Step 1: create an exam season. This is something you do within your management information system. I use SIMS, but there are other management information systems or MISs available. For people who haven't had the fortune of using one yet, it's basically a massive piece of software and a database that includes all your information about all your students in your school, and enables you to do different things - timetabling, behaviour management, monitor attendance, help plan your exams. These are big pieces of software and every school's got one, but they're in competition. It's like management information system wars going on constantly.
I just recently set up summer 2025 as an exam season. You import all your prospective candidates. So for me, that's all my year 11s. I'll also probably be pulling in year 10s as well, because some of them will be doing home languages, and some of them might be doing some GCSEs a bit early. So it's good to have your year 10s in there as well. And then you need to check that they've all got a candidate number, and if they don't have a candidate number, you need to make sure that you assign them one. Within your MIS, you have to assign them a candidate number. You can do it at any point, really. If there are some students in a year group who need to sit exams, then I'll just assign the whole year group their candidate numbers. I might do it in year 9 or year 10. You assign them a four-digit candidate number, which is their candidate number within your exam centre. And then you also assign them something called a unique candidate identifier, a UCI number, which is their unique number within the whole country.
They have a unique number, which is a four-digit number, within your centre, and then a unique one within the whole country, which is their UCI number. That's a long number. It's about 14 digits, something like that. So you've got your candidates in, and then the second thing you really need to do to create the season is to download base data. Base data is information that comes from the exam boards, and it's basically a big list of all the qualifications that an exam board runs. For the summer season, this gets released in November. So people have been able to download their base data and get all the qualifications that they're running in their school into that exam season, so that they can then start to make exam entries.
Step 2: make exam entries. This is where you're actually going to enter your students for the qualifications. This has got a little bit easier in recent years because in the past students did modular exams and you had to enter students multiple times across different sittings, and that would take ages. Whereas now, because students do what are called linear qualifications, where they do all the exams at the end of the course, you just enter them for the qualification, and then it naturally assumes that the students will be entered for each exam that's associated with that qualification.
To make entries you basically create big mark sheets associated with each qualification, and then you put like a Y into the column for each student when they're going to be entered for that particular qualification. And then once you've done all your entries, and that usually takes me a few days to do, you submit them to the exam board. There are some qualifications that it's a lot easier to enter students for, which is to do with whether or not there are foundation and higher levels. If there's no foundation and higher split in a qualification, you can just enter the students. You know they're going to do it, so there's no issue. Foundation or higher makes it a bit more complicated. So, in languages, in maths and in science you enter students for either a foundation tier or a higher tier. I usually wait on those. I've already done entries for quite a lot of subjects, but I haven't done them for those three sets of subjects because I don't know at this moment, and a lot of the time the teachers won't know at this moment, which tier the student is going to sit. The entry deadline to put exam entries in is usually towards the end of February, so we've got until then to work it out. You have to make sure that you hit that deadline as it’s all about the money and the cost.
It's surprising to a lot of people who don't work in education or exams, how much this costs. If you get all your entries in by the February deadline, then you pay the normal fee. It’s about £50 for each GCSE entry. If you miss that February deadline, then any entry you make after that goes straight to double fees. So, if it was a £50 entry, it would become £100. And then there is another deadline towards the end of April, I think it is, where if you are entering a student then for a GCSE qualification, it will cost you triple fees, so £150. The invoices that come in will show whether or not this is a late fee or a double late fee. And so, the people in finance will know if you have not done your entries or have submitted your entries late. Obviously, there are some occasions when students get entered at the last minute for things. Someone suddenly discovers that a student speaks Urdu. It's not just that you forgot and it's not your fault. It does happen from time to time that late entries will occur for a specific reason. But the financial penalties are immense, particularly if it's a cohort of students. If you miss the entries for GCSE Science then that's going to cost a huge amount of money.
One thing I recommend is to have a tick off list to make sure that you're tracking whether or not you have actually submitted the entries, because that is probably the one thing that people worry about the most. It’s good to get it started early. If you can't do it yet, if you need to wait until after Christmas, that's fine. There's still plenty of time.
Step 3: draw up an exam timetable If you have Examscreen, you could have done that at the beginning of the year, because we put up our base data in September. You can share that with staff. You can publish it on your school website. We get a lot of phone calls starting from October saying, what day is this exam on? What date is my child going to finish their exams? And things like that. People want to see the programme of exams. The one thing that you won't be able to tell people at that point is where students are going to be sitting their exams precisely. That's a step further down the process where you actually start to allocate students to exams. So you know when all the exams are going to be now.
At this point you can also issue a timetable to candidates. It won't have any of their venues on, but it will have all their exams on it with the dates. It's quite a good thing to do, because if there are any mistakes, candidates will let you know…..I've been entered for this and I shouldn't have been, or I haven't been entered for this. It's a good way of getting feedback on your entries, so that you know if you've missed something. And also I think for the candidates, it's really good for them to know that far in advance, these are the days, these are the big days, this is what's coming down the line.
Step 4: start invigilator planning You can send something out to your invigilators which says…. this is when all the exams are, let me know when you're free, when you're available. Please all say that you're free and available for all sessions. The thing that will drive exams officers mad is the person who comes to you, says they want to be an invigilator and you then go through your recruitment process, do everything, get very excited. You send out your availability and they come back with three dates in May or something like that. Why have they done this if they're not available to work? Obviously, with invigilators, it's the more the merrier. It never hurts to have people on board. But I think when you recruit people, you don't want someone who's booked a holiday for the whole of May and June.
So you can start to get their availability in and start to see how it's looking for you. Set a pretty firm deadline for getting their responses, so that you're then in a position to be able to allocate as soon as you can. And obviously, if you do think that you need to recruit more people, then you'll need to get on to that fairly quickly.
Step 5: seat your candidates This is probably the most time consuming aspect in the whole planning process, and it's probably the most tricky as well. Within your MIS system, there will be a facility where you can seat candidates. It's quite long and laborious. It looks almost exactly like how you book seats for the cinema. You will have an image of a room with lots of different vacant spaces in it. And you then allocate the seats. Some will be sat with your SEN team in very small rooms. So you have to do all of that. And of course, you're going to have quite a lot of exams. You've got about four and a half weeks worth of exams, probably two a day. So I usually find that if I can sit down in a concentrated period of time without getting disturbed, it usually takes me about two to three days to get the seating done. Then without getting disturbed, it usually takes me about two to three days to get the seating done. The timing is fairly crucial. So if you go too early on it, then you'll get so many changes that it will become really frustrating, and you're moving candidates all over the place and it ends up becoming a massive headache.
So you don't want to go too early on it. You want to make sure that all the arrangements are settled, all the access arrangements are settled and things like that. But then obviously if you leave it too late, then you've got to allocate all your invigilators, you've got to send candidates their information, so you don't want to leave it too late either. So there is a sweet spot, I usually find about the beginning of March is when I want to be doing that and starting to get information out to people in the middle to end of March. Once you've done your seating and you know what all your venues are going to be, you can allocate your invigilators.
Step 6: allocate invigilators This is my favourite bit of my job. There is an artistry to allocating your invigilators. It isn't is a science. It's like a combination of art and science. I wouldn't automate this process because it involves human beings. There's lots of things I'm taking into account when I'm allocating invigilators. So the number of slots that you give people, this is a really tricky thing to work out. The first thing I'll do is a rough allocation trying to make it as fair as possible. I'll bang people into different slots. What I do then is a pivot table, which tells me how many slots I've given to each invigilator. I can start to see instantly if I've slightly over-allocated somebody or under-allocated them. I can then start to shift things about if I've done that. I've tended to find over the last couple of years that about 18 or 19 slots is bog standard for an invigilator who's available quite a lot.
Where it gets trickier is where you've got someone who's not giving you that much availability. And what I tend to try and do with those people is that I'll probably give them as a proportion of the amount of availability they've given me, slightly more. But I'm not going to give them everything that they've given me, because that feels like I'm slightly punishing the people who have really good availability. You also do it on experience. There'll be some invigilators who will get slightly more, and they'll tend to be my lead invigilators, my very experienced invigilators. Or if I've got somebody who's doing something very specific. I have one guy who does computer rooms, and he's become a bit of an expert on just running the computer rooms and doing the setup for that. So he will ordinarily get more slots, because there's not that many people who can do that. So there's lots of things to balance and it's a real challenge.
Step 7: update timetable and republish At this point, I would update the timetable, put all the exam venues in, and then we can republish the timetable with all that information. It's now complete, so everybody can see what rooms are going to be used etc. You can now start to share information with candidates. So I would now give them a completed timetable with all their venues on.
Step 8: information for candidates There's also a lot of information that JCQ requires you to give them about the processes around exams. A lot of people will send it out multiple times during the year. Sometimes you can send it out when your mock exams happen, but this is a good time as well. This is all the stuff they need to know. Here's the timetable, and also here's all this information about the rules and things that have to be followed.
Step 9: complete pre-exam admin Probably about a couple of weeks before the exams I would do all my pre-exam admin. One of the things I will have to do is re-rooming. Some people might have someone else in the school who does this for them, but I do it myself. We tend to select a set of classrooms that we want to use for exams because they're isolated, they're in a good spot in the school for running exams, and it doesn't matter what lessons are timetabled in there, we will just move whatever's in there somewhere else. But that is a big job. This is a nightmare during mocks because everything's running as usual, so I tend to use what's available during mocks, which sometimes means compromising a little bit on what would be ideal.
But during the public exams, we don't do that. We've got a particular set of classrooms that we use, but they are classrooms that are heavily used by the school generally. So that's a lot of re-rooming. I'm re-rooming several classes every single day. This varies so much across schools. Some schools are like ours where it's really quite complex, there aren’t many free rooms, but other schools will have that luxury. It's also one of the bits where you're likely to get on people's nerves as well. This is where your good relationships with everyone matters, because you're moving people's classrooms around all the time. You suddenly just turn around in April and you’re saying “Hi, I've never spoken to you before. I don't know you, but I'm going to kick you out of your room continuously for the next four weeks. And if you're using the same classrooms, you will often be hitting the same teachers. So the block of classrooms we use is in our languages department and so it's often the same teachers that are being affected by it. In our school, they take it very well and everyone is very helpful. I also have to notify the attendance team about which students will be going into which exams so that they can get all their attendance stuff sorted in advance. I will also do the access arrangement lists for the SEND teams so that they can allocate TAs and people to support in exams. They obviously do all the stuff around awarding access arrangements to students, but then when it comes to actually seating them and putting them into a programme for their exams, then I'll do that and then share it with them. And then they allocate the TAs. And then there are some other things that you'll need to do. You’ll have to put together packs for invigilators so that they've got everything that they need when they come in and they go off to their rooms. We put a card on each student's desk, which has photo ID and information about them, their candidate number and things like that. So you need to make sure that all that stuff is in place.
Policies - when you get inspected, they check your policies. So we have to have certain policies around, for example; contingency, policies around exams appeals, policies around inclusion and disability, and all sorts of things we have to have ready for the inspector when they come in. You need to make sure that these are done and up to date. There will be stuff that you're going to put on the notice board, so I'm printing stuff off in advance for every day. I think it's really good to get ahead of all off this because there's enough to do on an exam day without having to print off loads of stuff as well. Do anything you can in advance.
Step 10: daily communication Make sure that you are notifying everyone what's happening every day. Either do that first thing in the morning or maybe even the night before. I send an e-mail to all staff. It's includes what the exams are for the day, what the rooms are that are being used, any re-rooming and who's affected. And that goes out every day. To all staff. I send it first thing in the morning. I usually prep it the night before. So all I have to do in the morning is get in, just click a button and it's gone. But I think that having that daily communication with everyone is a real help. And it means that you can never be accused of not having told people what’s going on.
On that last one, Kirsty of the Cherwell School told us she did a wrap-up at the end of every day, an email bulletin that she sent. She's maybe a bit more conscientious than I am, but it's a nice idea. I think the more you can communicate about what's going on, it's always going to be helpful.
So that’s it. In summary:
Step 1: create an exam season
Step 2: make exam entries
Step 3: draw up an exam timetable
Step 4: start invigilator planning
Step 5: seat your candidates
Step 6: allocate invigilators
Step 7: update timetable and republish
Step 8: information for candidates
Step 9: complete pre-exam admin
Step 10: daily communication