Examiners sacked after Telegraph’s undercover investigation

Two examiners at one the country’s leading examination boards have been suspended since a Daily Telegraph undercover investigation revealed examining boards were secretly coaching teachers on how to get the best results.

The December story was praised by Education Secretary Michael Gove as being in the ‘finest traditions of public interest journalism”.

Today the paper reports that Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) board, said ‘examiners who knew the questions pupils would be asked may need to be banned from giving seminars to teachers or writing books in future”.

In December undercover reporters from the Telegraph found evidence of exam boards giving secret advice to teachers on how to achieve better grades for their pupils at a series of seminars, when one examiner was recorded saying he was ‘cheating’by giving detailed information on which subjects would be covered in next summer’s history GCSE.

Today’s Telegraph report said:

Speaking after the hearing, Mr Dawe said that out of 13,000 examiners, “one or two” had needed to be “rapidly removed” after complaints that they were providing too much detail to teachers.

“In the last 18 months, I’m aware of two – one where we felt there was inappropriate information in a textbook, and we binned our exam and rewrote the exam and sacked him. And there was a seminar session where we picked up complaints and again we sacked the examiner.”