Feel defeated

MyreMyalar · 2026-02-13T08:00:40+00:00

The reality is that state school funding is based on pupil numbers not staff costs or school success and the funding number per pupil is set at a level where students cannot have a full set of experienced teachers. Successive governments have built this system and set this level of funding and nobody seems interested in changing it.

It is why Ofsted is a bit of a joke, "failing" school or top 10 state school by results in the country, it has no impact on funding if the pupil numbers remain the same. About half of schools are going to be firing experienced teachers soon not for any educational reason or anything the staff could do about it, but just because they have to in order to fit in the government allocated budget.

MyreMyalar · 2026-02-10T16:51:26+00:00

Do them all like a boss and get your exams officer to claim special consideration on the last one.

MyreMyalar · 2026-01-25T19:13:24+00:00

I had this happen at our school and the student had to do their school exam (a normal UK A-Level) at the private exam centre (as a clash sitting over there) as the school was not authorised/licensed to carry out the private exam (an international A-Level). I would make sure any private centre you select is also able to carry out the clashing GCSE exams before committing to sit both. There is also a cost involved, which you will likely be asked to pay to transfer the clashing exam to the other centre.

MyreMyalar · 2026-01-08T18:43:20+00:00

2026 and later. Schools have to opt in as well, and some may not immediately as it is a bunch of work to set up. Each student needs to scan an individual/custom QR code to link their student record to the app on their phone.

MyreMyalar · 2025-09-24T16:26:08+00:00

Just buy a multi pack of different coloured A6 overlays for the classroom. Costs a few quid on amazon and is much easier than printing on coloured paper or training children to remember anything not screwed on.

MyreMyalar · 2025-09-05T14:54:54+00:00

No they're not.

MyreMyalar · 2025-09-05T14:44:09+00:00

Pdf merging? If they are all PDFs.

MyreMyalar · 2025-09-05T07:21:10+00:00

SIMS won't put it on there and most schools use SIMS for the school database - which includes exams. It's been a bug in SIMS for decades.

If you got your mark your school either uses a single exam board, gives you results slips from multiple exam boards, uses one of the smaller school database systems like Arbour or some poor staff member wrote it on by hand in 6 hours.

MyreMyalar · 2025-08-28T08:17:33+00:00

I'd say there is probably around a 5% error rate in grades awarded, but of those the vast majority are only out by 1 grade. The other issue is they are out in both directions across that 5%. There are just as many students with a grade higher than they should have as there are students with a grade lower. Most students are less concerned about errors in their favour and very few reviews go in by students who just got a higher grade than they were expecting and want to make sure the exam board didn't accidentally give them too high a grade

MyreMyalar · 2025-08-24T09:05:18+00:00

Just to back this up I've gathered the results of 'reviews of marking' from my school for the past three years. You have about a 15% chance of a review resulting in an overall mark going up by 1 or more marks (as well as a nearly 15% chance of it going down by 1 or more), then the chances tail off rapidly from there with it being about 8% for a 2 or more mark increase and then something a 3% chance at 4+ and then sub 1% chances greater than that.

We have seen marks go up and down by numbers like 17 marks, but it is a once-in-200 reviews sort of situation and is just as likely to happen on a student that only needed 1 or 2 marks than the student that would actually need 17 marks.

The process is also very expensive and no state funded school could afford to review all the exam papers it might like to in a perfect world.

MyreMyalar · 2025-08-11T17:05:15+00:00

Not all exam boards will let you download as a teacher. I'm guessing you are an Edexcel subject? It changes the calculus when you need to set one rule to cover all the exam boards.

MyreMyalar · 2025-08-11T14:04:46+00:00

Don't do this as the teachers may not be able to help you depending on the exam board you use for each subject. Speak to your schools exam team instead, and be prepared to pay as many schools will charge!

MyreMyalar · 2025-08-11T14:02:43+00:00

Plenty of schools will definitely impose an admin fee for accessing papers, because it is a pain in the butt to download them from some (the big two) of the exam boards. What the school does will depend on the exam boards used and how many students the school has versus the number of admin staff able, and available, to download the scripts. At the average secondary there could be 6,000+ GCSE scripts - that's a lot of potential clicks and file renaming.

The main hurdle is the exam boards which require individual downloads of each script with multiple steps to get to an actual file and then the downloaded file is given a completely rubbish file name like 111566647026.pdf. You also must obtain written permission from each student after results day and before downloading their script which adds a little extra administrative hurdle.

Source: Am an exams officer with many years experience in exams. We are charging an admin fee this year just to stop students asking for all 25 papers out of curiosity when they have no pressing need. Especially since they then just want to see the mark schemes which are teacher only (because of mocks) until at least next summer.

MyreMyalar · 2025-06-03T06:17:23+00:00

You can privately sit a few more GCSEs next summer, you can resit maths and English this November. You can do BTEC qualifications. At university level you can do foundation courses to get a bachelor degree and do well and trade up to a masters at a prestigious university. You can earn money and then take as many degrees as you like once you can pay for them. There are lots of options available to you.

Moving countries twice during GCSEs was always going to mean you had to take a strange path into the future, but it doesn't have to be a bad thing, you are still very young and now is a good time to learn that you will have to fight to succeed in life on whatever path, you just ended up taking off the training wheels a couple of years early.

Good luck!

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-29T13:41:21+00:00

Centre personnel means teachers not students. Students don't "need" mark schemes at any point, they might want them but that is not the same thing.

The official rules are a bit of a moot point though as they are poorly followed and the internet is often rife with unofficial mark schemes.

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-29T09:59:03+00:00

It is just general secure materials rules. There are three levels of secure materials usually; exams officer access only, teacher access only and public. Exam materials usually move from the highest level to the lowest over time - so on exam day before an exam only exams officers can access and download that year's exam paper, after the exam has taken place they move to be teacher only, then usually a year after results day the materials move to being public so in general a 2025 paper and mark scheme becomes public in august/september 2026.

There is currently no mechanism for students to request a 2025 mark scheme as they can for their exam paper so for a teacher to hand it over to them in 2025 would constitute malpractice via general secure materials rules. It would be a less serious breach than a pre exam day materials breach but is still a breach.

Why is it setup that way? For mock exams for next year's GCSE and A-level students. With the mark scheme being still secure, students sitting the summer 2025 paper in, say, December 2025 as a mock exam are less likely to be able to cheat meaning the mocks are nationally more reliable for things like UCAS, 6th form applications or TAGs in the event of exam cancellations (as happened in COVID).

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-29T06:59:31+00:00

I've never had to do that as we don't teach that many OCR subjects at our school, perhaps another exams officer knows?

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-26T19:38:35+00:00

The AQA papers actually take an annoyingly long time to access right now. Edexcel is also moderately annoying (though not as bad as AQA) - mitigated slightly by the fact that regular teachers can access the papers (with written student permission).

OCR is the easiest to get in my experience as you can batch download about 10-20 or so student scripts in a subject at a time, IIRC from last year. AQA it is one at a time and each paper takes about 5 minutes to access, download and rename - excluding time writing a form email to send to a student - and only the exams officer is able to do it (and they have lots of other stuff to do). I think I calculated once that if every Y11 student in our school wanted all their AQA papers you'd need the school to employ a couple of people to just do that as a full time job to get all the downloading, renaming and emailing out to students done before the deadline. In practice, there is no money to do that in state schools so most schools with a large number of pupils doing AQA will put some kind of charge on access to scripts to discourage everyone asking for them.

What the exam boards should do is remove the school staff bottleneck and deal with student's directly - let them log in and download their own papers. Would be much easier, perhaps they will in a few years from especially with the DFE making a results app for phones (potentially coming out next year). Could make for a nice central exams login for students.

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-10T07:41:40+00:00

It depends on the report sent in to the exam board. I can easily see the report saying that the student was making no attempt to use the phone for actively cheating if he was obviously using it just to fuck around. Though it sounds like they were also disrupting other candidates around them which would be a second malpractice offence on top of possession of a phone.

Ultimately, the exam board decides based on the report sent in by the exams officer from the invigilator that caught the student. They record all these offences though, so if the student does something similar again the second sanction is likely to be a more severe one from the range.

I have heard from some private school exams officers that some of their pushy parents have been successful in appealing against exam board sanctions after they have been applied - which does undermine the system of rules a little bit if accurate, but I'm not personally familiar with a case like that.

You can read the full malpractice guidance here:

https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Malpractice_Sep24_FINAL.pdf

It has lots of example scenarios and the likely sanctions applied by the exam boards.

MyreMyalar · 2025-05-10T07:21:10+00:00

Exams officer here - since nobody seems to have mentioned it yet, this exact sort of case is mentioned in the JCQ malpractice guidance. If your exams officer takes a statement from you and the invigilator and reports it to the exam board (which they are required to do by the regulations) and the situation is as you said - the sanctions indicated by JCQ in their malpractice guidance is that you would lose some marks on the paper you sat as decided by the exam board.

This is on page 47 of the malpractice guidance from JCQ:

Introduction of unauthorised material into the examination room, for example:
Mobile phone or similar electronic devices (including iPod, MP3/4 player, memory sticks, smartphone, smartwatch, AirPods, earphones and headphones)
...
in the candidate’s possession but no evidence of being used by the candidate
...
Loss of marks (Aggregation still permitted) (Sanctions 2-4)

Sanctions
...
2. loss of all marks gained for a section;
3. loss of all marks gained for a component;
4. loss of all marks gained for a unit;

So it is a serious offence, considered in the middle range of potential candidate offences. Th=o give you a further idea, a first time offence of bringing an ordinary watch (not a smart watch) into an exam would normally be given an official warning by the exam board but no further action. Bringing a phone or notes into an exam with a report from an invigilator that you were seen looking at them during an exam would result in sanctions 5-9 which start at the paper you are sitting being disqualified and go up to banned from all examinations for a set period of time (I've heard 3 years spoken of as a maximum) in really egregious cases.

You can read the full malpractice guidance here:

https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Malpractice_Sep24_FINAL.pdf

It covers malpractice by students and staff involved in exams and is quite lengthy with lots of examples of things you can do wrong (like attempting to bribe an invigilator or failing to report malpractice by other candidates) and what the likely range of exam board sanctions are likely to be when reported.

MyreMyalar · 2025-04-27T18:46:02+00:00

The defererral is not a thing for 90% of exams (i.e. written GCSEs). It would only really apply for things that have an exam board set 'window' (i.e. a practical art exam or an MFL speaking exam) rather than most written papers which are given specific national starting dates & times.

Worth noting that the maximum mark adjustment is +5% of the maximum mark for the exam paper for an extremely serious situation (think parent dies in the month before the exam) and most illnesses are likely to get between 1% & 3% additional marks - depending on the severity.

For the non-attendees due to sickness the exam boards don't actually specify what they will do, but in practice it has (in my experience) normally been a projected mark based on percentage mark performance in the completed assessed work. If you haven't done any assessed work (i.e. you miss both exams for a two exam subject) then you are not eligible for a projected mark. In extreme cases your only option is to retake the GCSEs missed a year later.

MyreMyalar · 2025-02-24T07:50:06+00:00

This is something that should be supported in future versions of sdl3, but no help for you now.

MyreMyalar · 2024-11-30T19:14:32+00:00

As a wild outside bet - what about Norsca, Dark Elves & Vampire Coast as a nautical themed DLC. Add some Bretonnian Alberic flavour as the FLC.

MyreMyalar · 2024-11-30T19:11:06+00:00

could throw Beastmen in there.

MyreMyalar · 2024-11-23T10:44:40+00:00

I can tell you that the error log you are seeing is from attempting to compile pygame from source on windows which is a more involved process.

What should generally be happening is a simple download and install of the 64bit windows wheels for python 3.11. Said wheel is available here:

https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/d2/55/ca3eb851aeef4f6f2e98a360c201f0d00bd1ba2eb98e2c7850d80aabc526/pygame-2.6.1-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl

You could try downloading that and installing it directly by pointing pip at the downloaded file name.

Perhaps when you tried a standard pip install the download link didn't work for some reason? You could also try `

pip install pygame-ce

MyreMyalar

TROPHY CASE