with the specification.
3.14 Due to these developments, OUP decided that there was little commercial sense in its sales representatives attending future Edexcel promotional events as delegates.
3.15 The OUP experience shows not only how conflicts of interest can arise from the relationship between (i) an awarding body, and (ii) a publisher, but also how they can arise in relation to (iii) the authors of those materials. It is hardly surprising that public confidence is compromised: “[awarding bodies] have moved some distance along the line from being impartial assessors to becoming businesses, dedicated to giving clients what they want”. Edexcel’s 2010 marketing pitch for GCSE Maths to schools states: “We’ll give you answers and solutions when you need them…” (see Annex A).
The failure of existing regulation
3.16 Voluntary regulation of the commercial activities of awarding bodies and their links with publishers was attempted under a code issued by the Joint Council for Qualifications (“JCQ”) in May 2005, revised in January 2008 (see Annex B). The key provisions acknowledge the importance of impartiality and the avoidance of actual or apparent conflicts of interest which might undermine public confidence. There is also a provision to ensure plurality of resources (Sections 3.2 and 4.1 of Annex B).
3.17 This self-regulatory approach has failed: the key recommendations of the code are simply not being observed. Given the very close links that exist between awarding bodies and publishers (see above), OUP believes that the conflicts of interest within the industry cripples the prospect of effective self-regulation.
3.18 As well as its responsibility for maintaining standards in qualifications and assessments, Ofqual is also responsible for promoting public confidence in these exams. As demonstrated by the fact that the Education Committee is conducting this inquiry, it is clear that self-regulation and Ofqual have failed to address the concerns surrounding the commercial activities of awarding bodies and their links with publishers.
Recommendations for action
3.19 A strong commitment by the Education Committee to maintaining effective competition, an appropriate separation of the activities of awarding bodies and publishers and plurality of resources available would significantly strengthen public confidence in the administration of exams in England.
3.20 OUP seeks the enforcement and regulation of a level playing field within educational publishing to ensure that vertical integration or commercial links do not reduce standards and result in “teaching to the test”. Those who shape, set, and mark exams should be required to be distanced from those who create and sell the resources that teachers use in the classroom to prepare pupils for their exams. In particular, an effective mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure this happens when awarding bodies and publishers are jointly owned.
4. Conclusions
4.1 The Education Committee must consider the administration of exams for 15 to 19 year olds in England having regard to the effect on those exams of the actual and perceived conflicts of interest that exist in the sector. These clearly affect the perceived worth of the exams and, in OUP’s view, are also likely to undermine their actual worth, by encouraging narrow focussed teaching with no scope for differentiation of approach, undermining the scope of a child’s educational experience and genuine attainment. Public confidence in the administration of exams is also affected by concerns about these issues, and must be restored.
4.2 The commercial activities of awarding bodies also reduce the choice of resources available to meet the diverse needs of pupils, teachers and schools. A “one size fits all” approach to education inevitably leads to a fall in standards. Rather, effective competition for the provision of resources for exams should be promoted to achieve quality, innovation, plurality, choice and value.
4.3 OUP is committed to continuing to support, as long as commercially feasible, all of those with a role in the educational system in this country (teachers, pupils, schools, and awarding bodies) so as to achieve its mission of furthering the achievement of excellence in education.
Annex A + Annex B have been left out of this publication as they have been printed elsewhere. Please find the website links below.
Annex A, Gilligan, Andrew, “The Real A-Level Grade Inflation” Article in The Telegraph, August 2010 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7946047/The-real-A-level-grade-inflation.html
Annex B, JCQ, Joint Council for Qualifications, Agreed Code of Practice: Awarding Body Publisher Relationships
http://www.jcq.org.uk/attachments/published/436/CoP%20-%20AB%20Publisher%20relationships%202008.pdf
November 2011
1 See, for example, the recent publication dated March 2011 from the Department for Business, Skills and Innovation, A Competition Regime for Growth: A Consultation on Options for Reform. The foreword by Vince Cable notes that: “Competition is one of the great drivers of growth, keeping prices low for consumers and encouraging innovation, enterprise and investment”. Section 1 of the consultation also notes the importance of economic growth and competition. See http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/consumer-issues/docs/c/11-657-competition-regime-for-growth-consultation.pdf.
2 The brochure Introducing Ofqual 2010/11 acknowledges that one of Ofqual’s objectives is “taking steps to make sure that the qualifications market provides value for money and meets the needs of learners and employers”.
3 Since this acquisition, Pearson publishes under the following brands: Longman; Causeway; Kickbox; BBC Active; Edexcel’s own (formerly Heinemann); Ginn; Rigby; Payne-Galway and Raintree.