Waddell (1978)

Notes on the text

Part I

Preliminary pages Contents, Membership
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Educational matters
Chapter 3 Structure of the examining system
Chapter 4 Cost
Chapter 5 Conclusions
Appendices

Part II

Preliminary pages Contents, Membership

Report of the Education Study Group (ESG)

Glossary, Introduction
Chapter 1 Feasibility of common exam system
Chapter 2 English
Chapter 3 Mathematics
Chapter 4 Science
Chapter 5 History
Chapter 6 Geography
Chapter 7 Modern languages
Chapter 8 Classics
Chapter 9 Commerce
Chapter 10 Social science
Chapter 11 Religious studies
Chapter 12 Craft design and technology
Chapter 13 Technical drawing
Chapter 14 Home economics
Chapter 15 Needlecraft and dress
Chapter 16 Art
Chapter 17 Music
Chapter 18 Further work
Appendix A List of witnesses
Appendix B Questions
Appendix C Statistics
Appendix D Joint examinations

Report of the Cost Study Group (CSG)

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Costs in 1976
Chapter 3 Costing a common system
Chapter 4 Changeover costs
Annexes

Report of the Steering Committee established to consider proposals for replacing the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level and Certificate of Secondary Education examinations by a common system of examining

Chairman: Sir James Waddell CB

Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education and Science and the Secretary of State for Wales by Command of Her Majesty July 1978

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1978
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Part I: Cmnd 7281-I
Part II: Cmnd 7281-II

Part II - CSG Report

Chapter 1 Introduction
[pages 132 - 134]

1. In writing to the Schools Council about their proposals for a common system of examining at 16+, one of the points made by the Secretary of State was that some estimate needed to be made of the extra costs that might be involved in changing over to and operating such a system. Our task has been to consider the costs of examining under the present dual system (CSE and GCE O Level) and to report our findings, with recommendations as to how these might assist the Steering Committee in costing possible models of a future common system of examining at 16+ and in assessing any changeover costs.

2. To meet these objectives we have used the services of a small team of professional accountants and, where appropriate, also enlisted the help of HM Inspectorate. They in turn have received the cooperation of the CSE and GCE examining boards, individual teachers in a small number of schools, and officials of the local education authorities maintaining those schools. In all we met 8 times to devise our approach, to consider the data provided and to prepare our report.

3. Our remit was a limited one. We were asked to look at present costs and consider how these might help in predicting future ones; in fact we go rather beyond this in Chapter 3 and offer some fairly speculative figures on the range of costs of various possible features of a common system. Our task was not to produce a cut and dried costing of a common system, since the Steering Committee saw its role as falling well short of providing a blueprint for the administration of such a system, and intended to confine itself to stating certain principles and objectives which any administrative organisation would need to observe and fulfil; it was rather to provide the basis for a broad indication, in terms of ranges of costs, of the likely effect of changing to and operating a common system.

4. Our task was undertaken against a background of work already done by the Schools Council. Their approach had, however, used fee income as proxy for the overall costs of the examining boards and in so doing they had encountered a number of problems, in particular that of isolating the O Level costs of the GCE boards. Our exercise was specifically designed to overcome this difficulty. We concluded that an essential first step was to undertake a full analysis of the recurrent expenditure, staff and premises of all examining boards in 1976, the last complete year; and that such an analysis could only stem from a special information gathering exercise. It was agreed that there would be advantage in drawing on the services of accountants for this purpose. The Department made available one of its professional staff, Mr Alcock, and he was joined by Mr Squires and Mr Slight from the local authority field; Mr Fielden and Mr Thorp of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Company, were also brought into the exercise on a consultancy basis.

5. Under our guidance, this team visited between them all the GCE and CSE boards at least once over a period of 4 months to discuss with them the problems of stating their expenditure in a form settled by us in advance to ensure a common basis and uniformity of treatment. By and large we believe that the boards are satisfied with the broad basis on which the costings were done. As indicated in paragraph 2, the team also visited, in company with HM Inspectors, a number of schools and local education authorities. The amount of time that could be allocated to these latter visits was limited and we would not claim that the findings from them are more than a rough guide. Their purpose was to find out in the limited time available as much as possible about the examination costs arising within the schools for which the examining boards make no payment often referred to in our report (and elsewhere) as the 'hidden' costs of examining. The largest single element in such costs is teacher time.

6. The information from all the visits is summarised in Chapter 2. This contains only a part of the statistical and other material collected, but the whole body of it is lodged within the Department for use as necessary at a later stage if a common system is developed. The main object of the fact finding and analysis was, of course, to provide a foundation from which we could build up our advice on the range of possible costs involved in changing to and running a common system. In order to do this, and to make recommendations about the use of the information gathered, it was necessary to postulate possible models for such a system and to develop a range of assumptions. We therefore sought your advice and that of the Educational Study Group (which had been set up at the same time as ourselves) on a number of points relating to the administration of a common system and possible changes in the form and number of examinations that might result under such a system. The replies reinforced our expectation that for most important elements our costings could only be illustrative of the range of additional costs - or savings - that might result from the adoption of various options under a common system. Our figures in Chapter 3 therefore provide the Steering Committee with raw material which could be used in giving an order of magnitude to the costs involved in a particular solution.

7. Other and more intangible factors obtain. The data from the examining boards and schools provide a snapshot of practices and activity in a particular year and our figures for a common system are in terms of that year. No attempt has been made to take into our costings factors - such as declining school rolls, changes in the 'take-up' of examinations and economic factors likely to affect the future costs of examining whether or not a common system is introduced, although we do discuss such factors in general terms at the end of Chapter 3. And where we have made assumptions about the future we have tended to do so on the basis of minimum change. For example, for the most part we have not assumed any change in the staffing complements of boards as a result of moving to a common system, although we recognise in Chapters 3 and 4 that such changes are likely to result.

8. The focus of our consideration has therefore been the costing of different elements of examining activity, distinguishing the variable from the fixed costs. Our concern has been to illuminate where we can the range of possible changes in expenditure on those elements, even where the extremes of a range may seem to us highly unlikely to obtain in practice. Because of the many imponderables, however, we have not for the most part indicated points between the extremes where we consider the level of expenditure most likely to fall. Nevertheless, we have indicated the total maximum and minimum possible costs of a common system, based on our assumptions. These are extreme values and we regard both figures as unrealistic. The cost seems certain to fall somewhere in between, and would depend of course on the many decisions that would be required at various levels in implementing a common system. We have therefore thought it sensible to confine ourselves to providing relevant basic information, some suggested techniques for using that information, the application of those techniques to possible models of a common system, and a store of additional data for use by the educational system after the Steering Committee has reported.