Ofqual’s own data shows how deep it runs. Students get the grade a senior examiner agrees with just 52% of the time, in combined English. On a 6 mark question, two trained examiners land on the same mark somewhere between 46% and 75% of the time. That’s barely better than a coin flip.[1]
One person reads a paper, once, under deadline, with no one checking their work.
Moderation is supposed to catch it. In practice, that’s a standardisation meeting and a small sample checked before marking starts.[2] What happens across the other hundred papers, nobody finds out. Departments do this as well as anyone could.
This lands on teachers stretched thin. Workload is the top reason 9 in 10 teachers give for considering leaving the profession, and most won’t raise it until they’ve made up their mind.[3] 62% mark at home in the evenings, 55% at weekends, well past the 1,265 hours they’re contracted for.[4] It’s slow, it’s solitary, and it’s a different skill entirely from what makes someone good in front of a class. No teacher has ever looked forward to an evening of marking.
Underneath all of it sits something departments are throwing away: the richest data learning produces. Every marked script is concrete evidence of what a class understood, question by question, skill by skill, more detailed than any test score or grade on its own could ever show. Right now it gets one feedback lesson and is never looked at again, by anyone. One DfE funded trial found that when this kind of insight is actually captured and used, students gain 2 additional months of GCSE progress.[5] A teacher has a feel for their own classes. Imagine knowing, for a fact, exactly where every student stands, department wide, in one place.
