Exam bosses blow £2m on five-star meals
SQA under f ire over lavish spending on markers’ meetings when school cutbacks are threatening children’s education
SCOTLAND’S exam markers are being treated to £100-a-head dinners at taxpayers’ expense – despite the education system facing the most savage cuts in decades.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday can reveal the cash-strapped organisation that runs Scotland’s school exams is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds every year hosting meetings for markers at top hotels.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is even laying on five-star menus, despite the fact it received a £3 million government bail-out earlier this year.
The events are intended to allow staff to come together and discuss the exams they are marking, to ensure grading is standardised across the country.
But critics say money is being squandered because the meetings are held at luxury hotels, with expensive three-course dinners – all paid for from the public purse.
Venues for the meetings include the five-star Glasgow Hilton and the city’s Crowne Plaza and Grand Central hotels, which boast sumptuous menus of crab with caviar, braised feather-blade of beef and coconut panna cotta.
Overall, the government-funded SQA has spent nearly £2 million on markers’ meetings over the past five years – with the bulk of that sum used to pay for food and drink.
When 146 English teachers met at Hampden Park in Glasgow in May last year, the bill came to a whopping £15,500 – £106 per person.
The same month, £186.40 was spent hiring a room at the Queen’s Hotel in Perth for only two Higher geology markers.
A £35,000 two-day Higher English meeting at Edinburgh International Conference Centre in May 2011 topped the expenditure list, working out at £220 a head for each of the 158 attendees.
The extravagance is in stark contrast to the cuts imposed across the rest of Scotland’s education system.
Some hard-up schools are being left with less than £1 per child to spend on basic supplies such as pencils and notebooks, and teacher numbers have dropped by almost 4,000 since 2007 – meaning class sizes have had to increase.
Elsewhere, rural schools have been shut, while others have reduced timetables to four-and-a-half days per week to reduce staff costs.
The SQA itself – which has an annual budget of £70 million – was forced to beg for a bail-out from the Scottish Government earlier this year after recording a £3 million deficit.
Last night, critics demanded an end to the lavish spending. They also asked why meetings had to be held in costly hotels instead of SQA offices or even school halls.
Eben Wilson, director of campaign group Taxpayer-Scotland, said: ‘This is an outrageous waste of money and it must be stopped.
‘If gym halls are good enough for our young people to sit these important exams, then why are they not good enough for markers?
‘The markers are doing an important job but they are already paid well for it and should not need an extra sweetener.’
Scottish Conservative young people spokeswoman Liz Smith said: ‘£100 a head and above will seem excessive to many parents and pupils.
‘These marker meetings are obviously crucial when it comes to maintaining marking standards but so too is the assurance that everything possible is being done to keep costs to a minimum when the examining body is under such tight financial pressure.’
Around 150,000 pupils sit more than 700,000 exams at 550 schools and colleges each year.
In 2013, the SQA employed 8,850 markers – who must have at least two years’ teaching experience – at a cost of more than £5 million.
Markers are paid £25 per hour to grade papers – with most taking home between £500 and £600 each exam season – and are required to attend ‘standardisation meetings’, where they will be taken through a marked example.
Crowne Plaza on the banks of the River Clyde hosted 21 meetings last year for 844 markers at a cost of more than £35,000, while official SQA offices were used only 12 times for a total of 70 markers.
The SQA justified the cost of the markers’ meetings and said all external venues were booked through a Government-approved supplier to provide ‘best value to the public purse’.
A spokesman for the SQA said last night: ‘The cost of marker meetings is less than 0.5 per cent of our total budget, a percentage and cost which has fallen year-on-year for the past three years.
‘Checking the consistency and standard of marking across the country is an essential element of our quality assurance process. This often means bringing large numbers of markers together in central locations when they cannot be accommodated at SQA venues.
‘There are a limited number of venues available across Scotland who can cater for the number of markers we bring together.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘It is the responsibility of the Scottish Qualifications Authority to ensure relevant professional training and information is available to all markers of qualifications across Scotland.’