Tag Archives: exam boards

Centre Assessed Grades are almost done.  The bane of every GCSE and A level teacher is almost over, the marking is largely done and standardisation will then occur by the exam boards.

As an economics teacher, I get curious about numbers.  Particularly when teachers, not exam boards were asked to do the marking this year.  The back of the envelope figures look roughly like this:

There are roughly 800,000 A level students in England.

Most do three subjects, so that’s 2.4 million subjects that need marking.  Exam entry fees are around £60 at a minimum.  So that’s roughly £144 million in exam fees.

Marking I’ve done for A level papers.  You tend to have a contract of between £800-£1000 and end up marking over 400.  So around £2 per paper is a rough estimate.

Students usually sit 3 papers per A level.  At 2.4 million subjects sat, that’s 7.2 million papers that need marking at a cost of £14.2 million

The situation is even worse with GCSEs.  GCSEs cost around £40 per subject.  There were 4.7 million GCSE entries in 2020.  So that’s £188 million in income. 

Most GCSE exams have on average 2 papers that need to be marked by examiners.  So that’s 9.4 million+ papers to be marked.  At £2 per paper that would be another £18.8 million.

This means that the exam boards have taken over hundreds of millions in exam fees. Headteachers estimate this to be £440 million with other qualifications added in, and they’d like half back – £220 million (Headteachers in England call for refund of £220m summer exam fees | Exams | The Guardian)

Now exam boards still have a lot to do – alternative question papers this year (although they just used a mix of the past papers in most cases), standardisation, appeals – they do need some money to function.  

But there’s still the money not spent on marking – £33 million!  This £33 million – at a bare minimum should really go to schools and FE colleges (particularly the latter as they receive lower funding than schools).  There is a strong moral case for this when schools and FE colleges are making staff redundant due to a funding crisis for education, as is the case at my college.