The Queen (on the application of London Borough of Lewisham and Others) v Assessment and Qualifications Alliance ("Aqa") and Others (4) Oxford and Cambridge and RSA Examinations t/a OCR ("OCR") and Another (Interested Parties)
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Elias,Mrs. Justice Sharp |
| Judgment Date | 13 February 2013 |
| Neutral Citation | [2013] EWHC 211 (Admin) |
| Docket Number | Case Nos: CO/11409/2012 AND CO/11413/2012 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division (Administrative Court) |
| Date | 13 February 2013 |
[2013] EWHC 211 (Admin)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Lord Justice Elias
and
Mrs Justice Sharp
Case Nos: CO/11409/2012 AND CO/11413/2012
Mr Clive Sheldon QC, Ms Joanne Clement and Mr Joseph Barrett (instructed by LB of Lewisham Legal Services) for the Claimants
Mr Clive Lewis QC and Ms Jane Oldham (instructed by Eversheds LLP) for the Defendants AQA
Mr Nigel Giffin QC and Mr Christopher Knight (instructed by Herbert Smith Freehills LLP) for the Defendants EDEXCEL
Ms Helen Mountfield QC, Ms Sarah Hannett and Mr Raj Desai (instructed by Wragge & Co LLP) for the Defendants OFQUAL
Hearing dates: 11-13 December 2012
Setting the scene.
This case involves two claims for judicial review brought in relation to the award of GCSE English qualifications in August 2012. In England and Wales, those qualifications are awarded by four different awarding organisations ("AOs") under the supervision of the statutory regulator, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation ("Ofqual"). Each of the judicial review claims is brought against just one AO. The first is against Assessments and Qualifications Alliance ("AQA") and the second against Pearson Education Ltd (operating under its trading name "Edexcel"). Ofqual is a second defendant to each claim. The other two AOs were named as interested parties; OCR served an Acknowledgement of Service but WJEC took no part in the proceedings. This is a rolled-up hearing; technically the court must first consider whether to grant the claimants permission to pursue the claim and if it does, it must then determine the substantive merits. We have not, however, dealt with the permission question as a preliminary issue but only after having considered fully the merits of the legal challenges.
New GCSE examinations were introduced in all subjects in 2009 and 2010. The new set of GCSE English qualifications was first taught from September 2010, and qualifications were awarded for the first time in the summer of 2012. In place of courses in English and English literature, three courses were provided in English, English language and English Literature. The English GCSE included both language and literature elements.
There are three relevant features to note about the new qualifications when compared with their predecessors. First, changes were made to the weightings of external and internal assessment. Internal assessment increased to 60% from 40%, and traditional coursework was replaced with "controlled assessments". This was partly at least because of concerns that the course work may not always have been the student's own unaided work, or may have been plagiarised. Examination boards produce a range of controlled assessment tasks. Teachers select the assessment which is then carried out by all the students and is conducted in the classroom under supervised conditions. The controlled assessments are marked by teachers internally although they are subject to moderation by the relevant AO. The 40% subject to written examination is marked externally by examiners appointed by the AO.
Second, the new courses were modular. This meant that students were able to take examinations or submit controlled assessments at various points during the course, or at the end of it. For the course which began in September 2010, assessment dates were in January 2011, June 2011, January 2012 and June 2012. Each school could choose the order in which students studied and completed units and when to take the examination or be subject to an assessment. However, this freedom was subject to what is termed the "terminal rule" which required candidates to complete at least 40% of the course at the terminal date in June 2012. This could be by way of written examination or controlled assessment. The written examinations would necessarily change for each assessment date, but the assessment topics were identical for all candidates at a particular school. Candidates could re-sit a unit once and take the better result (unless it was taken to satisfy the terminal rule).
Third, examinations and assessments were marked after each January/June date and the marks and grade boundaries were made public. The raw marks given by examiners for the scripts or assessments do not equate directly to grades. The grade boundaries are set by the AO after the raw marks have been determined.
The consequence of publishing marks and grades at each stage of the process is that individual candidates and their teachers know after each module what raw marks they achieved and how that translated into a grade for the particular unit. Many teachers assumed that the boundary mark between grades C and D would be the same, or at least almost the same, from one assessment date to the next. A central issue in this case is whether they were led to believe that this would be so, and whether it would in any event be fair and lawful for an AO to adopt significant differences in the grade boundary for a particular unit from one assessment to the next.
There are more than one hundred and fifty claimants represented in the two actions and they include local authorities, schools, teachers and pupils. They share a widespread and deeply held grievance over the way in which the boundary between grade C and grade D was fixed in the English GCSE examinations and controlled assessments assessed in June 2012.
This boundary between C and D is a particularly important one for students, schools and teachers alike. For students it may be crucial to their chances of being qualified to go into further education or achieve apprenticeships; and for teachers and schools who are subject to increasing accountability, the proportion of students attaining the C grade in English is one of the more important measures of their success. Furthermore, many teachers quite properly take professional pride in their ability to judge performance and to determine whether a student is of the requisite standard for a C grade or not. If fewer students secure at least a C grade than anticipated, their judgment is in question, and the results may be damaging to the standing of the school and the teacher.
The claimants' complaint is that too rigorous a standard was adopted when assessing some of the units in June 2012 with the result that many pupils who confidently and reasonably expected to attain the C grade, on the basis of results which their fellow examinees had obtained in the January 2012 and indeed earlier assessments, inexplicably failed to do so. There was an unheralded and unjustified shift in the grade C boundary. This constituted an elementary unfairness because pupils competing in the same examination were not treated equally. The January cohort of students was graded more leniently than the June cohort, at least in some of the papers assessed by the two AOs. Ofqual, as the regulator, had power to forbid this inconsistent and unfair treatment by issuing statutory directions, and its failure to do so in order to remedy this conspicuous unfairness constituted an error of law.
This unfairness was, say the claimants, compounded by two further factors. First, both the AOs and Ofqual had led the pupils and their teachers to understand that the marking standard would be consistent at whatever stage in the two year cycle a unit was completed. The natural inference from this was that in relation to any particular unit, the same, or at least substantially the same, grade boundary would be adopted in June as in the previous January. It is conceded that everyone understood that there might be some minor variation in the mark boundary for written examination papers to reflect the fact that a particular paper may vary in difficulty from one half-yearly assessment to the next. The marks will then be correspondingly higher or lower depending upon whether the paper is easier or harder and the grade boundary will need to be adjusted accordingly, but no radical change would have been anticipated in such cases. For controlled assessments, where the task remains precisely the same whenever the unit is completed, there is no justification in changing the grade boundary at all. Mr Sheldon QC, counsel for the claimants, submits — and this is not disputed — that many pupils and teachers had acted on that assumption to their detriment. In some cases, for example, there is evidence that once teachers were confident that a student would achieve a C grade on the basis of previous grade boundaries, the student was encouraged to switch focus to other subjects.
Second, the claimants allege that the AOs had wrongly given effect to what was in substance, if not in form, a direction from Ofqual requiring them to fix their June grade boundaries by reference to the predicted results for the particular batch of students. Whatever Ofqual's intentions, in practice the AOs acted as if Ofqual was requiring them to set the grade boundary so that the number of students obtaining the C grade did not exceed the predicted number by more than 1% (the "tolerance limit"). The effect was artificially and unfairly to pitch the pass mark for the C grade too high. Insufficient credit was given for the qualitative performance of...
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