This year’s autumn exam series could create weeks of disruption for colleges, further education leaders have warned.
Formal decisions about the autumn exam series - including on who can sit the exams, which exams will be offered, when they will take place and how they will be funded - are yet to be confirmed.
On 22 May, exams regulator Ofqual opened a consultation on its plans for how the series would work. The consultation closes on 8 June - and leaders are hoping that the outcome will provide colleges with some much-needed clarity.
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Eddie Playfair, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said that there were big issues to be addressed - the most critical being about scale.
He said: “If the autumn series is quite small-scale and involves a relatively small number of students - those who really need it or are very keen to take a particular subject - it will be manageable.
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“The problem is if this is a large-scale series with students taking large numbers of exams, it will be very disruptive to whatever course they’ve progressed on to, because they will miss their classes, and their concentration will be split. It could be a very big, very difficult to manage and very disruptive process for colleges.”
In its consultation document, Ofqual proposes that the exams could happen in October and November and that exam boards produce exams for all of their GCSEs, AS- and A-level qualifications. This could mean that from September, students could be preparing to sit a large number of exams at the school or college they left, while also beginning their new course at their new institution.
Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, questioned how many students would be motivated to sit an exam in the autumn, especially if they had already progressed on to a higher course.
He said: “Are you really going to do better sitting an exam in the autumn after six months of no formal teaching? It may be that there are some sharp-elbowed, deep-pocketed parents who can arrange for the kind of preparation and support for their sons and daughters to do the exams in the autumn but there’s a risk there of inequality of opportunity because some parents won’t be able to go down that road.”
He warned that the preparation for these exams could result in school and college teachers’ capacity being seriously stretched.
“How do we best prepare students for these autumn exams? Students won’t know if they want to take the autumn exam until mid-August. Who’s going to teach them from then until October? Teachers will be teaching a normal full timetable in September and won’t have the capacity to go on teaching an extra year group.
“We’re very worried about the ground lost for the current Year 10s and Year 12s. How much are we prepared to accept teachers being distracted by thoughts about the current Year 11s and Year 13s taking some exams in the autumn? It’s likely to take teachers away from looking at the Year 10s and Year 12s.
“It’s not to say that young people shouldn’t be able to have a go for the exam, but how they prepare for it is a big challenge.”
Mr Playfair said that he hoped that guidance from schools and colleges will focus on trying to limit the number of exams taken, “so students take the essential one that they absolutely need to take and not those just for the sake of it.”
He said: “If half the college is out of college because they are all taking exams at school, that’s going to be very disruptive. The series is fraught with lots of difficulties and it’s in everyone’s interest to keep it small and manageable.”
Who will pay for the exams?
Mr Playfair said another issue colleges need urgent clarity on is who will pay for the exams.
He said: “An autumn series could be quite expensive to run. Would it be a free entry? Would it be included in the cost of the summer entry? Or would the government underwrite it?”
“The autumn series might not pay for itself. If the autumn series is paid for by the candidate entries in the summer, then we are very unlikely to see any savings from the summer. The awarding organisations have said that any savings from the summer will be redistributed to the centre. But if you have a very full and expensive autumn series that is likely to eat into all of those savings, and potentially there won’t be any savings.
“That seems unfair. The centres and candidates who don’t use the autumn series will be subsiding those that do.”
According to an Association of Colleges’ report on college finances in 2018, 3.5 per cent of a college’s income is spent on exam entries, which, when you consider £30 million to be the average income for an FE college, amounts to just over £1 million per college.
Mr Playfair added: “As a share of college spending, exam fees are higher than they’ve ever been. Colleges would have been expecting some sort of rebate next year based on the system this year because teachers are doing much of the work. That would be very disappointing if that rebate was spent facilitating this autumn series.”
In an interview with Tes, apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan said that exam boards were looking “at the rebate situation”.
She said: “Of course they’ve had some change in how they have had to deliver, they’ve had additional work, they have had some work to do, so they are still consulting on that as well. We are looking and working with the exam boards and Ofqual - and indeed it depends what the numbers are - on that.”
Social distancing in GCSE resits
The Department of Education has confirmed where the exams should take place. According to the document, Centre responsibility for autumn GCSE, AS- and A-level exam series: guidance, students who wish to sit an autumn exam should do so at the centre that entered them in the summer. The DfE also confirmed that the condition of funding for GCSE maths and English remains in place, and if a student has not achieved a grade 4 or above in maths and/or English, the college or institution they are due to attend from September 2020 is responsible for entering them into the November resit series that already occurs each year.
Colleges are accustomed to offering GCSE resits to thousands of students - in summer 2019, 3,700 students sat either GCSE English or maths at Leeds City College, for example. But due to social distancing, this year’s exams could look very different.
Gemma Simmons-Blench, deputy chief executive of curriculum and quality at Leeds City College, said that it was looking to quarter the number of students sitting an exam in an average room.
She said: “We are looking at room utilisation and what we would have had planned for a normal exam series and we will roughly be dividing those numbers by four to give us that indication as to how many learners we can fit in the room.
“Space is a huge issue. We will struggle to get any external space because it’s going to be very difficult to access external space as it will be in high demand from other organisations looking for spaces to use as overflow. to reduce capacity in offices.”
She added that another issue was how safe students and staff felt about being back in the college building, and the reality of what that might mean.
She said: “Students aren’t prepared to sit exams with face masks on, with plexi screens between them, and staff are not experienced in delivering in those methods either.”
Lindsey Johnson, principal at Craven College, said that the series would mean five days of college closure due to the lack of space the college has to host the exams and the likelihood of social distancing measures still being in place.
They added that just taking the exam was stressful for most people, and while the college was considering renting a large venue like the local Rugby club, they were concerned about the anxiety that might cause students.
Mx Johnson suggested that one way to minimise the disruption would be to relax the condition of funding for GCSE English and maths.
They said: “If somebody wants to sit the exam, personally, I think that it would be our obligation to give them some input and prepare them for that. But I do think there needs to be a relaxation of the condition for funding. The decision as to what the student takes in terms of maths in English should be down to the professional judgment of the teacher.”
