The former chief executive of exam board OCR, Jill Duffy, is among four new appointments to the Ofqual board, the Department for Education has announced.
Another newcomer is Conor Ryan – who also serves on the board of Oak National Academy alongside Ofqual’s chief executive Sir Ian Bauckham.
Duffy stood down from OCR earlier this year after seven years at the helm. Her declared interests show she is also governor of Oxford Brookes University.
Ofqual regulates exam boards and fined OCR twice in 2018 over GCSE failures. The exam board had to pay out £175,000 after an incorrect question about Romeo and Juliet on a GCSE English literature paper that affected nearly 3,000 pupils.
OCR also shelled out another £125,000 after partial answers to GCSE computing exam questions were found in textbooks it had endorsed.
Ryan will join Hardip Begol to become the second Ofqual board member from Oak, which provides online curriculum resources for teachers. Bauckham is also chair of Oak.
Ryan is also a member of the Labour party and was a special adviser to the Tony Blair’s government.
The other two new appointments are Kurt Hintz, interim principal and CEO of Petroc College, and Andrea Rigamonti, the former CFO at Videndum PLC.
They will both serve from October, while Ryan will serve from November and Duffy from January.
The appointments last for three years and board members will be paid £9,000 per annum for around 20 days’ work.
Six existing Ofqual board members were also reappointed earlier this year.
These include Chris Paterson, acting co-CEO of Education Endowment Foundation and a trustee at Ormiston Academies Trust, and Cindy Leslie, who holds various trustee positions. Both were reappointed from July for three years.
Such an appointment looks very much like cementing and setting in stone our skewed and narrow (and as the fines illustrate, a clearly faulty ) truly terminal examination system. I waiting and hoping that somewhere in the UK there’s respected and recognised educationalist that’ll write a seminal report called ” Half our future” or a more radical ” 25% of our Future”. A report that recognises that too many students are voting with their feet, many more suffer a sense of failure and only after leaving school find a means our restarting to gain skills and a wider education that eventually enables them to survive, earn a living and critically deal with the world from an informed and educated standpoint.
Thousands do not achieve these skills or perspective often with very undesirable consequences for themselves and society.
Ofqual needs to promote innovation in the field of assessment rather than reinforce a system of assessment that is governed by being simple and cheap.
The failure of schools and uk ks3 ks4 ks5 assessments to recognise that there’s many kinds of intelligence is a neglect to develop at least “Half Our Future “. (Newsom Report)