Exam News- Coronavirus (COVID-19): GCSE (English & maths), Functional skills and ESOL exams

Due to Covid-19 (coronavirus), the government has announced closures of schools and colleges until further notice. Which means that this year’s summer exam series, including GCSE (English & maths), Functional skills (all levels) and ESOL have been cancelled or postponed.

This is what we know so far….

GCSE

The exam boards will be asking teachers to submit their judgement about the grade that they believe the learner would have received if exams had gone ahead. To produce this, teachers will take into account a range of evidence and data including performance on mock exams and non-exam assessments, attendance – clear guidance on how to do this fairly and robustly will be provided to colleges. The exam boards will then combine this information with other relevant data, including prior attainment, and use this information to produce a calculated grade for each learner, which will be a best assessment of the work they have put in.

We will notify you as soon as we have received your results from the awarding body.

ESOL Speaking & Listening

As per the government’s guidelines regarding closure of schools and colleges. Unfortunately, we have had to postpone your exam until further notice. We will update you of any changes to this.

Functional skills

We are waiting for more information from the awarding body regarding the functional skills exam. At present it looks like the exams will be postponed. We will contact you as soon as we have more information.

Childcare Awards and Certificates

The awarding body we use for childcare qualifications is NCFE/ Cache and they have released this statement…

“Our qualifications fall into the category of Performance Table Qualifications (PTQ) and Vocationally Related Qualifications (VRQ). We are therefore working with Ofqual to come up with a contingency plan per qualification and will communicate this with you when finalised. The options we’re considering are whether to reschedule the assessment, adapt the assessment or use teacher estimations for marks and grades.”

We will inform you as soon as we know more.