Welsh Exam Board 'still out of line' after raising grade standards

We review preliminary results from all exam boards. Most qualification awarding in summer 2012 was completed mainly without intervention ... although our exchanges with Edexcel and with WJEC (jointly with the Welsh regulator) led to amendments to their English awards to bring them more in line with other boards. We can now see that although our interventions were necessary they may not have been fully effective, as final results of both these exam boards are still somewhat out of line with those of their competitors – but not as much as they would have been had the regulators not intervened.

This unilateral decision by the regulator in Wales has resulted in more favourable treatment for the 2,300 Welsh students who were upgraded than for their English counterparts. However, this was entirely outside our control or that of the regulator in Northern Ireland. It signals significant problems for the future, if we are to maintain common standards across borders.

We have ... found [GCSEs in English] to be especially susceptible to pressures, as teachers strive for the best possible outcomes for their students and school. With GCSE English currently so central to how schools are judged, this is a significant weakness. We have found that the qualifications are easy to bend out of shape: they can buckle under the pressures of accountability, and the evidence we have is that this did happen to some extent.