Examscreen: More than a clock

Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Season 2 Episode 5

In this episode, John and Sophie reminisce and reflect on six years of Examscreen from its earliest inception as a piece of technology John developed primarily for his own use, to a professional educational software tool used in schools all over the country and internationally.

I thought what would be interesting first, John, is if you could explain what Examscreen is, because I am terrible at this when people ask me!

When I first started designing it, I couldn't really explain it to anybody who didn't understand exams. So I just basically called it a clock, and a couple of friends of ours were very funny about it- every time I saw them, they'd ask how's your clock doing?! You've reinvented the clock?

Examscreen is basically a display screen for exam rooms. When you are sat in the exam room, you're looking at a screen, and on the screen is a clock. There is, indeed, a clock! Then there's all the other information that you require for that exam. So it will be the exam title, the start time, the finish time. If you have extra time, it will be up there as well. So that's all quite simple, but it's a bit cleverer than that because it does calculations. It calculates finish times, it calculates extra time. And it also contains a massive database of all the exams, which means that as a school centre, you can tailor it to whatever qualifications your school does.

When your invigilators turn up on an exam day, they just have to open it up and from a little drop down menu they can select exactly the exams that your school does. They set up the information for candidates often in a matter of seconds, but certainly in just a couple of minutes at the very most. Should we talk about the problem that that was solving?

Yes. Why did you come up with it?

I can remember the exact time that this happened. I can remember when I had the idea for it. It was 2018 and it was towards the end of our exam season. I think it was our year 10 exams at the end of the year, probably late June, early July. There was something going on in our hall, which meant that we had moved the students to a different venue. We've done a very quick setup in that room for the students. I think it was a gym. We'd put up a projector and a screen in the gym to put all the exam information on.

You mean write it on?

Yes. What I'd done was I’d opened a Word document and I'd found an online clock which had ads plastered all over it. Then I split the screen, so we had the exam information written on the Word document on one side and the clock on the other side. I thought, that's good, but it also looks terrible as well. It just looked quite messy. It was certainly better than scrawling it on a flip chart board that nobody could read and was really small, but it still wasn't quite right. At that moment, I just thought, surely there's a way of doing this in a much cleaner, clearer, professional way. Then what I did was I went away, and I just started designing PowerPoint slides- I've still got some of those slides. Then I had a conversation with someone at work who was our computer science teacher. I said to him, how would you go about doing this? He just gave me a few hints, really. I thought at one point about saying, do you want to come on board? But he was leaving the school and he was very busy.

Basically, in previous jobs, I had done a little bit of web design as well. I understood a little bit about programming and things like that. Over that summer, I taught myself quite a lot using the internet. That 2018 summer, we spent a lot of time on it, didn't we? We sat in the living room in the evening.

I was watching Love Island....

I was on the laptop trying to get this thing together. Over the course of that summer, I managed to come up with it basically.

At that point, I did think you were going a bit mad, to be honest, because I just kept looking over and you were just like drawing clocks. You quite enjoyed it though, didn't you? Learning how to code and enjoying that. Didn't you do a couple of courses online?

Yes, I did a few free courses on coding and stuff. But one memory I really have is our niece, Meg. She'd have been doing her GCSEs, and she came to stay. I remember showing her this thing and explaining to her what it was going to be. Bless her. She was so polite about it!

You were, at this point, only thinking, you were just going to use it for your own exams, weren't you?

Maybe I had thought a bit broader than that. Because I guess, with anything, you think that if I'm creating something genuinely new here, then other people might like it. By about October 2018, I was at the point, I've done this thing, I think it's really good, and I'm going to share it with some people. So I did share it with a few Exams Officers.

Locally, wasn't it?

Yes, some locally and also some others that I knew through the Facebook group. It just started to get bounced around. And actually within that group, it got bounced around quite a lot. We hosted it on a site called examscreen.co.uk, having come up with the name Examscreen, and people just started using it. I was tracking it with Google Analytics just seeing how many people were going on. We had a few days, where 300 separate schools were coming on to the site to use it.

Which felt so big at the time!

It was just incredible. And I thought, wow, what's happening?

This was about the point that I started being interested in your clock......!

It just kept getting shared. And one of the things that really taught me actually, was just how well networked Exams Officers are and how willing they are to share their own practice with each other. So that was a really eye-opening thing to see that. It was really fun. It continues to be really fun. When you're starting something new, it is really exciting.

You were using it in your school and enjoying using it, weren't you? But it was very, very basic.

It was very rudimentary. And I guess that's one of the things that I learnt through doing that process, which I think I'm now much more able to apply generally in life than I was before, that it's just better to do things and get them out there and then improve them from that point.

You're talking about our podcast!

Which is exactly what we did with the podcast. Rather than sit around for ages trying to make something perfect. I think I do have perfectionist tendencies. I genuinely don't believe that it's a good thing, because I think a lot of success in life comes actually from being brave enough to say, I know this isn't perfect, but I need to push this thing out there. That's the way that I can make it better and improve it and tailor it well to what people want, rather than what I think they want. Launching it was definitely an interesting experience.

I think why it was really liked was because it was something that you wanted to use yourself. You knew what people needed because you were doing it yourself.....

I definitely had a decent idea of what I thought people would like. In those first few months in particular, I got some amazing suggestions, things I hadn't thought of or things I'd missed, which really helped to push it along quickly and improve it quickly. More and more schools wanted to use it. That was a really fun time. One thing we did learn at that point was about the name, wasn't it? Examscreen was just something that came very naturally. It's really simple, really clear about what it is. But the key thing to realise about Examscreen, is that I had it all as one word. But it's one of those things that your phone will autocorrect. So obviously, when anyone ever sends me a message about “Exam Screen” from my point of view, it's spelled wrong. It's always Exam Screen, two words.

And our six year old, has always called it Exam Scream. OK, John, so now we're going to have a little quiz. Some dates and key stats of the journey of Examscreen. So how many schools used Examscreen in the summer of 2019? So this is just the first year that you created it.

I'm going to go for probably about 500.

550, well done!

I remember the first big science exam, GCSE biology exam. And after that, going on to the Google Analytics and just being dumbfounded.

And there was something else that was big that happened around that time. What did we win?

So this is where I think you have been so instrumental in this process of growing Examscreen and making it work. You have always said, let's just do that. And one of the things you wanted us to do was to enter it into a competition. That is something I would never have done. I would have shied away from something like that. But you entered us into a competition run by a company called Cool Initiatives, which is the business investment arm of Cool Milk, which some of you may have heard of.

If you've got primary age children, or work in a primary school....

There's a weird link between Examscreen and companies involved with primary schools, which is very strange, which we'll get on to in a bit.

They were running a really interesting competition that I came across. To be honest, the main reason it was interesting, was because it had a large cash prize. At that point, Examscreen was free. We’d probably put about a thousand pounds into Examscreen at that point in terms of you making the basic website. But we were suddenly aware that we had over 500 schools using it for their GCSE exams. And suddenly we need to put a bit of money into this to make sure it's secure. It was also related to education and ed tech, so we were quite a good fit. It was looking for new startups that were doing really high impact stuff that was innovative.

Yes, you had to be able to show that your product was already a bit successful, that it was already having an impact on schools. I had absolutely no hopes for this. I thought they’d think it was weird that it's just this page with a clock on it.

Did I do it without you knowing?

I remember it was a series of rounds. I think there was a first round, then a semi-final, and then a final. And I remember in the first round, my laptop didn't work and they couldn't hear me. And I was literally on the point of thinking, I'll just slam the laptop down and forget this.
But for some reason I just stuck with it. We got through that first round. And what I really noticed about doing that process was it was so helpful. It made me think about what we were doing so much.

It was a good time, wasn't it?

It was a great time for us to have something like that. And I also want to mention a guy called Tim Stirrup, who is a wonderful guy, who was working at Cool Initiatives at the time. His job was to help you through the process of being in this competition. I had some fantastic conversations with him. The advice he gave was always absolutely on point, and I could tell from quite early on that he really liked the product. He thought it was a really simple, elegant solution to a genuine problem. So I always felt he was on our side a little bit. He was so helpful in terms of the advice and support he gave. Tt was a really pivotal, important time for us, where it was important for someone to actually say, this is good.

Externally validating what we knew was taking off a little bit. But we didn't have any experience of having a start up. Then when you went to the final, and you had to present, didn't you?

I had to present, and there were some quite successful people within education who were on the finals panel. I had to do a presentation to them, and that was very daunting. But again, it was a really valuable thing to do. We didn't win, did we? Interestingly. We did come second, which came with a not insignificant amount of cash for what we needed to do at the time, which was to improve the website a bit, enhance security, and pay for the development. We did go out for a meal and buy a 40-pound bottle of wine. That was very exciting!
We should also mention at this point, that although we didn't win the judged competition, we did win the People's Choice Award, where people could vote for you.

There will be people listening to this who voted for that.

Exactly, because of what I said before about Exams Officers being networked, so we were really able to mobilise people to vote for this. I hope that they did not just out of being nice, but because they genuinely thought Examscreen was great. I think we won that by some distance. I think it just changed everything after that. It was just so motivating. And we did then have the cash to do what we needed to do to make the next step.

So what was the date when we launched the new version?

After that, we went on a process of developing the site. And actually, we didn't really develop the Examscreen tool itself, but we turned it into a fully functioning website. Which we launched, I think, in February 2020?

Yes. Bang on. How can you forget?

Yes, I can't forget, but we'll get to that in a minute. So, with the site at that point we wanted to add the database of exams so that people didn't have to type in all their information every time they had an exam. We could create these drop down menus on the screen where people could select exams, reduce the chance of errors and speed up the process of preparing the exam room. That was slightly beyond my technical skills, so that was the first point at which we got some help. I should mention Dhruve Shah.....

I just feel we were emailing him at half 11 on a Friday night, saying Dhruve, urgent, we need something fixed. And he would get back to us at 4am on a Saturday!

He was so polite with us the whole time. And he did such a good job, didn't he? It was absolutely perfect for what we needed at the time. We created a site where people could create an account for their school. They could select the exam boards that they were doing, and just start to customise Examscreen for themselves a little bit. That was a key development that we wanted to do at that stage, and February 2020 was when the new version launched.

The day I thought you’d died.

We didn’t have a clue what we were doing. We picked out this date, we launched the website. It came live at like midnight, I think it was on the 27th. And I didn't book the next day off work as leave. So I went to work…

And left me basically holding the baby. Literally with a baby. And the laptop. All of a sudden, I was like, oh my God. And I couldn't get a hold of you at work. And it just went mad.

There was an issue. I think it was to do with emails from the site not getting through or something like that. So people couldn't set up accounts etc. And by this stage, people were using Examscreen really regularly, and they were really relying on it. My phone was just going off like mad. I think if Paula Merrill is listening, Paula, we had a conversation at one point during the morning because I answered my mobile and spoke to her. And she was so nice, honestly. My phone was kicking off,  so I was actually starting to panic a little bit. At lunchtime, I was just like, right, I'm going home.

I remember you coming into the living room, and saying I'm going to sort it out now because I'd been trying to keep everything under control. So you went up to work upstairs. And then I came up and I thought, John's really gone quiet, I hope everything's all right. So I came upstairs and had my baby under my arm, came into the room and all I could see was your feet and your face flat down on the bed, and you were still in your suit. I thought you’d dropped dead. You’d fallen asleep!

 One thing you need to know about me is that when I'm acutely stressed, I just go to sleep.

Well, now I know after that. But I genuinely thought you were dead. I thought we launched Examscreen, it's crashed and you've died - all in one morning!

So, if anyone remembers that day, that's what I was doing, I was passing out with stress. I think there were a few people I remember talking to. I think Rehana Patel was another one, and Paula.

Everyone was very nice. The reason was that the demand was incredible.

Anyway, it was quite a big, but quite a simple problem to get fixed. But then obviously, a month and a half later, something much bigger happened, which we've obviously touched on multiple times. COVID came and then obviously, no one had any need for Examscreen. We thought that was that then. For a time, it was plausible to think that we might never get back to exams.

We just thought, oh, well, that was a bit of fun. We were sad because it was such an exciting journey.

What was so fascinating was that it did keep going through COVID. We don't have an alternative reality where we could see what would have happened if there had been no COVID, but it did continue to grow and schools continued to want to use it.

On that note, what happened in November 2020? We were finalists in the Education Investor Awards.

Oh, that was bizarre, wasn't it? So we've twice been finalists in the Education Investor Awards. The first one, November 2020 was an online event. This event is normally black tie and they told us to get dressed up. So we were sat in our living room. I had a suit on and you had a cocktail dress on, just sat in our living room with a laptop on our lap. We didn't win.

It had grown during that time, and international schools had really started to pick up at that point.

And we should at this point mention Rebecca Rowley. She was one of our guests in season one because she picked it up in the UAE. And the UAE after the UK is still our second biggest country where schools use it, and that's largely down to Rebecca telling everyone about Examscreen. We’re hugely grateful.

When was Twinkl?

Maybe the following year, 2021.

What month?

I'm going to say towards the end of the year. December?

December, very good. It's part of our heavy primary education focus!

I don't know how many of you will know who Twinkl are, but I suspect probably most of you, I'd say anybody who's had kids go to primary school in the last 10 or so years would know who Twinkl are.

All those worksheets on your fridge.....

Yes, the worksheets. If you've ever seen the Santander adverts with Ant and Dec as well, the thing that they promote is the Santander program in schools done in partnership with Twinkl. So Twinkl is a massive education publishing company. At the time that we joined forces with them, they had a hub, basically a business accelerator, for education and other businesses that they wanted to help. So we ended up partnering with them in late 2021, which has been a really valuable and interesting experience, hasn't it?

And a big thanks to all the team at TwinklHive. It's been fantastic. And to Jonathan Seaton MBE, who's the CEO, who spent quite a few evenings with us.

The access and advice that we got from Jonathan was incredible. He and his wife have built this incredible company and we’ve got a lot to thank him for. When we were developing the latest version of the site, we had a lot of debates, didn't we, about exactly how we wanted it to work? And sometimes you just have moments of madness, don't you?

I did think this was a moment of madness, but I trusted your judgment on it.

One of the key features of Examscreen had been the big database of exams that we created. I had this idea that we didn't need to do this anymore, that the new website was going to be so easy to use and efficient that people would just end up creating their own catalogues of exams within their account. I wanted to proceed on this basis. We got an email from someone at Twinkl saying, Jonathan would like to have a meeting with you. For about half an hour, he grilled me on why I thought that this was a good idea. And he never, to be fair to him, he never said, you're doing the wrong thing here. But the very fact that he'd wanted to talk to us was kind of a hint, wasn't it? It was clear what he thought. I had a long think about it and we had several conversations, didn't we? And then we decided that it was a mistake.

Then we had to go back to the developer.

It's funny, sometimes I mention that story to Examscreen users now, and they always say, that's the best bit.

When did we launch this latest version of the site?

July 2022.

You’re better than me on these dates. So where are we now, John, in terms of Examscreen 2024?

So we're getting towards the end of 2024 and Examscreen is six years old. We're now in 1,500 schools in the UK and internationally, which is really exciting. There's a few things that I'm really pleased about. So one of the things that's been true of Examscreen right from the start when it started getting shared and spread out was that it spread very evenly geographically, which has been fantastic. One of the things I think sometimes particularly with new technology and digital tools is that they will often cluster in areas where they've been shared within local networks. But they'll often cluster in areas where there's good access to technology and good infrastructure, so often around London.

We do have a lot of schools in London, but there is no area of the UK in which Examscreen is not used and actually the coverage of Examscreen is very, very even across areas. Obviously in cities, it gets more use, but it is pretty much in every area of the UK, which is really, really pleasing. The other thing that I'm really happy with is the fact that it's used in all kinds of different schools.

It's not that schools that have access to great resources have taken up Examscreen, it's all types of schools. And one of the purposes behind Examscreen is trying to make the exam system a bit more standardised and a bit fairer in the sense that everyone's having the same experience, the same environment in the exam room. It’s also in some of the top independent schools in the country. That one where a lot of prime ministers go to, it's in that school.

That was one of the first schools to sign up.

Yes, but it's also in community schools, very small rural secondaries.

Special schools as well.

It's used by quite a lot of special schools, but also we get quite a lot of contact from managers of SEND in schools who say to us how much they like Examscreen and the clarity that it provides for students in the exam room. So that's another thing that's really pleasing. And I guess the final thing that I'm proud of is the fact that it's really user-friendly, which means that it hasn't excluded people. Obviously Exams Officers are very used to using all kinds of different software, and so they were always going to be able to deal with something like Examscreen, but what a lot of Exams Officers tell us is just how much their invigilators enjoy using Examscreen.

Often when they first introduce it, the invigilators will be a bit reticent because it's a new piece of technology. But once they see it and get to use it, it's almost like they're arguing over who's going to set it up and that sort of thing. So introducing a piece of technology which hasn't frightened people, but has been embraced, is something that I'm very happy about.

Yes, particularly as things move towards digital exams. And that's good, isn't it?

I think so. Obviously there is that journey going on and it may take quite a long time. I think in the interim what Examscreen does is that it enables invigilators and people in exam rooms to get used to the idea of using technology as part of the exam experience. I think that Examscreen has enabled people to have success in doing that, which means that they feel more comfortable with it.

More open to it as well.

Absolutely. So as more complex technology potentially gets rolled out, it won't be such a battle to convince people that it can be done.
Obviously there are ongoing challenges with running Examscreen. I think one of the things, is about the responsibility involved. Do you want to explain a bit about that?

Yes, I think at first it spread so organically, and you were sort of playing with it at your own school to see how it would work. At that point, I didn't think too much about the responsibility aspect of it. But we talked on a podcast we went on recently about how there was one day in the summer exam season.  What year was that?

It was perhaps a couple of years ago, I think. It was that first year back after Covid.

It suddenly dawned on me how many hundreds of thousands of students were sitting in an exam room that morning. I think it was like GCSE English or something, and would have been sat in a hall looking at Examscreen. I suddenly had full knots in my stomach, oh my god, this is a huge responsibility. So I think it is important for everyone who does use Examscreen, who listens to this podcast, to know how seriously we take it.

It's always been a really interesting question with Examscreen, who is the user? Obviously you've got the Exams Officer in the school who's in charge of the account. Then you've got the invigilator using it in the exam room. But ultimately, the primary user is actually the student because it's for the students. That's who it's meant for. Sometimes we can forget that, I suppose, because we're dealing with the people who are actually running exams, logging into the program. But actually, the user to a large extent is the student and you can sometimes forget you have that huge responsibility.

But that means it matters.

It does. It's important. I think one of the other things is, we get amazing feedback, don't we? And we have great conversations with people who use Examscreen. So many of the developments that we've made to it and the way that we've been able to improve it have come from our users. They have much better suggestions than we ever would have come up with. But we get so many good suggestions, one of the things I always find really hard is balancing making improvements with trying to keep the essence of it, which is something that's really simple and really user-friendly.

Particularly about how things look on the screen. Maintaining the integrity of the screen, which is sometimes quite hard to explain, but it does just have to be kept that simple.

This is very much a family business. Some could say we are exploiting retired people.

Just thinking again about the student, and also user-friendliness in terms of invigilators. So it's trying to make it better without overcomplicating it. So that's a real challenge. We've launched a couple of new features this year, which I think so far seem to have gone down pretty well. So we do always listen to suggestions. We always take them very seriously and we often try things out. A lot of the time they work, sometimes they don't. But we're always thinking about it. We’ve thanked quite a lot of people on this episode but there are a few people who we're working with. Examscreen is really just Sophie and me as a team but, having done it for six years, we have a support network who help us.

A small but mighty team.

Principally, we have a development team from a company called STAXO who are absolute legends. We should particularly mention Julie Parr and Peter Goring, who manage our relationship with them. They keep all our ongoing developments and projects on track. And then also, I'd like to mention David Goring, who is our chief development consultant, and Chris Seal, who has helped us massively with the design of Examscreen. All those people have played a really pivotal role in how Examscreen looks and works now.

And finally, two people who we definitely need to thank, don't we?

So, every year, we load this massive database of exams into Examscreen. It's a very time-consuming process. But we also are desperate to make sure that everything is correct. Obviously, if on an exam day, you were to put an exam up on the screen and some of the information wasn't right, that could have a really bad effect. So, we are so desperate to get everything right. And we have a fantastic checking team.
We put all the exams in there, but we have an amazing checking team, which is constituted of Sue and Martin Gaston, who are my mum and dad.

Some would say that we exploit retired people....

Maybe we should keep quiet about it, but they sit and they meticulously check all the exams that we put into the system before any exam season. And they really help us to feel confident that what we are putting out there is right and is going to do the job for all of you. So, a massive thank you to Sue and Martin for that!

I hope you've enjoyed this little potted history of Examscreen. If you work in a school and you're not using it, and you want to know more, then please contact myself or Sophie. We're at john.gaston@examscreen.co.uk or sophie.gaston@examscreen.co.uk. You can also contact us via the website’s contact page. If you go to the home screen page www.examscreen.co.uk  you can set up a free trial for your school and check out all the features that are available.

To listen to all previous episodes of The Exam Man and to read our blogs, visit: https://theexamman.com/