Exam invigilation and the furlough scheme.

Mike_in_Horwich

Thankyou one and all for the extremely useful help on this thread (especially InvigillJill). I've been in loose communication with my school over this topic and have yet to receive ANY response. When I do I will remember to post back on here.

My simple take on this is:   The government scheme is designed to minimise the loss of income for all employees resulting from covid-19. The schools already have the budget to pay both for exam entry fees and for invigilation provided by professional staff from OUTSIDE the school as is required for GCSE's. To fail to pay both the exam boards and the invigilators will result in a surplus of budget at the school and, I suspect, this will be used over the following year to 'bolster' pay for full-time teaching staff.

Kayzy

I had been offered and accepted exam invigilation days for summer term so contacted HR at the school to enquire about any payment.  I was told “We are government funded so cannot furlough staff”.  Is this correct?

hotcook

Mike_in_Horwich said:

Thankyou one and all for the extremely useful help on this thread (especially InvigillJill). I've been in loose communication with my school over this topic and have yet to receive ANY response. When I do I will remember to post back on here.

My simple take on this is:   The government scheme is designed to minimise the loss of income for all employees resulting from covid-19. The schools already have the budget to pay both for exam entry fees and for invigilation provided by professional staff from OUTSIDE the school as is required for GCSE's. To fail to pay both the exam boards and the invigilators will result in a surplus of budget at the school and, I suspect, this will be used over the following year to 'bolster' pay for full-time teaching staff.

I initiated communication with my school (state funded academy) on behalf of all the invigilators that work there (around20) and it took a while but they have written to us individually this week with an offer of 50% of what we earned in May/June/July last year as a 'gesture of our goodwill and appreciation for your past efforts' but clearly stating that their HR advisor has been clear that the school has no contractual obligation to pay us anything because the schedule for the summer term had not been issued and so we had not entered into a 'period of engagement'. I don't want to sound ungrateful but what about the rest of it if the school has already received its budget to pay us?  There are references in the letter to the school's loss of private income streams, catering, lettings and third party rent, but I fail to see how this affects us.  Surely if some staff are paid from private income streams they can be furloughed as per the info in some of the links already posted on this thread, so the school shouldn't need some of 'our' money to pay them?  I wrote to my MP - no answer.  I rang the council  - just got passed from department to department, no one knew anything. I am wondering if ACAS can help?  It's so hard to find anyone that actually knows anything helpful - we need a union!

sharpe106

It is still down to the employer to furlough or not anyway at the end of the day and what they want to spend the money on. If they want to spend the budget that they would usually use to pay you on something else as they no longer need you then they can. I would personally take the 50% as I doubt very much you will get anything else as they have already stated their position and they are right they don't have to pay you anything. So you can't legally make them pay you any more.

Mike_in_Horwich

Kayzy said:

I had been offered and accepted exam invigilation days for summer term so contacted HR at the school to enquire about any payment.  I was told “We are government funded so cannot furlough staff”.  Is this correct?

Strictly speaking the school cannot furlough staff for whom they have received budget money in advance - from taxpayer funds ultimately. This is the reason why teachers (and TA's) are not on furlough but are being paid as normal. However, given that logic, it should be extended to invigilators who would be legally required to manage any external exams - these cannot be run by teaching staff (unlike mock exams). The budget does indeed exist for this cost. The invigilators who would have worked will suffer a financial loss - perhaps one of a very few group of public employees who will suffer. I'd welcome any comments from anybody who can identify any other group (in the public sector) by the way.

I still have no response from my school and with half-term I suspect nothing will happen until at least Monday, 1st June.

sharpe106

There has been several other posts on him from people that work for the public sector that have not been paid, if they are contracted then the public sector are still paying them, as what is the point in not doing,  but there is a lot that are not, supply workers mainly that have not been paid similar to invigilators. 

Kayzy

Thank you very much ‘hotcook’ and ‘Mike in Horwich’ for your helpful comments.  I am about to compile my response to HR at the school and will let you know if I receive a favourable reply.

moneymoaner2020

Dear colleague,

I hope that you and your loved ones are keeping well and staying safe during this time.

Since I last got in touch with you, you’ll have received updates from some of my fellow AQA colleagues on what the cancellation of the summer exam series means for you and the work you do with us.

I’d like to thank you for your patience over the past few weeks. We work with tens of thousands of associates carrying out different roles for us at AQA, which has meant a lot of conversations have needed to take place for us to make the right decisions.

I know it’s been an uncertain time so I’m glad that I’m now able to clarify our position and share those aforementioned decisions.

Our associates play a vital role in the exam system, so we want to support you where we can – but we’ve also promised to return any savings as a result of the cancellation of exams this summer to schools and colleges.

As we’ve shared previously, we’ve been in ongoing discussions with HMRC and DfE on whether it might be possible to furlough our associates. We now have clarity on this and sadly it isn’t an option due to the way you’re contracted with us. This means we’ve had to make some very difficult decisions.

After a lot of thought, we’ve decided that we can’t justify making payments to all the associates who won’t need to do any work for us this summer.

We have tens of thousands of summer associates, so even a small payment to each of them would result in millions of pounds being unavailable to return to schools and colleges.

I know that, where some other exam boards have offered small payments to summer associates, these have not been significant enough to make a difference on an individual basis – which makes the overall cost to schools and colleges difficult to justify.

I realise that this will come as a disappointment, but I hope you can understand the rationale behind our decision given the circumstances we find ourselves in this year. There will most certainly be more opportunities in the future and I hope we’ll be able to work together when those opportunities arrive.

Please note, if you carry out other roles throughout the year with AQA, you’ll receive more information on this in another email. Please be assured that any work you’re currently carrying out on behalf of AQA or do so in the future, will be paid in full.

If you’ve any questions, please get in touch with Resource Management Team, and we’ll endeavour to respond as quickly as we can.

Thank you for your ongoing support,

Mark Bedlow
Chief Executive (Interim)
So this is what we received as examiners from AQA on Thursday. I am not sure how many of you have kept up to date with this but bacially OCR examiners have been furloughed Edexcel/pearson offered 20% and myself nothing. So basically if you invigilators largely monitor the AQA exams then surely you have a case to get something back off your centre when they are rebated? I am unsure what the other exam boards are choosing to do as feel I am being treated unfairly by AQA. This is chairty that has 84 million in the bank in accordance to their most recent financial data so they should be investigated and ordered to pay schools rebates and examiners an amount or lose their charitable status. That is my moan anyway but hope this is useful information for you all. Hopefully if we all keep fighting our corners we will get something out of this.  

Mike_in_Horwich

moneymoaner2020 - thankyou VERY much for sharing that with us. Your input does indeed shed extra light on the subject. Now, I'm an ex software developer with no inside knowledge of the education system beyond what I've learned over the past 12 or so years invigilating. I'm assuming an examiner is a marker of the students paper - work carried out post exam (obs). I can see that you would, just like invigilators, have no work this summer. What a strange system though that permits the different exam boards to handle matters so radically different. Intriguing that OCR have furloughed staff. That implies to me that OCR will not be charging schools for the entrance exams as to do so would create a very large bonus for them whilst lumbering the gen. taxpayer with their payroll charges.

I looked at the entrance fees of several boards for GCSE's today and derived a charge of between £38 per subject to £78 for tri-science (these are rough figures). I estimate each student will undertake maybe 8-10 exam subjects (averaged out) and at £45 average per subject this is £360-£450 per student for GCSE's. I've located the budget for the school I work at for last year and it's approx. £91,000 and with about 180 year 11's that's approx. £73k as a mid value entrance fee total cost. I cannot determine if the invigilation pay uses the £18k remaining or if we count as part of the "support staff" costs (another budget value) noted in the accounts.

But, with refunded exam fees there should be sufficient money to make some payment towards invigilators. I would be uneasy though receiving such at the examiner's expense.

BinP

The academy I work for as an invigilator is proposing to pay us 25% of last year’s summer earnings, probably in July and the remaining 75% only if we work the rescheduled GCSE/A level exams in the autumn. Whilst I recognise this is better than nothing, we do feel we are being held to ransom over the 75%. The school states that if it pays us 100% now, it won’t have any budget to cover the additional autumn exams. The autumn season will obviously be no where near as big the summer one so I’m thinking savings on summer exam fees would cover additional invigilator costs.