Efficiency and exam boards

I am sick of being told to find 'efficiencies' so I'm going to tell some other people to find them for me.

source: https://slightlychilledporcupine.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/the-grinding-gears-of-bureaucracy

I've always thought exam boards are really bizarre organisations. Who knows quite how they work? They seem to work on a shoestring, with hoards of part time staff on 0.05 contracts and spend their time passing the job of marking out to anyone they can get their hands on with a pulse and a vaguely relevant qualification even though most of those people already work 50 odd hours every week. In the mean time, someone who runs them gets an OBE and everyone says it's a jolly good show and we all go around for one more dance.

"I've got a fish tank and some free time between 9:06 and 9:21pm?" 
"Great, you can mark biology A-level then!" 

I have every sympathy for them in some ways. They live in shadow of the QCA, soaking up the ire and frustration of teachers which really should be aimed at 'the man' itself. Lets be absolutely fair - it wasn't any of the exam boards who were sitting about saying 'what these kids need is more grammar and remembering' 

but...

I do think there's a huge amount exam boards could do about general teacher workload and here's a few ideas and reflections based on my experiences with new specifications in the last couple of years. (I'll name no names as I understand from my colleagues that the experience is pretty universal)

1: Think about the fact a specification should be a document for students to read (at least in part) and carefully consider the way things like assessment criteria and coursework requirements are presented. At least some part of the specification should be designed to give directly to students.

In my spec, criteria spread across pages - I want to print out and give to students but every single student needs two pieces of paper, not one.

In my spec a lot of the language describing the tasks and criteria are obtuse. It is fair to expect different levels of outcome, but it's not fair to leave students baffled about what exactly it is they are supposed to be aiming for.

2: Provide some simple student focussed resources that can be used in class. Video would be great. A simple talking head video explaining what the assessment is, what the criteria mean. Why not? Why leave students at the mercy of varying interpretations by teachers, some of which will be inevitably inaccurate.

3: Organise the information properly. My specification has some criteria in it whilst some others are in sample mark schemes. Some content is outlined in the specification, some things are in notes on the website, somethings can't be discovered unless I log into a secure site and find additional material.  Some further things have been added to the 'news' tab of the website and still more emailed or revealed in online training sessions.

It's 2018, digital information is really easy to organise and update. As a member of a subject support group on facebook, I'd say 60-70% of posts are people asking 'where is X?' - that can't all be people who are too lazy to look - it must be an indication that the information isn't well organised.

4: Provide a hub for teachers to share resources. Why not? It's the absolutely ideal point to bring staff together and share resources. Why is this happening in 'the TES resource sharing area' (a private organisation profiting from education) or within ad hoc groups online but not at the source (i.e. the exam board web page)

Perhaps particularly useful resources could be 'endorsed' by the exam board, reducing their own workload in terms of providing training and support. In time, the exam board website could become a really well used hub saving people lots of time and sharing good practice which could only benefit learners.

5: Actually encourage teacher feedback. It's genuinely hard  to speak to anyone who is actually responsible for the content of the spec or the information on the website. It can be a positively Kafka-esque conversation and getting a response beyond 'Thanks, we have logged your comment' takes real perseverance.

As someone who is essentially the user of a service, I'm amazed I've not had a survey to fill in, or a phone call to discuss my impressions of the new specification and points where it could be developed. It's not that I think I have amazing insight, it's that ultimately, I am paying the exam board to enter my learners, I am paying them so I can fill in reams of (sometimes ill designed) paperwork or to sit trying to work out what the hell criteria x or y actually means and I feel as if it doesn't matter what I think, it doesn't matter what my experiences are, it's a 'put up or shut up' arrangement which seems to be

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These five suggestions would (I think) go a long way towards eliminating some of the long evenings spent trying to work out exactly what it is that 'the exam board want'

I'm well aware that it might be challenging for the boards to fulfil these points as I get the impression they aren't exactly generously funded at 'ground level' but if the Government is actually serious about teacher workload, it could do a lot worse than look at the work which could be saved 'at source' which for many of us is the exam board.

A small amount of funding here, to enable proper oversight, to update technical expertise, to provide a really good service and some full time commitment (at least in the first year(s) of a new specification could pay itself back many times over in time saved by teachers and thus more time to actually teach, assess and do things that really develop and benefit young people.

I'm not sure me endlessly rooting through quasi legal documents really is the ideal use of my time in terms of educating young people holistically.

When your taxes get spent on adverts then you know something is wrong.

'We need a more aggresive YouTube presence - lets get rid of some TA's and hire a marketing assistant!'

Hello reader. I pay tax.

I don't really mind cos I'm not that handy with my fists so I'd probably get eaten in a total anarchy and also they pay my wages so it would be a bit contradictory to be against taxes cos I'd have no job cos it'd probably be only rich people that went to school beyond the age of 7 and I'd be working in the silicone chip mines instead or have a job tending the maggot farm at 'prole foods inc' or whatever dystopian alternate reality scorched earth disaster porn vision floats your salvaged boat.

I'm not that fussed about paying tax because I'm not planning to open an armed gated survivalist community and I can afford potatoes and even stuff like that posh ginger cordial in a glass bottle. Neither am I planning on living in a tree with free loving like minded souls living only off nutrients leached through the souls of my feet.

I do think, though, that it might be an idea to question what tax gets spent on sometimes because (and this is where the fun bit ends) I'm not sure that public spending and a free market style vision for the public services really works that well.

I see on a daily basis (using my eyes which then sends signals to my brain which I use to process and make sense of the images in front of me) evidence of the fact that there isn't enough money being spent on some things which should have money spent on them.

You can make your own list using your own eyes and brain to eye wiring - It shouldn't be that hard if you have access to a high street or any public services.

Anyway, to keep things on track, what surprises me is the fact nobody seems to be outraged at the fact that a big chunk of the money given to schools to spend on their stuff, like teaching and learning and going on trips and all that normal 'getting kids to know about stuff and be able to do things' gets spent on advertising.

Sit in a school boardroom. Listen to the endless conversation about 'market share' and consider the number of hours spent 'considering what the competition are offering,' the money spent on branding, the hours spent trying to convince potential pupils and parents that school A is better than school B, the sloganeering, the full colour glossy brochures, the photo shoots, the videos on websites, the time spent creating 'positive news stories' the search for 'our USP' and so on and so on.

Think about how with academisation and the impact of central funding cuts the razor's edge of the 'marketplace' gets even sharper.

Think about how we can't afford

- to properly resource SEN support
- to finance either decent workloads for teachers or pay them in line with interest rates
- to do anything especially innovative or unusual
- ten million other wider social things which inflict problems on education system.

Think about how it maybe cost effective for the individual school to compete but ultimately how the money spent on competing for students overall is a waste as no matter how well marketed and branded every school is you can't increase the overall consumption of the service offered. One school will win and another will lose. This is fucking schools we are dealing with. Not Shreddies or computer consoles. Schools forced to fight within a closed marketplace set up as an ideological experiment.

The total number of schoolkids is the total number of school kids. End. There are x numbers of school places and y number of kids. Overall. No amount of marketing can change that.

It's not like a can of coke where you can buy a variable amount of the commodity on offer. Parents aren't going to think 'wow, I like this school thing, I might send my kids again in the evening' or 'can I get a bigger size or a multipack?' - There is a woeful lack of deeper thought about this.

Even if the average marketing spend is only 2% per school (that figure is misleading as it represents only the direct costs, not the indirect costs of time - for example, the indirect cost of a head teacher drawing up a marketing plan, which is drawn from ideas generated by a head of department, drawn in turn from ideas from the staff body or the cost of x number of staff representing the school on a weekend open day and receiving time in lieu) - then we are wasting a massive chunk of public money on playing a nonsensical game of 'survival of the fittest' instead of considering what it could be spent on to benefit the learners and manage the duties of teachers so they can in turn, benefit the learners.

What is frightening is no one seems to really know what the 'norm' is in relation to marketing spend. It doesn't seem to be monitored and scrutinised in the same way that a 7 year old's mastery of reflexive pronouns are. It doesn't seem to be subject to the same kind of penny pinching meanness that school milk or free lunches are. It's apparently wasteful to give a child a meal or some calcium but perfectly fine to give an ad agency a brief for a pointless logo change. I couldn't find any government papers or analysis relating to the impact of marketisation or it's recent acceleration.

Think about everything we apparently can't afford in the UK and think about how we seemingly CAN afford to allow schools to compete over pupils with little or no thought given to it.

Think about whether you want your taxes spent on adverts or something else.