Why the state should take charge of examinations

Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it amounted, as the man said, to ‘cheating’.

The irony of the thing is that those teachers who did not pay £230 a session for his assistance are likely to do much better by their pupils: the obliging examiner was telling the teachers about the cycle of examination questions — in other words, which bit of the syllabus was not going to feature in the questions. And I think we’re agreed — are we not? — that it’s preferable that pupils are taught the entire syllabus, not just those bits of it that will feature on exam day.