Supporting examiners in your school: good practice for school and academy leaders

Why encourage your teaching staff to consider examining?

Teaching staff who work as examiners can have a positive impact on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment across your school and can improve the progress pupils make.

  • It can lead to improvements in assessment and moderation processes.
  • It can give more reliability to the internal data produced, including predictions.
  • It can improve the quality of feedback given to pupils.
  • It can encourage collaboration between departments and between schools.
  • It can enable more continuity and progression of knowledge and skills through key stage 3 to key stage 4.
  • It can demonstrate the priority given to CPD for your staff.

 

Through examining, individual teachers develop their assessment expertise including knowledge of the specification and strengthening of their subject content knowledge. They gain experience of the practical application of the mark scheme and see common errors made by candidates which can, in turn, improve the ways they support pupils in their development of exam technique. Aspects of their workload become easier to manage as examining experience enables teachers to more easily develop exam style questions create model answers and closely focus marking and feedback of pupils’ work to the requirements of the specification and mark scheme making that process quicker. The department has an expert on the specification and the mark scheme who can share their expertise to disseminate best practice as well as improve internal moderation processes.

Teaching staff who work as examiners can have a positive impact on the quality of teaching, learning and assessment across your school and can improve the progress pupils make.

Suggested ways to encourage teachers to consider examining and to support those who do

  • Signpost teachers to the JCQ website which will be the central place on-line where examiners and potential examiners can easily find information about examining.
  • Display information about becoming an examiner in the staff room.
  • Include reference to examining as valuable CPD in staff meetings and INSET sessions, perhaps showing one of the videos available from the JCQ website.
  • Recognise examining as high quality and valuable CPD for teachers in your school.
  • Publicise how your school supports its teachers to fulfil their examining work.
  • Value the expertise of examiners on your staff – know which teachers examine, at what level and for which board so that best practice can be shared and disseminated across the school with relevant other staff.
  • Identify key examining windows in the school calendar and support staff who are examiners to manage their workload during these periods, for example by organising fewer meetings.
  • Have a ‘known’ examiner who acts as the school’s examining champion and who could lead the school’s examiner community.
  • Aim to have one examiner per department/faculty so that the positive impact of examining will be felt across all subjects in the school.
  • Encourage Heads of Department and Senior Leaders to retain their role as examiners, and/or have them talk about their current/past examining experience to the staff.
  • Seek JCQ recognition of your work to support teachers who examine in your school.