Reflections on a teaching error

Last week, during an English Literature exam, fifteen of our A-level students discovered that they could not answer one of questions, which counts for nearly eight per cent of their total A-level mark.

This came about because of a teaching error – the wrong section of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had been studied.
On being informed of this fact, I felt my spirits go into freefall and my thoughts went to the young people who, at the end of their St Christopher’s careers, had to endure the anxiety and fears caused by a teacher’s oversight.
As Principal I felt sad and embarrassed that our school had let these students down and was also angry that this could have happened.  As a father I felt strong empathy with the parents of these fine young people and could imagine the anger and worry that they would be experiencing.
After the initial necessity of deciding who should do what over the coming days I had a little time to ask myself:  Does this mean that St. Christopher’s is still the excellent school that people say it is? My answer is clearly ‘yes’, but I would qualify this by adding that any such errors affect a school’s reputation to a greater or lesser extent.
On the other hand, given that ALL schools make mistakes at times, an important measure to apply is ‘how well did the school work to try to put things right?’ 
In this case, we apologised to these students and their parents.
We then went to great lengths to work with the examinations board (AQA) to find a solution and have kept parents fully in touch with what we have been doing.
None of this, of course, takes away the fact that this error simply should NOT have occurred.
AQA have promised in writing, that candidates will not be disadvantaged, but that won’t remove the anxiety that these students will inevitably experience from now until results day in mid-August – they just want that results slip in their hand, announcing the result that they deserve and leading to a place in the university of their dreams.
But… how do mistakes like this happen? It is simply that being human means we make errors – ‘to err is human’ as the quotation goes.
What happened is a nightmare-come-true for     teachers who care deeply about the success of the   students whose education is entrusted to us. 
At the fundamental level we need systems that recognise the potential for human frailty and that therefore reduce the potential to as near zero as possible; clearly in this instance, these systems failed.
In the best schools, teachers and employees feel they are an integral part of the school and that which hurts students, hurts the school … and hurts teachers too. 
In the best schools, this leads to a resolve to ensure that shortcomings are addressed.  In the best schools the results of human error should lead to a stronger and better organisation – and we are determined that this will be the case in the current instance.
Even in the best schools, however, there can be no guarantee that all mistakes will be eliminated entirely – but there must be a determined resolve to be pro-active in hunting out other areas where a potential for significant error exists.

By Ed Goodwin