Arrests over 'stolen' GCSE maths paper

Two teachers who run a private tutorial college have been arrested over claims that they stole a GCSE paper and showed it to their students the night before they were to sit the exam.

Police raided the tutorial centre in Wimbledon, south-west London on Monday evening after the Edexcel exam board received "reliable information" of cheating at the college. The papers are thought to have been stolen from a local secondary school where one of the tutors is a teacher.

Officers interrupted an evening revision session at the crammer, which has not been named, and found students in the middle of a GCSE maths paper not due to be taken until yesterday morning. The tutorial centre is not an official examination centre and should never have had access to "live" exam papers. But local schools will have received the exams up to a month before they were to be sat.

Regulations require school staff to keep all papers in a locked safe until the invigilator opens the exam packet in front of pupils as they prepare to take it. The exam board is investigating whether the security of other exams may also have been compromised by the tutors. A police spokesman said a man and a woman, both in their 40s, had been arrested over the alleged theft of exam papers. They have been released on bail until July.

John Kerr, Edexcel's chief executive, said: "The examination system runs on trust. When anyone breaches this it is crucial that they are exposed to maintain the integrity of the system. We must demonstrate forcibly that cheats will not prosper."