General Certificate of Secondary Education (Hansard, 10 December 1985)

§ Sir Keith Joseph

The Government funded, national programme of preparation for the GCSE involves all teachers in introductory training seminars during 1986. These seminars will provide a general introduction to the GCSE and its assessment methods, particularly with application to the teacher's own specific subject. As GCSE courses begin, however, and teachers experience the inevitable difficulties associated with turning principles into practice, they will require further help and preparation related to the specific syllabuses that they are following and the assessment and moderation techniques involved. This further in-service training will need to be flexible and offered intermittently during the first two years of the new examination courses. The four examining groups in England are already drawing up plans for this further training and have estimated that their costs will be of the order of £4 million, of which £600,000 will be needed for the preparation of training materials. I have today written to the secretary to the joint council for the GCSE to say that the Department of Education and Science is prepared, subject to the approval of Parliament, to fund the 571W production of these materials by means of a special grant of £600,000 to the Secondary Examinations Council for onward transmission to the examining groups in England.

One half of this sum, £300,000, would be payable in the financial year 1986–87 and the other half in the following year, on receipt of a satisfactory progress report about the first year's activities. The examining groups will each be considering the best means of providing training, based on these new materials, for teachers using their syllabuses. Both the examining groups and the Department are in no doubt of the importance of this further in-service training for the GCSE, which should be of very great help to the teachers concerned.