Exam crisis: Heads demand investigation of GCSE results

Headteachers called for the exams inquiry to be extended to GCSEs yesterday after schools reported "significant discrepancies" in the marking of the tests for 16-year-olds.

The National Association of Head Teachers is preparing a dossier of evidence to demonstrate that GCSE papers in music, English literature and English language have been affected by "slipshod marking".

But David Hart, the union's general secretary, said his members believed the "very strange results" at GCSE were caused by the poor performance of examiners rather than malpractice.

The GCSE music complaints centre on Edexcel, the board that has so far largely escaped allegations of downgrading at A-level that have been levelled at the Oxford and Cambridge and RSA board (OCR) and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA). An Edexcel spokeswoman accused the NAHT of "scaremongering".

Mr Hart said: "We are gathering evidence that it's not just A-levels, it's GCSEs. We've certainly had complaints of some very strange marking, both in GCSE music and in English literature and language." Candidates who had scored As in the literature paper had only got Ds in the language exam, which Mr Hart described as "unusual, to put it mildly".

Thousands of A-level papers are currently being remarked because of claims that examiners downgraded them at the last minute to make the exam look more difficult. Independent and state schools have complained that students who regularly scored A grades were awarded Ds, Es and U grades in their coursework.

The chaos prompted the Secondary Heads Association yesterday to call for this year's A-level league tables to be scrapped, arguing it would be a "nonsense" to rank schools according to inaccurate grades.

League tables ranking schools' performance in GCSEs and A-levels are due out at the end of the year. But John Dunford, the general secretary of the SHA, said: "League tables do enough damage when they are based on accurate results. It beggars belief that they would be constructed on the basis of inaccurate results.

"Until these problems are sorted out, it would be a nonsense to produce A-level performance tables and pretend to put schools in some kind of spurious rank order."