A tricky question

The pressure on our independent schools to justify their often high fees through equally stratospheric examination results appears to bring its own dangers. As this newspaper has reported over the past few days, some of the country’s best-known educational establishments, including Eton and Winchester, have had to confront allegations that some pupils were given prior knowledge of questions from masters who were associated with the relevant exam boards.

The teachers concerned have been dismissed or suspended and the results nullified. It has been a wretched experience for all concerned and parents and pupils are entitled to feel deeply aggrieved, especially after this newspaper exposed a few years ago how boards were running courses for teachers and publishing materials designed to help schools do well in exams.

What is to be done to stop such things happening again? Head teachers have called on the exam boards to introduce stricter safeguards against the risk of teachers passing inside information to their pupils. However, it has been dismissed as “unfeasible” to remove teachers from the exam process entirely since they are often the leading experts in their subjects. It used to be the case that universities provided the majority of question setters and monitors but that role is now almost entirely in the hands of schools.

The obvious solution would be for masters, who can supplement their incomes from this work, only to set exams for boards that their own students do not use. As Robert Halfon MP, the chairman of the Commons education committee, put it, they should not be both poacher and gamekeeper. It must be possible to separate the two.