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By Rob, January 10, 2010 12:45 pm

Image © ccarlstead @ Flickr CC BY 2.0

I work in a special school, with a small number of pupils.  This means we enter a relatively small number of pupils for examinations etc.  Earlier in the year my bursar came to find me with an invoice for well over £1000.  “Is this yours?” she asked me.  Being a stickler for financial protocols in school, I was sure I hadn’t spent that much money, until I noticed the logo on the top of the invoice.  The logo belonged to Edexcel, and the invoice was BTEC Science fees for the 18 students I had just entered.  Scale that ten times or more, and across multiple subjects, you start to get an idea of some of scale of examination spending by schools, but is this really value for money?

On the day we broke up for the Christmas vacation I received a message from a copyright officer at AQA concerning copyrighted materials on my blog.  Immediately my mind jumped to the science resources I had put online.  Did any of these contain examination questions or materials from AQA that shouldn’t have been there.  I have been extremely careful which of my resources I share, so I decided to investigate further.  A quick search of the logs revealed that someone with an IP address belonging to the Northern Examination And Assessment Board in Manchester had been following links from Google Images to my site.  In fact they had visited my site over a period of an hour and forty-five minutes so they clearly had nothing better to do a few days before Christmas.   Yes I had been very naughty indeed, I had linked to an AQA logo in a blog post of two years ago offering free resources to support the AQA exam.  Of course I removed the offending link from my blog, requested that Google re-index the page, and emailed the copyright officer to let them know.  It is strange that they didn’t have time to acknowledge my email given that they had an hour and forty five minutes of free time to keep looking at it!  If only AQA would invest more money in the format of their (atrocious) multiple choice core science exam and less money on red tape and copyright, our children might perform better in their examinations.  I’m glad to see they are putting our huge examination fees to good use.

In a press release on the 7th January (and reported in the TES on Friday 8th Jan) the National Education Trust questions the spending of millions of pounds of pounds of taxpayers money on examination fees.  With the current huge levels of public debt we should be asking ourselves if it is still best value for money to pour money into the pockets of the examination boards’ shareholders.  Perhaps it is time to look at examinations at 16 (and their fees) afresh!

Comments welcome

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By Rob, July 10, 2008 12:46 pm

Until now the site hosting my science worksheets has been running on my own hardware, in a variety of locations. Unfortunately these old servers are no longer available and this means that this site is going to have to come down. (There is also the problem of finding time to keep a Joomla installation with various plug-ins up to date with security holes patched).

Whilst we are not a very busy site we do receive a steady stream of visitors following our links from Google or the TES site. I would like to continue to offer my resources for others. The alternatives were paying for a hosted solution (which still requires man-hours to maintain and update) or to use a free site such as a Wiki.

I decided to do the latter and have moved all of our sites onto free providers (such as Google’s blogger etc.) My (free) science worksheets and resources will continue to be available at http://resources.fiendishlyclever.com until I find a better home for them. I’ve uploaded all the files that were on the previous site – SEN worksheets to support QCA, AQA GCSE Core science and WJEC Entry level.

Thank you to the very few people who have taken these files and bothered to register/leave feedback – it is for you that I have left these resources on the Internet.

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By Rob, February 22, 2008 8:21 pm

I’ve finally done it! I’ve sorted through my resources and uploaded my SEN resources that support AQA GCSE core science. As with all other worksheets, these worksheets are free and available to download now in pdf format from my site without charge. I’ve not been able to upload all my material – many of my worksheets are modified versions of the Nelson Thornes material – however what I have uploaded you are welcome to take and trial in your own lessons. All my worksheets are licenced under the creative commons scheme.

Edit: Sept 08 As you will see from my blog I had to move the worksheets to a new home.  Take a look at the sheets on their temporary home.