Totally unbelievable

The school just couldn't believe its results. The best candidates had got Es instead of As and when they complained to the exam board a four-month struggle ensued. Nicholas Pyke looks at one school's battle with Edexcel and asks, could it happen again?

As A-level puzzles go, this one was a no-brainer. Take two dozen bright students, a troubled exam board, a bizarre set of results, and what do you conclude? The answer was clear enough to Queen's College, a fee-paying school for girls set among the red-brick mansion blocks of Harley Street in the West End of London. The board responsible was Edexcel – and the marks were blatantly wrong.

In fact, when the AS-level English results were issued last August, they were so badly awry that the school expected an immediate investigation. Instead of As and Bs its candidates had been awarded Es and below in one of the three papers. But when it complained, there was neither inquiry nor apology – just a miserable four-month battle for the 24 students and their teacher, the head of English, Dr Eleanor Relle.

In the end they won, and the board was forced to issue new, improved results, but the school is furious. The initial poor grades and uncertainty led several students to abandon the subject. Queen's College will not be using Edexcel again, citing a "grotesque series of prevarications, empty promises and buck-passing, which would have been funny had the situation not been so serious". Now it is calling for a new examinations ombudsman to prevent the same thing happening to other schools – a demand backed this week by the Secondary Heads Association.

All examination boards are under pressure at the moment, but London-based Edexcel is under the most. Since January it has been the subject of special scrutiny by the government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The National Association of Head Teachers has even called on ministers to remove the board from the examinations market because of its record. Back in August, however, Edexcel was in more bullish mood and refused to accept that anything was wrong. It told Queen's to pay for a re-mark, which it did – before settling down for a very long wait indeed.

By November, there was still no sign of the new results and the students were getting anxious. The board did get in touch, but for a different reason: it had found that a quarter of the girls' marks were wrong in another of the three English papers and needed to change them.

According to Dr Relle the girls became progressively more gloomy, unable to concentrate on the second part of their A-level course. "Not only were the students losing confidence in themselves, they were losing confidence in us," she says. "They got very dispirited indeed. As Christmas approached some of them began to think we'd already had the results but weren't telling them. It was really hard to convince them that, five months after they took their exams, there had been no movement."

In early December the school began to phone Edexcel every day. "They told us that results had been posted to us a fortnight ago; that the results would be faxed to us tomorrow; that there was 'something wrong in the system'. They claimed that the information was on Marlene's desk, but unfortunately Marlene would be out shopping until later. Then we heard that Marlene had ceased to work there a fortnight previously, but they would ring us back. They generally didn't.

"We were so disgusted we decided that as far as the new lower sixth was concerned we would transfer to a different board. The girls in the upper sixth are now stuck with Edexcel. They have become a bit sad, just a bit fatalistic. The joie de vivre has gone and that's a shame because I think you need a bit of joie de vivre in English."

They were vindicated, as they knew they would be, when after four months of hammering away they found that every single mark had been raised and 20 of the 24 candidates now had a higher grade. An Edexcel official admitted to Queen's College that there were 30 other schools in the same position, including King Edward VI High School for Girls in Birmingham, which complained loudly about severe undermarking in AS English. How many other candidates received lower grades than they deserved but did nothing about it? And there has still been no answer to the most fundamental question – what went wrong?

Dr Relle has a pretty good idea, of course. "Edexcel has spoken publicly about the difficulty of recruiting examiners, and I think in this case they took on someone who wasn't quite in line. Anyone with an ear to the ground knew that Edexcel had been appealing desperately to other boards to help them find more English examiners – at a point when at least one of those other boards had already finished marking."

There is little sign that things are any better this year. Last week the QCA admitted that, with the exam season already upon us, there was still a shortage of examiners in English, religious education, ICT and psychology. Postgraduate trainees have been brought in to mark some papers, and in the case of RE the boards have even called on the expertise of vicars.

Dr Relle and Queen's College understand that mistakes can occur. After all, last summer's new AS-levels represented a huge expansion of the system. In the case of Edexcel, for example, they increased the number of individual marks allocated from four to eight million. But she doesn't see why her students had to go through four months of damaging anxiety to get a fair result.

"Occasional mistakes inevitably occur, so I would like to see a quick, humane, straightforward system for rectifying them," she says. "Since the present system appears to be run largely by people who will say anything to get the customers off their backs or off the phone, why not have an ombudsman to whom cases of malexamination and maladministration can be referred?"

She is not alone. John Dunford, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, believes the QCA must strengthen support for schools, and this week called on it to set up a specialist quality-assurance unit to ensure the boards play fair. "I think the QCA should have an active quality-assurance department that helps people shake the exam boards into action," he said, pointing out that schools are often fobbed off with "customer-relations people" unable to answer the important questions.

The QCA has promised to investigate the problems faced by Queen's College, which it described as "very disappointing", but a spokeswoman said Edexcel had made progress since last autumn. Frank Wingate, the board's head of customer relations, said: "We regret it when any of our schools are dissatisfied. But the fact of the matter is that last autumn the system expanded very rapidly. It was a major change to us all. There were times when our customer service was stretched and didn't meet our expectations. Since then we have worked very closely with the QCA.

"In the end this case was satisfactorily resolved, albeit slowly. We understand the frustration of our customers. We have invested £4m in a customer-service centre and we're working very hard to bring the system up to speed. The shortage of examiners is a problem for all awarding bodies."

education@independent.co.uk

Testing times for Edexcel

Edexcel was formed from a merger of the old London University examinations authority and the vocational BTech. It is now one of the big three boards serving England and Wales along with the AQA and OCR. Edexcel has a huge market, particularly among colleges. But the last 12 months have seen it fall to the bottom of the class

MAY 31 2002

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, calls for the government to remove Edexcel's licence to set and mark exams.

MAY 29

Edexcel issues the first major apology of the new exam season after printers mistakenly dispatch a government and politics AS level paper containing an error.

MAY 15

QCA chairman Sir William Stubbs admits that all three main exam boards are short of examiners.

APRIL 20

Edexcel announces plan to recruit trainee teachers as markers.

FEBRUARY 1

The QCA gives Edexcel one month to put its house in order. It claims the board is "failing to meet its responsibilities to schools and colleges"

JANUARY 23

The Government sends a trouble-shooter into Edexcel as heads express concern. This followed a series of errors including setting an AS maths question that was impossible to answer.

OCTOBER 5 2001

Christina Townsend resigns as chief executive of Edexcel after a "particularly demanding year". Dozens of schools and colleges, including Queen's College, complain about unfairly low marks.

JUNE 14

Candidates sit an Edexcel maths A-level paper which appears to have been leaked to BBC News.

JUNE 13

The new Education Secretary Estelle Morris orders an urgent review of AS levels after a complaints about its shambolic introduction.

MARCH 22

Edexcel gives 10,000 sixth-formers the wrong results for an information technology exam.