One of the world’s biggest providers of educational services has been fined more than £2m for a range of serious breaches related to examination standards that could have affected tens of thousands of students.
Pearson, a FTSE 100-listed company, was hit by financial penalties of £750,000 for each of two cases and £505,000 for a third by Ofqual, the exams regulator. The cases concerned GCSE English language exams, A-level spoken Chinese and an online English proficiency test.
In the case of the English proficiency test, Pearson was fined £750,000 when it emerged that in 2023 it had allowed about 5% of candidates to take the test online at home, rather than at a secure centre.
This meant other people were able to sit the secure test on a student’s behalf, avoiding the remote invigilation safeguards Pearson had put in place. Although Pearson identified the incident and revoked 9,910 results, it admitted it should have identified the malpractice sooner and reported it to Ofqual.
The GCSE English breach concerned the risk of inconsistent grading standards. The A-level Chinese breach related to multiple issues with how questions were set and marked, meaning the assessments were inappropriately demanding for non-native speakers.
Amanda Swann, Ofqual’s executive director for delivery, said: “These fines reflect the serious nature of Pearson’s failures as well as our commitment to protecting students’ interests and maintaining public confidence in our qualifications system. Students must be able to trust that their results, and those of their peers taking the same qualifications, accurately reflect their performance, in line with appropriate standards. Students’ work must also be their own.
“This action is necessary to deter Pearson and other awarding organisations from similar failings in future.”
Pearson has now been fined seven times by Ofqual. Ofqual fined it £1.2m in 2022 for failures with reviews of marking arrangements between 2016 and 2019.
A statement from Pearson said: “We take responsibility for the issues that affected GCE A-level Chinese, GCSE English Language 2.0, and our legacy PTE Academic Online Test at different times between 2019 and 2023. Our actions at the time did not meet regulatory requirements or the high standards that learners and educators rightly expect from us.
“For each of these cases, we conducted a comprehensive review of our processes and have implemented robust improvements.”