Exam boards are “unlikely” to refund entry fees for this summer’s GCSE and A-level exams following their cancellation yesterday, Tes has been told.
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A former exam board chief has also warned that if any refunds do materialise they would be “marginal”.
“I think refunds are unlikely,” they said. “A significant amount of money is spent on producing and printing the papers, and so a lot of expense will have been on that already.
“Some of this will be a proportion of the fees, and the other expensive part is the marking and the certification, and the certification is still going to happen.
“The teacher marking [portion of fees] is available and up for debate, but the boards are going to have to put in some pretty robust systems around standardising predictions, so if there were any talk of refunds it’s going to be marginal, because of the cost of doing all this - boards will have to gather all this information, standardise it and everything else.”
Duncan Baldwin, deputy policy director at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said the union could not comment on the likelihood of exam fee refunds but that this would be “part of the discussions going on nationally at the moment”.
He added that most schools would already have paid for their exam entry fees.
However, one headteacher advised others on Twitter not to pay their fees if they had not already done so.
Schools spend tens of thousands of pounds on entry fees for A levels and GCSEs. Another head commented that they had not paid fees yet but that this payment was a “crucial” part of the school budget from March to April.
AQA and Pearson Edexcel told Tes they were waiting for confirmations from Ofqual and the government about any further details regarding exams.
Ofqual referred Tes to its statement in response to the government’s announcement: “We welcome the certainty that the secretary of state’s decision not to hold exams this summer provides in these challenging circumstances.
“We will now work urgently with the Department for Education to work through the detail of this decision and to provide more information as soon as possible.”
