Draining Away
Draining Away
Draining Away
Is it just my perception, or is all faith in Ofqual draining away?
Just to be clear: they hire a company - Capgemini: [Pass the sick-bag] “People matter. Results count” - to investigate the GCSE fiasco and pay them £150K.
Ofqual then dutifully reports that it’s all the fault of cheating teachers - despite the fact that 95% of AQA’s moderator reports apparently confirm the accuracy of teachers’ marking.
Then, when asked, Ofqual says there are no records of the interviews Capgemini undertook.
Ahem. Does anyone really think this is credible? Doesn’t it raise further questions about the competence of Ofqual and its woeful lack of leadership? £150K is, after all, rather a lot of money - our money - to be spending on a fiasco that isn’t of our making.
The people I know who were involved in those investigation meetings kept their own records. Their headteachers asked them to do so.
So perhaps it’s time to start publishing those.
They appear to raise questions about whether Capgemini’s staff (“People matter. Results count”) had a clue what they were trying to find out.
For starters, here’s one example from a very successful school which was devastated by the summer’s results. Like me, they don’t think this was a result of their supine teachers having to cheat. They - again, like me - blame Ofqual and the examination boards’ failure to regulate and moderate - aka to do their respective jobs.
So it doesn’t paint a hugely reassuring picture of the rigour of the investigation, or of the value-for-money of that £150K of our money handed over to Capgemini (“People matter. Results count”).
Any chance of a modicum of leadership soon to sort out this whole sordid affair?
We are a school with two consecutive outstanding inspection reports so when the the chance arose to speak to Ofqual in an interview as part of their ongoing investigation, we welcomed the opportunity to present a case.
As it transpired, the interview allowed us share our concerns and evidence to a very pleasant and skilled operative who had no answers for us but did have very polished PR. Whilst I fear it will be ultimately useless, it allowed our team the opportunity to highlight, quite robustly, how our youngsters have been robbed of their deserved grade.
A few weeks later, Ofqual then, quite bizarrely, sent an email querying our figures and suggested that in the interview we had stated that our data and their data didn't match, which is in fact inaccurate as we didn't.
The correspondence then states that we claimed to have dropped by 15% in English (which we did) when they had figures that suggested that we had in fact risen by 2% from 2011 to 2012.
They mention in the correspondence that they are working with AQA to ascertain why the two data sets are at odds!
Interestingly, we are with WJEC, and the report I gave them mentions the board and specification over a dozen times.
They are also demanding that we send all of our students' entry details so they can explore the disparity. Whilst I understand the importance of comic relief in drama and how absurd comedy can often define the inherent tragedy of the human condition, you will understand that I did not find this funny.
They have clearly confused the interviews of two institutions.
I would be delighted to receive the notes from other schools that were interviewed. It may be that one or two did have faith in the credibility of the investigation.
Geoff Barton
Thursday 22 November 2012
10:20 pm
Thursday, 22 November 2012