2 November 2012 Last updated at 06:45 ET

GCSE English: Teachers angry over generous marking claim

By Katherine Sellgren BBC News education reporter

The teaching profession is angry at claims they marked pupils' work optimistically

Teachers have reacted angrily to suggestions by the exams watchdog that they marked coursework too generously.

In its final report on the controversy over this summer's GCSE English exam, Ofqual says pressure to get good grades saw teachers overmark GCSE work.

Heads said it was "outrageous" to blame teachers for the fiasco which saw some pupils get lower grades than predicted.

Teachers have contacted the BBC News website expressing fury at being blamed for pupils' disappointing results.

The row centres around the controlled assessment aspect of the new modular English GCSE qualification, sat for the first time this summer.

Controlled assessment is GCSE coursework which is sat in the classroom under strict supervision and marked by teachers.

The exams watchdog says teenagers have been let down by an exams system where teachers who are under intense pressure to achieve good grades.

It says teachers in some of England's secondary schools were guilty of "significantly" over-marking pupils' GCSE English work this summer in order to boost results.

But Glenn Smith, principal of Honiton Community College in Devon, told the BBC that teachers in his English department used "stringent" measures to ensure they were marking these assessments fairly and consistently.

"An awful lot of work goes into ensuring their marking is accurate - the pressure they live with is intense," he said.

"To say they've marked up is outrageous."

Val Tyreman, a science teacher from Stockton-on-Tees, described Ofqual's report as "appalling".

"I cannot understand how they can blame teachers if external moderation procedures were properly applied. I don't see how teachers can be accused of generous marking."

John Townsley, executive principal of two academy schools in Leeds, said: "The problem is that Ofqual were asleep in the early part of the award.

"And that meant that many Cs were given out generously in June 2011 and Jan 2012, resulting in very little being left for the students at the end of the course. That's fundamentally unfair and it's not addressed in this report. "

Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "For Ofqual to suggest that teachers and schools are to blame is outrageous and flies in the face of the evidence.

"The accountability measures do place tremendous pressure on teachers and schools, especially at GCSE grade C, but to say that teachers would compromise their integrity to the detriment of students is an insult."

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "It is a diversion to attempt to blame teachers for following the rules they were given.

"If your elected government tells you this is the right thing to do, if your performance is measured on it and if you are sacked for failing to achieve it, you have no choice but to do it.

"Our punitive and single-minded focus on C-grade exam passes does indeed deserve a share of the blame for this summer's re-grading fiasco."

New qualification

Speaking to BBC Radio Four's Today programme, Ofqual chief executive Glenys Stacey said she believed teachers had marked the test "optimistically", rather than with a deliberate intention to inflate grades.

She said: "Teachers are not making up marks here. They are doing their level best to do the best for their students and they are bound, given the pressures they are under, to take the most optimistic view.

Ms Stacey says accountability and performance measures created perverse incentives for schools

"There's an amount of tolerance... some leeway in the marking. But if enough teachers mark up to that tolerance, mark up to that limit, then overall it has a national effect," she added.

This summer's English GCSEs were a new modular qualification, with pupils sitting written exam papers and controlled assessment, and schools decided when pupils submitted that assessment work and sat exams.

Ofqual's research found many schools used the marks pupils received in their first exams and the January grade boundaries to work out what score a pupil would need in their controlled assessment to get a certain grade and marked it accordingly.

Most of the controlled assessment work was submitted in the summer and when examiners saw evidence of over-marking, exam boards raised grade boundaries, leading some pupils to receive poorer grades than expected.

In Wales, ministers ordered a regrade for pupils who got a lower grade than expected with Welsh board WJEC, but Ofqual did not order such a move in England.

Ms Stacey said the distribution of this year's GCSE English results, which saw bunching around the C grade boundary, was "shocking".

"The unexpected pattern, the unprecedented clustering around perceived grade boundaries for each of the whole qualification is striking."

League tables

Schools in England are measured on the percentage of pupils who get five A*-C GCSEs, including English and maths.

This measure is included in league tables, with schools expected to have at least 40% of students reaching this standard.

In its report, Ofqual says: "The regulator concludes that so much weight on one grade in one subject as part of accountability and performance measures created perverse incentives for schools in the way they marked controlled assessment and led to the over-marking."

The report says the new qualifications "reinforced the trend" of schools running the GCSE schools years (Years 10 and 11) as a "tactical operation to secure certain grades and combinations of grades".

"This has come to be seen as 'what good schools do' despite the awareness of many teachers and parents that the concept of broad and deep learning can get lost along the way," it says.

Ofqual says it will take action to ensure there are no repeats of this year's problems in 2013.

The watchdog also says this year's debacle proves the proposal by Education Secretary Michael Gove to end the modularisation of GCSEs in England by 2014 is correct.

Ms Stacey said the new modular English GCSEs at the heart of the fiasco were too flexible and "not sufficiently resilient" to take the pressure they were put under.

"It is so flexible that, when subjected to the pressure of the accountability system, it can buckle," she said.

Are you a teacher or an external examiner? What do think about Ofqual's report? Are you a parent with a child whose grades are affected? You can contact us using the form below.

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29 October 2012 Last updated at 21:33 ET

Breast screening advice updated amid controversy over harms

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Women invited for breast cancer screening in the UK are to be given more information about the potential harms of being tested.

An independent review was set up to settle a fierce debate about whether the measure did more harm than good.

It showed that for every life saved, three women had treatment for a cancer which would never have been fatal.

The information will be included on leaflets to give women an "informed choice", the government said.

Cancer charities said women should still take up the offer of screening.

Controversy

Screening has been a fixture in diagnosing breast cancer for more than two decades. Women aged between 50 and 70 are invited to have a mammogram every three years. It helps doctors catch cancer early so treatment can be given when it is more likely to save lives.

However, the national cancer director Prof Sir Mike Richards said it had become "an area of high controversy".

The debate centres around the concept of "over-diagnosis", that is screening which correctly identifies a tumour, but one which would never have caused harm. It leads to women who would have lived full and healthy lives having treatments - such as surgery, hormone therapy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy - which have considerable side-effects.

There is no way of knowing which tumours will be deadly and which could have been left alone.

The review, published in the Lancet medical journal, showed that screening saved 1,307 lives every year in the UK, but led to 3,971 women having unnecessary treatment. From the point of view of a single patient they have a 1% chance of being over-diagnosed if they go for screening.

The independent review panel was led by Prof Michael Marmot, from University College London. He said screening had "contributed to reducing deaths" but also "resulted in some overdiagnosis".

He said it was "vital" women were told about the potential harms and benefits before going for a mammogram.

Prof Richards said: "My view is that the screening programme should happen, we should invite women to be screened and give women the information to make their own choice."

He said the leaflets on breast cancer screening sent to women would be updated in the "next few months" to "give the facts in a clear, unbiased way".

Current advice does not highlight the scale of the risk.

To screen?

Cancer charities have unanimously argued that women should still choose to be screened.

A joint statement by Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Breast Cancer Campaign and Breast Cancer Care said: "We encourage all women to attend their screening appointments."

It said the review provided "much-needed clarity" that screening saves lives, but women must be given "clear and balanced information" to highlight the harms.

Cancer Research UK, which commissioned the review alongside the Department of Health, said that "on balance" it thought that women should go ahead with screening.

Its chief executive Dr Harpal Kumar said: "Because we can't yet tell which cancers are harmful and which are not, we cannot predict what will happen in an individual woman's case.

"Research is advancing at pace and we hope that in the future there will be a number of new techniques that we can use alongside the screening programme to make it more sophisticated and reduce the numbers of women having unnecessary treatment."

Richard Winder, the deputy director of the NHS Cancer Screening Programmes, said: "This was a robust review and we appreciate the rigour and efforts of the panel in conducting it.

"We are pleased that the panel concluded the NHS Breast Cancer Screening Programme confers significant benefit and should continue.

"Where they have made recommendations, we will work with all partners to take these forward."

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27 October 2012 Last updated at 02:36 ET

Women smokers who quit by 30 'evade earlier death risks'

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Women who give up smoking by the age of 30 will almost completely avoid the risks of dying early from tobacco-related diseases, according to a study of more than a million women in the UK.

The results, published in the Lancet, showed lifelong smokers died a decade earlier than those who never started.

But those who stopped by 30 lost, on average, a month of life and if they stopped by 40 they died a year younger.

Health experts said this was not a licence for the young to smoke.

The study followed the first generation of women to start smoking during the 1950s and 60s. As women started smoking on a large scale much later than men, the impact of a lifetime of cigarettes has only just been analysed for women.

"What we've shown is that if women smoke like men, they die like men," said lead researcher Prof Sir Richard Peto, from Oxford University.

He told the BBC: "More than half of women who smoke and keep on smoking will get killed by tobacco.

"Stopping works, amazingly well actually. Smoking kills, stopping works and the earlier you stop the better."

Early death

The records from 1.2 million women showed that even those who smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes a day were more likely to die sooner.

Sir Richard said that it was exactly the same picture as for men.

The British Lung Foundation said the prospects for long-term health were much better if people stopped smoking before they were 30, but cautioned that this was not a licence to smoke "as much as you want in your 20s".

Its chief executive, Dr Penny Woods, said: "Stopping smoking can also be difficult to do - an estimated 70% of current smokers say they want to quit, so you shouldn't start and just assume you'll be able to quit smoking whenever you want to.

"The best thing for your health is to avoid smoking at all."

Prof Robert West, from the health behaviour research unit at University College London, said it was important to remember that smoking had more effects on the body than leading to an early death, such as ageing the skin.

"Around your mid-20s your lung function peaks and then declines. For most people that's fine - by the time you're into your 60s and 70s it's still good enough. But if you've smoked, and then stopped there is irreversible damage, which combined with age-related decline can significantly affect their quality of life.

"Obviously there is an issue around smoking if they want to get pregnant because it affects fertility and then there are the dangers of smoking during and after pregnancy."

The chartered health psychologist, Dr Lisa McNally, who specialises in NHS stop smoking services, also emphasised other factors.

Speaking to BBC News, she said: "There's the danger isn't there that people could almost take permission to continue to smoke to 30 or even to 40, but actually in my experience younger women quit smoking for other reasons other than life expectancy.

"They're more concerned about the cosmetic effects."

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