We all know that teacher-assessed grades have heaped yet another impossible burden on to schools. And the road to successful uploading of results and samples has often been almost impassable, because of completely foreseeable obstacles that exam boards somehow overlooked.

All that teachers and schools could do, when network crashes afflicted several exam boards at the crucial moment, was to wait for the connection to be restored and accept the tweeted apology.

Considering the many occasions on which IT marking platforms have crashed in the past, and the problems teachers regularly have accessing the exam boards’ databases on results day, because so many are on the system all at once, those leading this year’s TAGs really should have been prepared for these outages.

Yet despite the public complaints from unions and heads, there is no leverage to make awarding bodies improve their service or offer acceptable compensation.

It makes you think: if other sectors were run in the same way as the qualifications industry, they’d surely sink without trace.

GCSEs 2021: What are schools paying the exam boards for?

Take, for example, the hospitality industry. Imagine a Michelin-starred restaurant that expected its diners to devise the menu, create the recipes, shop for the ingredients, chop the vegetables, prepare the meat and make the sauce. Michel Roux Jr would be outraged at such transgression into his territory. 

But this is what has happened to the summer exam series in 2020 and 2021. In a normal exam series, properly prepared bespoke exam papers that have passed many stages of checking and quality assurance are obviously included in the fees. But this year they were withheld. Why? 

Instead, teachers had to scrabble around in the bargain counter that exam boards made available in April for the resources to set up their in-school assessments.  

These materials had already been around the block in previous exam sessions, and had been used by most schools for early practice papers by January. No self-respecting restaurateur would even consider putting such cold leftovers on the menus.

Most industries have to consider the convenience of customers, who can take their business elsewhere at a moment’s notice. But if there is a captive audience trying to upload samples on to an exam board portal, then it will simply have to wait.

The final debacle with submission of TAGs was a combination of poor messaging and ongoing problems with uploading materials.

AQA’s apparent expectation that teachers would be available around the clock to receive late-night emails and get cracking on getting samples uploaded to meet the 48-hour deadline was a serious faux pas. It left many sleepless that night, until the timings could be remedied during the board’s normal working hours the next day.

The whole episode shows the shortcomings of exam boards’ customer focus. During the pandemic, the hospitality sector has teetered on the brink of extinction. Consequently, it has had to be very sensitive to what its customer base wants and needs.

If only the qualifications industry could be the same. Instead, there has been defensiveness and self-justification.

Payment for services withheld

Restaurants take table bookings - their equivalent of exam entries - but don’t charge until the meal has been served and consumed to the satisfaction of the customer. When there is a problem with the quality of the meal, the restaurateur will make a reduction or provide a suitable alternative there and then. Any refund or compensation will be negotiated and agreed before money changes hands.

By contrast, schools have always had to pay exam board fees in advance, with serious financial penalties for late entries. And let’s not forget that all boards have raised their fees above inflation this year.  

It may have seemed relatively generous for AQA to charge “only” 50 per cent of the fees upfront, but that’s still an awfully large deposit.

Schools have no leverage to ensure that fees are a fair representation of the service received. Exam boards have been allowed to decide on their own rebates - and then only after the education secretary had made it clear he expects them.

The WJEC exam board is offering a 42 per cent fees remission. In contrast to last year’s 23 per cent, when boards did less than they were required to do this year, that might seem generous - and we have yet to see what is being offered elsewhere. But when schools have done more than 80 per cent of the work in both years, it still seems woefully inadequate.

Nearly three years ago, I arrived at a hotel in Bristol for an October half-term break, only to find the place in near darkness: electricity off, computer network down, candles flickering in reception. We were encouraged by the staff to find an alternative venue for dinner with the firm promise of reimbursement the next day if we produced the receipts. 

When it became clear that there would be no electricity connection until well into the next day, all the guests were found alternative rooms in nearby hotels, transported there by taxi at our hotel’s expense, and given a refund for our non-stay.

There was a contingency plan in place, which worked well. Although the hotel was undergoing a substantial refurbishment, there was no sense that the management expected its guests to subsidise the building works.

Surely there is a lesson here for our exam boards?

Yvonne Williams has spent nearly 34 years in the classroom and 22 years as a head of English. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)