It’s the mid-point of the academic year; you’re over the worst hump of the hardest half-term. It’s time to relax - just one email to go. And it’s from the exam board with the largest market share exhorting you to become an examiner. Its YouTube videos are full of altruistic reasons for signing up. This is by no means the first you’ve heard of it. From September onwards, teachers are bombarded by emails, letters and even pleas to examine at the end of training seminars.
It’s a hard slog year on year for exam boards to recruit the huge numbers needed to keep the high-stakes accountability framework ticking. Marketers have to find ingenious conscience-grabbing ways to recruit from a shrinking pool of active teachers. But is a marketing spin the answer?
Shortage of examiners
Actually, boards need to look at examiner satisfaction levels each year and take advice from feedback. After all, the more examiners retained, the fewer to recruit. Unfortunately, most boards don’t survey examiners. So, to fill the void, here are the top 10 ways in which boards can reduce marketing costs, retain examining teams and improve the overall quality of marking:
- It’s all about the money
Examining is arduous work and a highly skilled job with very high stakes attached. So for effort expended, level of skill required and long-term significance of the end product, surely examiners should be highly paid. Interestingly, no board ever quotes its pay per script in any form of publicity. The nearest it gets is to hint at purchasing power - the cost of the annual holiday for the family. When I first started examining, I was able to afford a three-piece suite - not any more, thanks to inflation.
- Pay structures need to be fair
Time taken to attend either an online session or face-to-face meeting should be paid for separately. Time is money. It should not be subsumed into the overall script rate. It is understandable that boards don’t want to pay examiners for just turning up, grabbing the training and the money and then deciding not to do the examining. But the vast majority have given up their time in good faith and deserve to have their effort and integrity rewarded.
- The script rate should reflect the complexity of the task and should be paid as a whole
The “bonus system” - whereby a lower script rate than that of a board’s competitors is set as the standard rate and then topped up with a so-called “bonus”, which is paid if markers meet the deadlines - is one to be avoided. The overall rate if all scripts are marked on time is only equivalent to a sum within that offered by competitors as standard. Life does happen to examiners, and there are all kinds of reasons that lead them to drop out of the process before finishing their allocation. Under-paying them will ensure they are not keen to work for that board again.
- Pay examiners’ expenses immediately
Examiners are not wealthy people. Any expenses such as travel and accommodation can make a huge hole in their monthly income. I have appreciated the way that one board reserves and pays for hotel accommodation up front. It greatly eases the stress on time and finances; and it means I can concentrate completely on the job in hand.
- Pay examiners in July - not August
Yes, the world may run on the BACS system and there is a need to ensure that claims are in by the middle of the month - but the money that examiners earn is less useful to them in September. I remember several years before the current system in mid-August when the family queued up at the cash point in Tenby waiting to see whether the examining fees had arrived in our bank account to pay the hotel bill and the next few meals.
- The quality of CPD
The current recruitment strategy favours playing up the value of the training on offer, partly to compensate for the poor rate of remuneration. Some training can be absolutely excellent. The best caters for all levels of expertise in examiners. Boards must ensure that the quality of standardisation material is high and scripts well-chosen to cover as many learning points as possible. Having to cope with these at the earliest stages gives examiners confidence and provides a solid foundation for the later stages of the marking process.
- Well-run meetings
Although Ofqual’s latest findings show that examiners trained online were happy with the arrangements, I would still prefer to have face-to-face meetings because they offer the flexibility to ask questions and clear up misunderstanding early on, enabling supervisors to engage with the people who are doing the marking. Examiners feel they can ask questions or raise doubts when they need to. The online experience is a narrow tunnel and even the set-up of online conferences does not cater for the rapid fire of questions, the ones examiners may wish they had had the opportunity to ask further down the line.
- The team leader
Examiners are human, they get tired and sometimes disheartened. These are inevitable aspects of the human condition. In the summer term at the end of a gruelling period of revision sessions, production of last-minute study materials and answering of anxious questions from students, teacher-examiners are tired. So a helpful team leader who can signpost them to resources and assistance for IT aspects of their jobs will be much appreciated. The best supervisors understand how their examiners think and work. The quality and qualities of team leaders are much more significant factors in retention than boards may realise.
- Quality of communication with the board’s team in charge of examiners
It does matter how examiners are treated. In this technological age where invitations to meetings are sent out by email as “calendar invites”, politeness strategies have died out. There are still some genuine human beings in exam-board subject teams - excellent communicators who add the occasional slice of humour or empathy as required. They may not realise just how important they are in retaining examiners.
- Timely responses to queries
Examiners are under intense time pressures. The best boards provide rapid responses and go the extra mile to respond to difficulties. Team leaders who rescue their examiners in difficulty immediately ensure that deadlines are met. Most importantly, response teams at exam board HQ who respond to communication immediately by email or phone are gold-dust. The automated response promising a reply within three days is worse than useless - especially when the three days stretches into infinity.
Meanwhile what examiners really need is a kind of Trip Advisor website on which exam boards’ services to examiners are rated and pay arrangements compared. This might well drive up competition between recruiters and benefit examiners to ensure that they are properly supported and rewarded.
Yvonne Williams is a head of English and drama in the south of England
