Universities collaborate to support professional learning in schools
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
8 hours ago
- ITV News
WJEC faces £350k fine after hundreds of students given wrong GCSE results
An exam board is to be fined £350,000 for breaching rules which led to hundreds of students being given the wrong GCSE grades. More than 1,500 students who had taken a WJEC food preparation and nutrition GCSE in England last year were given an incorrect result. WJEC is Wales' largest awarding body, but also offers qualifications across England and Northern Ireland. Ofqual, England's exam watchdog, said WJEC had failed to adjust teachers' marking of coursework – which made up 50% of the qualification – to ensure results were in line with national standards. It meant that 847 students received lower grades and 680 got higher grades than they should have. Those who received the incorrect lower grades were given the corrected grade several months later, but those who received the incorrect higher grades kept them, the watchdog confirmed. In the second case, WJEC reported that it had allowed nearly 4,000 exam papers between 2017 and 2023 to be reviewed by the same assessors who had originally marked at least part of them, which broke exam regulations. In response to the incident, WJEC said it "sincerely" apologises and takes "full responsibility." It has issued credit notes as financial compensation to schools and colleges affected, totalling just over £219,000. Ofqual said the proposed fine reflects the "serious nature of WJEC's failures." Amanda Swann, Ofqual's Executive Director for General Qualifications, said: "Students must be able to trust that their results accurately reflect their performance, and what they know, understand and can do. "These proposed fines reflect the serious nature of WJEC's failures and our commitment to protecting the interests of students and maintaining the integrity of our qualifications system. This includes the requirement that GCSE, AS and A levels students are entitled to an independent review of their exam marks." The watchdog said it took into account that WJEC had admitted the breaches, accepted responsibility, and taken steps to prevent the problems happening again. A WJEC spokesperson said: 'We would like to sincerely apologise to the learners affected by these incidents. We take full responsibility and acknowledge that we did not meet the usual high standards expected of us."Having cooperated fully with Ofqual throughout the process, we want to reassure learners and centres that we have undertaken a thorough review of our processes and implemented appropriate measures to ensure such incidents do not occur again in the future. The measures we successfully introduced in 2024 have proven effective." With regards to the impact on exam papers in Wales, the exam body added: "Regarding the fine associated with reviews of marking, Qualifications Wales is currently considering the appropriate steps to take. We are working closely with them and will provide a response once a final decision has been reached." Welsh Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Education, Natasha Asghar MS, said: 'The scale of the failure undermines trust in the qualifications system and raises serious questions about oversight and governance. 'The WJEC must ensure that robust safeguards are now in place to prevent such errors from happening again. She added: 'Pupils across Wales deserve full confidence in the exam board ahead of results day next month and this incident does nothing to reassure them that their own grades will be accurate and reliable.'
The Herald Scotland
8 hours ago
- The Herald Scotland
How would I tell students about Gaza? The same as every genocide
As many of you know, before becoming a journalist I spent more than ten happy and successful years teaching English. In Scotland, that means having near total freedom to build a curriculum for your students and, influenced by those who taught me, I have always believed in presenting challenging literature and new writers that students might not have encountered before. One such author was Chinua Achebe, who is best known for his seminal novel Things Fall Apart, which remains the most widely translated and studied novel to have come out of Africa. But Achebe wasn't just a novelist. During the Biafra war – a brutal and too-often forgotten conflict in which more than one million people were starved to death in a besieged and blockaded territory – he wrote poetry that was subsequently published as a collection entitled Beware, Soul Brother. Although many of his poems are extremely powerful, there is one that stands out more than others: Refugee Mother and Child. Read more Lessons to Learn: The text offers a vivid and brutal snapshot of the plight of the Biafran people, distilling their suffering into the experiences of a young mother caring for a starving child 'she soon will have to forget'. Amidst the horror of a refugee camp she holds a 'ghost smile between her teeth' as she tends to the 'rust-coloured hair left on his skull', an act carried out 'like putting flowers on a tiny grave'. It is, above all, a stunning representation of pure love, dedication and dignity in the face of unspeakable pain. When teaching this poem I would very often use a photo by Don McCullin to help students fully develop their understanding and responses. Taken in 1968, Starving Twenty Four Year Old Mother with Child, Biafra is one of the most harrowing images ever produced by one of the world's great photographers, and features a young, emaciated woman looking straight into the camera as her starving son tries to feed at her visibly empty breast. Like Refugee Mother and Child, that photo shines an unflinching light on the best and worst of humanity, showing us both extremes of which we are capable. And last week, we saw that again in the now infamous photo from Gaza. Once again, a mother holds her starving child with love and dignity; once again, she does so under the shadow of the deliberate starvation of desperate, innocent people; once again, this all happens as the world looks on. Read more: Horrifying images are clearly the tipping point for public outrage over Gaza The image of a Gazan mother holding her starving child shocked the world (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images) When I taught about Biafra, students would ask why it was allowed to happen, why the world watched as a deliberate campaign of starvation was waged against a civilian population, why innocent children were left to face the most horrific suffering. Similar questions came up when I taught about Rwanda, which I often did using former BBC journalist Fergal Keane's utterly astonishing reflective essay, Spiritual Damage. It is a text that always elicited powerful responses from students who, as with Biafra, often knew little or nothing about a genocide in which up to a million people were slaughtered, many of them hacked to death by their neighbours. Keane writes about the smell of death seeping into his clothes, his skin, and his soul. He confronts the racism that was (and still is) used to excuse 'a final solution of monstrous proportions' as being simply a manifestation of 'ancient tribal hatred' or, even worse, just something that Africans do. At one point, he explains that his belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil was 'whittled away' in Rwanda, suggesting a slow and painful change that took place massacre by massacre, body by body, machete wound by machete wound. He also refers to the colonial roots of the violence, the role of German troops who 'tutored Rwandan peasants in the arts of massacre', and the fact that the Americans – who successfully demanded that UN troops were removed from Rwanda once the genocide had begun – had 'bickered over the funding of armoured vehicles' that might have saved lives. The wider implication was never lost: countries like ours didn't just let it happen, they were complicit. Often our discussions would lead us to talk about Christine Shelley, the US State Department official who admitted that 'acts of genocide had occurred', and then could not or would not answer when asked the obvious follow-up: 'How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?' Asked if she had been given 'specific guidance' not to use the word genocide 'in isolation', she offered a waffling, technocratic response that even today, more than twenty years on, remains sickening. Why wouldn't they use the term 'genocide' or even properly consider the possibility? According to a then-secret, and now declassified, memo from the US Dept of Defence, legal officials were worried that doing so would require the government 'to actually 'do something''. And that, too, is now happening again, as so-called world leaders refuse to call a genocide by its true name, and in doing so make themselves, and their countries, and all of us, even more complicit in the escalating horrors that are unfolding. One day I might go back to the classroom, and if I do I will still teach about historic injustices, but I will also end up teaching about Gaza. Perhaps I'll use the work of Refaat Alareer or Hiba Abu Nada, both killed by Israeli airstrikes back in 2023. And it will all happen again. I'll be asked why the world didn't stop it. I'll be asked why presidents and prime ministers justified the horror, and why they refused to use the word genocide. I'll be asked why we left children to be starved to death in their parents' arms. And the worst part is that the answers will be the same as well.
Powys County Times
11 hours ago
- Powys County Times
18th century shipwreck among ‘best preserved' of its time, experts say
Latest diving surveys have revealed a 'remarkable' completeness of the wreckage of an 18th century English warship preserved on the seabed. Twenty metres deep underwater and nine miles off the Kent coast, the Northumberland shipwreck is said to potentially be one of the 'best preserved' wooden ships. The latest survey, organised by Historic England with MSDS divers, found wooden decks, lengths of rope, copper cauldrons, and wooden chests with some preserved cannon balls inside had survived 'particularly well'. The 320-year-old protected wreck site is at high risk of deterioration as shifting sands expose it to processes which may erode the well preserved wreckage, Historic England said. Its licensee Dan Pascoe, who monitors the site, said: 'The Northumberland has the potential to be one of the best-preserved wooden warships in the UK. 'However, at 20 metres underwater and nine miles offshore, it is out of sight and mind to most people.' The Northumberland was a third rate 70-gun warship built in Bristol in 1679 as part of Samuel Pepys's regeneration of the English Navy. It sank during the 'Great Storm' on November 26, 1703 off Kent along with three other warships, including The Mary – the location of which is still unknown. They were all part of Queen Anne's fleet, the last Stuart monarch, reigning from 1702 to 1714. A film made by streaming service History Hit airs on Thursday detailing the new survey and the initial construction of the Northumberland. Creator Dan Snow said: 'Northumberland is the missing link. Built roughly halfway between the Mary Rose and HMS Victory, this wreck can fill in crucial details of shipbuilding and life at sea at that pivotal moment in our history. 'We have the Mary Rose, the 'Tudor time capsule' – well here's a Stuart time capsule to sit alongside it.' Future work on the site may include taking wood samples or dendrochronological sampling to find out more about the ship's construction and confirm its identity. Paul Jeffery, marine leader at Historic England, said: 'The completeness of the Northumberland wreck site is remarkable. 'It is a race against time as more of the Northumberland wreck becomes exposed.'
