To coincide with the announcement of our next steps, Pearson hosted a panel discussion and audience Q&A on 14th May at Skinners Academy in North London. The panel and audience consisted of a wide spectrum of experts and interested parties, many of whom contributed to the consultation.

Chaired by Reform, discussions centred on the recommendations and commitments in the Leading On Standards – our next steps report.

The panel consisted of:

Dale Bassett, Research Director of Reform
Rod Bristow, President of Pearson UK
James Toop, Chief Operating Officer, Teaching Leaders
Richard Earp, Education and Skills Manager, National Grid
Sue Williamson, CEO, The Schools Network
Professor Robert Coe, School of Education and Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, Durham University

To hear the views of the panel members following the event and to offer your comments please click here.

The debate over educational standards and the future of examinations is critically important to the success of our economy and country. It is also a debate central to Edexcel, one of the UK’s main examination bodies, and to Pearson, its parent company. It was to help inform this debate and signal our determination to play [...]

Not surprisingly, there was a wide range of opinions expressed on the questions we posed, as well as some challenges we had not identified in the consultation document. A number of themes recurred across the seminars. First, there was widespread agreement that the future of examinations was the wrong starting point for our discussion and [...]

How best to set world leading standards? In our consultation paper, we asked how to ensure our examinations help our education system meet the highest standards in the world and how we equip our young people for the challenges of the global economy. We suggested that Pearson could help meet this ambition by creating our [...]

As we have set out in the introduction, our consultations revealed a wide range of views on the issues we raised and the way forward. There were also concerns which we had not addressed explicitly in our initial report. These include a lack of confidence over comparability, wariness of competition between examination boards, worries over [...]

This process has been heartening because there is a clear appetite for improvement. The emphasis has been on incremental change rather than a radical overhaul of examinations. This cannot be used as an excuse for delay. We intend to play our role in bringing about change for the better. So in the light of the [...]

The discussions summarised above took place between the 23rd February and 8th March. These comprised 5 seminars convened and moderated by the independent think tank Reform. All sessions used our paper “Leading on Standards: a consultation on the future of examinations”, published on the 31st January 2012 as the stimulus for debate, and were independently chaired and transcribed …

As part of the Leading on Standards consultation and in partnership with the think tank Reform, Pearson hosted a seminar on Thursday 23rd February with teachers and head teachers from across the country to discuss the big questions surrounding our education and exams system.

To watch a full video of this seminar and to offer your comments please click here.