The wonder of the National Curriculum Tests marking scandal is that it has taken a decade for the inadequacies of the school exam system to become widely known. As Liz Brocklehurst, a former exam marker, reveals in this issue (see page 21), the exam system has been in crisis since being politicised in David Blunkett’s days as education secretary. For ten years, markers have been put under pressure to interpret answers in a bizarrely over-generous fashion, even to the point of marking obviously wrong answers as correct. Little has been revealed about such practices because the markers have been sworn to secrecy. As the results got better and better, allowing the government to crow about how it had raised education standards, ministers attempted, often successfully, to stifle criticism by claiming any attack on the examination system was an attack on the hard efforts of the pupils themselves.
This year there is no way that Ed Balls, the current Education Secretary, can get away with that ruse.
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