Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Series 1 Episode 6
Back during Season 1 we had a lively and fascinating chat with Rebecca Rowley, Exams Officer at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. When we caught up with her she was stuck at home, unable to go to school because of the huge floods they had in the UAE in April this year. She told us about her previous job working as a tax inspector, how she ended up in Abu Dhabi,. Rebecca talked entertainingly about life at the school and in the UAE, and how her previous role as a tax inspector prepared her for the Exams Officer role!
How long have you been out in the UAE, Rebecca?
This is now my 15th year in the UAE. I was in Al Ain, which is way out in the desert, for eleven years and I've been in Abu Dhabi now for four years. So only two international schools, but here for a long, long time. My husband and I both got jobs at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi just before Covid hit. So I wondered if I'd survive that one! They hired an Exam Officer about two weeks before exams were cancelled in the UK. So that was a bit of a “Oh, my god, do they still need me?” It turns out that cancelled exams meant a lot more work for an Exam Officer.
I was a tax inspector in the UK. I worked at the Inland Revenue and then HMRC as a VAT Inspector. I worked on national insurance, so my background is numbers and stats and computer screens, not kids at all! My husband has always been a Geography teacher. He was Assistant Principal at a school in Al Ain, and we came out here for that. I did get a few part time jobs working in his school, and then I took five years out to have some babies and grow them, which I was very grateful for, to be out here in the sunshine doing that. And then they grew up and started school, so it was time for me to get a job. They put it out to the staff in the school if anyone could be our Exam Officer. And my husband said, “Oh, my wife could do that”. And I thought I need to earn some money, I've been out of work for too long, I'll give it a go. And within a week my line manager had found The Exam Office training. I went on the training, and within a week I had found my calling in life. I thought, this job is just so me. I hadn't run any exams at that point. Remember, this is September where it's all paperwork and lists and computer systems and codes and clicking numbers and stuff. So I'm in my element, sat in my fancy office, because I've never had my own office before, and loving life. It was interesting when it came to running exams for the first time.
My husband always said be a teacher, then we can go work anywhere in the world. I enquired a lot about doing a PGCE, but I like my kids 1.25 meters apart, in silence, not able to move, no noise! I think my second job would be a librarian. I think that's the only two ways I deal with children. So it was totally accidental. You don't see many Exam Officer jobs in the UAE. I think most people have other jobs and they're asked to be the Exam Officer as well. It only took me five months in the job to realize that that's just crazy, because I just didn't have time for anything else. Kudos to anyone who does another role. I just don't know how you do it. When I started the job at Cranleigh it was part time and I remember thinking, how? I know it can be physically part time, physically in the office two or two and a half days a week, but that's not half of the job. And obviously, when it came to exams, they said I'd be in full time. They'd compensate and it would be different for those two months. But I was quite adamant that this is not a two months of a year job. This is a full time job. I think they realise now that it is, and I value any school that employs a full time Exams Officer. There's new schools opening all the time here. There's hundreds and hundreds of schools. So as you can imagine, they might open at year 10 and only have 50 kids, but it obviously builds and grows. But that first cohort of exams might only be 20, 30, 40 kids. So I can see why they don't employ a designated Exam Officer straight away. The two that I know who were also SLT were quick to give it up and not because they didn't want to do it, but quick to say that this needs someone.
How much do you think your previous job as a tax person helped you, and prepared you to do this job?
I definitely wasn't prepared to work with children! My husband's been a teacher since I've known him, so I've always been connected with schools. You go along to open days and plays and things like that. So I'm aware of how he deals with children. I've been around school environments since I met him 20 plus years ago, but I never worked with him before. I'd say what helped me was the structure of it. I'm quite methodical. I've always got a checklist, there needs to be a process. There needs to be deadlines. Some of the Maths and some of the practical stuff comes easy, like working with spreadsheets and things like that. I find you need data quickly, like how many laptops do you need in that business exam? I’ve now been doing this for seven years and every year, whilst it's the same process, your method gets more streamlined, learning from last year. I can't know that yet. A good week of my year is just sort of staring at the timetable, looking at it online. Someone might see one exam here and one exam there and one exam in the afternoon, but you're seeing that exams are listening exams, so you can't put this exam in the same room as that exam. So whereas it looks like one exam, it means three invigilators to me, and then one student’s got a private room because of whatever access arrangement she's got. So that's another invigilator. I don't think I would use a tool for it as well. You need that human element in it.
This all sounds great for people with really methodical brains, but you're throwing a lot of children into this mix. Surely, there's lots of curve balls and changes. And that must have been quite different to what you'd done before?
I was lucky as in my first few weeks I helped out invigilating before the role started. I was called in to do a November series and I think that's quite a valuable lesson for an Exam Officer to be an invigilator first. All the planning, the lists, and the spreadsheets- I know that however many hours it took me to make that timetable, I did it that way for a reason. And now it's all about the kids. You get used to the kids, you're lucky enough to see them hopefully in Year 10 mocks, and then Year 11 exams. Hopefully they stay to do Year 12 and you do build a bit of a rapport. My invigilators have got such a lovely rapport with the kids- I'm a bit harder!
You can be a bit anonymous as the exams person, particularly until they get to Year 10 and Year 11, and then you are quite an important figure. But I think some of my invigilators are much better known. My invigilators will often tell me that a kid has stopped them on the street years and years later, and said “Oh, you were an invigilator, weren't you?” I don't think the same thing would happen to me! They get all the presents at the end of the year. They get invited to the prom. They get invited to graduation. I'm just there in the background. It's funny to see that leap from Year 11 to sixth form. Year 10s, they don't care who I am at all and there's only maybe a handful doing something like early Maths or English. And then in Year 11 I’m that woman who's just telling them to sit down constantly and sending them emails all year to fill in this form and fill in that form. And then there’s the switch when they get to sixth form, and they think this woman actually might help me get into uni! They've decided to be here. They're going to value anyone who's helping them along that process, because it's a process they want to do, rather than being forced to do. They realise the benefits to keeping me happy. I tell them, you answer my emails, you do what I say and then, when you've lost your certificate in three years’ time, I'll be right there to help you.
The question of certificates is another podcast episode. I can't believe how many of our certificates don't get collected every year. I reckon about a third of our certificates don’t get collected each year.
I thought that was an international school thing. Because a lot of my kids finish their last exam and then literally leave the country. They've gone home, they've gone to uni, in goodness knows how many countries around the world. I thought they don't get picked up because they physically can't pick them up!
Rebecca, can you tell us a little bit more about the school, what the school day is like, where the kids come from?
I think at the last count, last International Day, we had about 67 different nationalities at our school. It's a crazy, huge, wonderful amazing mix of kids, and we're a through school, so we're FS 1, FS 2 - I think it's nursery and reception in the UK - all the way through to Year 13, on two campuses. The early years, the pre prep FS 2 to Year 2 have just moved to a different site because we've got so big in the last couple of years. We've got a long school day. We get to school so early because of the traffic, and I like to get my emails done before the day starts. My kids register about half past seven in the morning, and then the last lesson finishes at 3.30. Eight lessons a day. We have good breaks – an hour for lunch. It’s a lovely long day for me and I manage to get all my work done. One of the big things about Cranleigh is the emphasis on what we call CCAs, co-curricular activities, clubs after school. And we've got such a massive, huge array of after school clubs. My kids are there till about five o'clock. We're quite an expensive school, one of the top schools in the Middle East, in Abu Dhabi. So parents want to get the most out of their school. The kids are there for really long days. There's clubs in the morning before school, swimming and instrument lessons. There's things going on at break times and lunch times, and then the after school clubs. My kids do three out of four days of after school clubs, only because they do one at home on the other day. My husband has to run some CCAs, but we're there anyway at school which, for an exam officer at this time of year is amazing, because I get 11 hours at work. I don't have to bring any work home. In November time when there's not much to do I can get a bit bored, but I've started to learn to prep ahead and balance this time out, or else I would be at school much more than I was needed to.
We're right on the beach at Cranleigh. We're on a big strip that got recently developed. It's absolutely beautiful down there.
Can I ask you a couple of slightly boring technical questions now? What exams do you do? What are your exam boards and what do you run?
We are predominantly Pearson. A lot of Pearson exams, very few Cambridge exams, getting fewer. We did a lot with AQA, and then we switched this year to Oxford AQA. There's not quite enough availability of subjects in one exam board to not use the other exam boards. This is my first year with four exam boards.
So you don't do IB then?
We're not an IB school. We do some BTECs but I'm really not involved in them. I do all the registering for the kids and then at the end of their two years I do their results, to process the certificates. But the rest is done by a specific BTEC team.
Another question I had, which is more of a personal curiosity, is how do you get the exam papers?
I remember you said you were going to ask me about the differences between the UK and the UAE, but I've never done this job in the UK. We get them in the post. Most of the exam boards use DHL. The funny thing is working in an international school, which I don't think you get in the UK, is they can come at absolutely any time, day or night. It does not matter that the school gates have closed. It took a big long scout of the JCQ and Cambridge rule book but I don’t have to be there. My second key holder is the Head of Security, so he's more or less on site 24/7. I'll get texts in the middle of the night, your parcel’s arrived!
I had this image that they would send secure files and you would then print them on site. Are Cambridge and Pearson moving you towards digital exams for international GCSEs?
We're trialing English next June, and then my husband's actually involved with his Head of Department in developing the Geography modular IGCSE, to move that online. That's taken a bit more work as you can imagine. With an English paper it’s just type, but with Geography it’s plot a graph, draw a map, shade this, draw a line there. So they're trying to come up with how it'll actually look online and he's involved in that.
You said school has been closed for two days.
It’s been proper, crazy, biblical rain, and they say that it hasn't rained like that in the UAE for 75 years. There were cars floating down the street, the tunnels just filled up with water. There's a picture of a car floating under the Formula 1 circuit, just floating down in the street. Tuesday it would have been closed because of the river. The apartment went black and it was like it was 10 o'clock at night. We had to put all the lights on! The cloud was thick black. So they closed the schools out of precaution, mostly because of travel to and from school, and keeping kids and staff safe. And then today it was probably closed more because of the damage from yesterday. It hasn't rained too much today, but the devastation, the devastation of it. Ceilings coming in and windows. But we all know when the rain comes, afterwards it will just be summer now. That'll be it. It'll be hot, there’ll be no more breeze, there'll be no more spring time. It'll just be hot.
So you'll be back to school tomorrow?
Inshallah. Yes, we've been told, but Dubai had it worse than us. So Dubai are closed for the rest of the week. Closed used to mean closed, and now it means remote. Covid taught us how to go remote. No one gets a day off and no one gets a snow day.
In the UK, everyone talks about Dubai, and no one ever mentions Abu Dhabi. Does it have that same feeling when you're in the UAE, of it being like a kind of little brother scenario?
No not at all. We've got the ruler, and we've got the culture! Dubai is the Blackpool of the UAE. We go when we need to go, it’s just so busy. It's so different you can't explain it. We’ve got the glamour and the weather, obviously, but Dubai is just on another level. There's more people, and I'd probably say it’s more diverse, just busy, busier traffic. We don't go if we don't need to go. Best of luck with all your exams. I hope it goes well. And thank you so much - I’ll talk to you any time you like!
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