How many teachers at top schools are cheating their way to better exam results?
This week Eton dismissed a deputy head for leaking exam information. Other public schools are embroiled too. Our investigation asks ...
Over the summer, embossed envelopes have been dropping through the letterboxes of Britain’s smartest homes. Sent by the headmaster of eton College, Simon Henderson, they contained disturbing news for dozens of the young men who recently completed their studies at his £38,700-a-year school.
Through little or no fault of their own, these gilded youths have been caught up in an extraordinarily grubby scandal, the letters reveal. It revolves around what, with each passing day, looks increasingly like an epidemic of exam cheating orchestrated by rogue teachers at Britain’s top schools.
‘I am very sorry to be writing with this extremely unwelcome news,’ reads one such letter, which discloses that there has been ‘a breach of exam security’ because of ‘the actions of a member of eton’s staff’.
Consequently, the results of crucial final-year exams sat by eton students in economics and Art History have been declared null and void. And one of the school’s most senior teachers, Mo Tanweer, has been removed from his job.
elsewhere, in the cloisters of Winchester College (annual fees, £38,100), a similar scandal this week led to the departure of a senior teacher, along with the cancellation of exam results achieved by at least 13 pupils. Awkward questions are now being asked in government about this controversy, while two further boarding schools, Charterhouse and radley, have also become embroiled in the affair.
Detecting potential corruption in this highly competitive world, where schools fight for the best pupils from the richest families by boasting about their exam results, regulators have now launched a wide-ranging formal inquiry into the cheating allegations.
Investigations will centre on Cambridge International, the exam board used by many private schools, because it offers Pre- U qualifications — an alternative to A-levels thought to provide pupils with a better chance of getting into Oxbridge and other top universities.
Cambridge International appears to have been hiring teachers who work at schools that use its exams to set the very papers their pupils will take. Inevitably, this has created a conflict of interest in which pupils from top fee-paying schools are being prepared for the most important exams of their school career by people who are likely to know what parts of the syllabus might come up.
There is the worry that, at eton and Winchester, teachers may have succumbed to the temptation to pass on ‘insider information’ to pupils or staff colleagues.
This controversy certainly exposes how teaching staff at top public schools face intense pressure to get the best results for their pupils, at a time when fees are rising and they have to compete to attract the children of the super- rich from Britain and abroad.
It also raises questions about the possible negligence of major exam boards, which have turned the business of administering qualifications into a multi- billion- pound industry — where, it is feared, shortcuts might be taken to protect profit margins.
recent events at eton provide a stark insight into exactly how sharpelbowed this moneyed world is.
They revolve around Tanweer, the school’s Head of economics, who entered the teaching profession just over a decade ago, following a career as an investment banker.
His arrival at the school — alma mater of 19 British prime ministers and Princes William and Harry — in 2015 coincided with Simon Henderson, nicknamed ‘trendy Hendy’ by pupils on account of his habit of wearing chino trousers and opennecked shirts, taking over as head.
Henderson, who once suggested he might dispense with eton’s traditional tailcoats, is known to be fond of modern management techniques. Last year, he announced innovative plans to split eton’s deputy headmaster role into two, creating one deputy head for ‘academic’ affairs and another for ‘pastoral’ matters.
BOTH
jobs were advertised externally. But the ‘academic’ role was given to Tanweer. A colleague says he gave ‘a knockout interview’ and his pitch was helped by the fact that pupils in his department had done incredibly well in their Pre-U exams.
Tanweer was due to move into the new role this autumn. Yet, during the summer term, his fortunes changed.
Like many teachers, he’d signed up to mark papers for Cambridge International and became ‘principal examiner’, setting questions for a Pre-U economics exam .
Crucially, earlier this summer, with eton’s sixth-formers due to take the very exam he’d devised, Tanweer decided to email three colleagues in the school’s economics department with ‘practice questions’ they might like to give to their students.
Worried about a conflict of interest and fearing his message contained information about the exam, one of those colleagues contacted his seniors and then the exam board.
According to one of the eton head’s subsequent letters to parents, a brief investigation established that the email did contain information which was ‘confidential and constituted a breach of exam security’. Tanweer was suspended, and has now been dismissed.
These dramatic events had a terrible effect on the youngsters involved. Having done nothing wrong, they were nonetheless told their exam achievements were invalid so as to protect the ‘integrity’ of the process. Their Pre-U grade was therefore calculated based on their marks from other papers.
They aren’t the only sixth-formers caught up in this alleged ‘ exam rigging’. This week, it emerged that pupils studying Art History at Winchester College had their marks in one paper disqualified amid reports that they’d been given prior warning about what it would contain.
Laurence Wolff, head of art history, has been accused of tipping off students about test papers he helped prepare. The 56-year-old is the son of Professor Heinz Wolff, the ebullient bow-tied presenter on Tv’s Young Scientist Of The Year and The Great egg race.
It is alleged that some Winchester pupils had joined online discussions about their upcoming Pre-U exam and this had come to the attention of school authorities. An investigation was launched. Wolff was suspended and then decided to retire.
‘ The college has treated this matter very seriously,’ said headmaster Tim Hands. ‘It greatly regrets what has happened.’
So do pupils. It later emerged that some Winchester boys had forwarded a communication from Wolff (which purportedly contained secret details about the paper), to friends at eton. As a result, they, too, had exam results invalidated.
For parents who, over the previous five years, will have paid almost £200,000 each in school fees, that’s a bitter pill to swallow. Little wonder that robert Halfon, the Tory MP who chairs the education Select Committee, has said they ‘ have a right’ to ask for their money back.
‘ To have one example is bad enough, but to have two in some of Britain’s top private schools is more worrying,’ he said. ‘ The same teachers shouldn’t be involved in the same exam boards. You can’t be poacher and gamekeeper at once.’
Significantly, it seems that Ofqual (the exam regulator that has launched an investigation) may now ban teachers from setting exam questions that their own pupils take. Schools minister Nick Gibb says: ‘The public must have confidence in the integrity of the exam system and cheating of any kind is unacceptable.’
Wolff and Tanweer have not commented. But colleagues believe their alleged behaviour reflects the fact that ever more demanding parents are placing constant pressure on leading schools to achieve ever-higher exam grades.
‘Fees have become very, very expensive and only certain sorts of people can afford them,’ says a deputy head from one leading boarding school. ‘These people demand success, which to them comes down to exam results and getting into Oxbridge.
‘The day that results come out, heads of department are hauled into meetings and asked if they’ve done better than last year. If they haven’t, it’s a serious problem. Pride, ego and money are riding on these things, because if you slip down the league tables then enrolment will suffer.’
Adding to the temptation to cheat are the uncertain employment
conditions in modern schools. Historically, a teaching post at a top public school was a job for life. These days, heads of department are typically offered a 3-5 year contract. ‘If the kids don’t perform, then it’s cheerio,’ he adds.
Little wonder, perhaps, that cheating by teachers is on the rise across secondary education, both private and public. Figures from Ofqual, reveal that 388 penalties for malpractice were issued to school and college staff in 2016, up from 262 the year before. In 2013 and 2014, the figure was nearer 100, and in 2012, it was just 60.
Evidence that top schools might be playing fast and loose with rules has, in fairness, been around for some time. In 2005 it was alleged in an employment tribunal that some of Prince Harry’s teachers at Eton had helped him complete his Art A-level to ensure he got the necessary grades to go to Sandhurst. Though the tribunal did not make a judgment over whether this constituted cheating, it found that he had received help in the exam.
This week, meanwhile, it emerged that Radley had been investigated three times after complaints about conduct of its GCSE Art course in 2014 and 2016. The school said the inquiries concluded that, aside from ‘one minor technical issue . . . no malpractice has been identified’.
And Charterhouse confirmed on Wednesday that it, too, has been investigated by Cambridge International over claims that pupils had been told exam questions in advance of sitting the paper. But after being investigated by the exam board, the school was cleared of wrongdoing.
A major factor contributing to the growing suspicion of unfair dealing is the fact that public school teachers are increasingly eager to set and mark exams to burnish their CVs. They are often happy to do the job for meagre pay — a willingness the UK’s seven exam board seem happy to exploit.
‘Exams are now a competitive business,’ one public school department head puts it. ‘Each school chooses an exam board for each subject and then pays them money for every pupil who takes one of their GCSE, A-level, or Pre-U exams. Typically it’s between £40 and £50 a go.
‘The boards have costs — paying for the exam to be written, printed and distributed. Then they pay for people to mark it. But after that, they keep the profits. And the less they pay, the bigger the profit.’
CAmBRIdGE
International, which pays markers between £1 and £5 per script, does well financially: accounts of its parent company, Cambridge Assessment, reveal income of around £350 million last year, with a £72.8 million surplus. Its highest- earning staff member was paid £420,000.
‘In the old days, most exams would be set, and often marked, by retired teachers, so there would be no conflict of interest,’ adds the head of department.
‘But retired teachers are expensive to employ, whereas working teachers motivated by a desire to improve their CV will do the job for a relative pittance. Boards are employing more and more of them, despite the obvious pitfall.’
This week’s events at Eton and other top schools have dragged that conflict of interest into the limelight, however.
‘This controversy can be equated to the scandal of drugs in athletics, another highly pressured field where people seek to create an unfair advantage,’ says Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, one of Britain’s top educationists. ‘I think this is the tip of an iceberg.’
And every contrite headmaster’s letter — such as the one from Eton’s Simon Henderson — will only add to the toxic perception that too many of Britain’s most famous public schools are helping their already privileged pupils cheat their way further to the top.