Teachers are being put under pressure to boost pupils’ marks because of school accountability, MPs investigating last summer’s GCSE English marking controversy were told last week.
Representatives of the awarding bodies told Parliament’s Education Select Committee that they had spotted discrepancies in marking and blamed pressure from the high stakes involved in trying to get borderline pupils from a D to C grade.
Andrew Hall, chief executive of AQA, told the committee he did not believe schools were cheating in their marking of controlled assessment, but they were put in a position where “their judgements were influenced by the pressures of the accountability system”. This had been at the heart of last year’s problems, he said.
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