For some reason my comment to the Daily Telegraph article and Leader didn't 'take'. So I wrote a comment in 'The Guardian' instead:
The issue here is the fairness. Pupils shouldn't be given an unfair advantage. In the bad old days this was ensured by Exam boards not giving any detailed information about what their questions would be about and the way they needed to be answered. Examination syllabuses fitted on one page of A4. The 'best' teachers, from the point of view of getting pupils through exams, were the ones who could predict what questions would come up. It was unfair on thousands of pupils, and wasteful in terms of not producing educated young people.
'Specifications', as they are now called, are A4 booklets of a hundred pages or so. They are very complicated, and, to make matters worse, change far too often, i.e. when the government gets a new idea into its head. However, at least the details are now transparent, as a result of which you don't have to have special, privileged, knowledge of the Examination system in order to prepare your pupils for the examination.
Seminars are therefore a vital means, though not the only one, whereby teachers can get a more accurate view of what the examinations will be like. They used to be arranged by local authorities, and the commercialisation of schools and the examination system is largely to blame for the present system's examples of unfairness. However, moral outrage at 'The Daily Telegraph's' 'shock revelations' doesn't really help.
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