According to data obtained through a freedom of information request by the Sunday Times, thousands of teachers have been caught cheating in an attempt to improve their students’ test results. The figures showed that nearly 2,300 malpractice offences had been committed by educational staff, who offered OCR exams, between 2012 and 2016. Over fifty percent of teachers charged with malpractice offences were accused of providing "improper assistance" to their students during exam periods. By comparison, over the same period, there were only 3,603 cases of candidates being caught cheating. Furthermore, the data revealed that students were punished more sternly than their teachers. For example, around 1,000 pupils were disqualified from papers or entire qualifications, but only 581 teachers receiving warnings, whilst 113 were given training, and only 83 were suspended from exam-related roles.
A spokesperson for OCR stated that “We take any allegation of malpractice very seriously and work closely with schools to resolve issues quickly and fairly. We report our malpractice figures every year to Ofqual." Alan Smithers, a professor of education from the University of Buckingham, declared that cheating during exams was equivalent to taking drugs in athletics and that the punishment for teachers should be "commensurate."
Last summer, England’s exams watchdog, Ofqual announced that it would review the system for allowing teachers to set exam papers. This measure followed accusations of cheating regarding two prominent UK public schools, Eton and Winchester. For example, Mo Tanweer, a deputy headmaster, was accused of circulating questions from an upcoming economics paper to other teachers, and Winchester’s head of history of art, Laurence Wolff, was suspended amid allegations that he provided prior information about exam questions to students. In November, an RSA report found that the number of teachers cheating had increased fourfold, with 388 penalties issued in 2016, compared to 97 in 2013. During the report’s launch, Julian Astle, the RSA’s director of creative learning and development, argued that education had become "like a game of ‘whack-a-mole’" as schools found ever more inventive ways to play the system. "It has become such a game that it is forcing teachers and school leaders to choose between helping pupils and helping themselves,” Mr Astle said. Meanwhile, Michelle Meadows, an executive director of Ofqual, told the education select committee in November that the organisation was "considering preventing teachers from teaching topics for which they had been involved in developing the exam, but added that “there are some really thorny issues associated with that which would need working through”."