Ms Elaine Sheridan:

Generally, we want to make sure people are as close to the classroom experience as possible. In some subjects, there is a specific policy after X number of years that retired examiners are no longer recruited. However, we must be very conscious of the reason we are here today, which is that we have an examiner-supply problem. We have very few examiners working with us who have a long distance from the classroom and are out of it for 20 years. What we are very conscious of is that we are very grateful to our retired examiners, because they bring a huge amount of experience, in particular to our senior examining teams as well. We are conscious of that in terms of the robust training that we provide. Very detailed resources are provided to all examiners. While retired teachers can be distant from the classroom, equally, there is an issue with newly qualified teachers who have not clocked up the miles in the first place. We provide very robust training materials and exemplars. There is a lot of marking done on sampling material at the marking conferences in order that we are sure that we can robustly support and stand over the marking by all our examiners, not just retired or newly qualified ones. Again, we have the quality assurance processes throughout in terms of getting material. As I mentioned to Senator Dolan, the move to online marking is pretty much instantaneous. If we have a situation with an examiner, we can immediately address that and put measures in place. We are very appreciative and very lucky to have a core group of retired examiners. As I mentioned previously, our priorities are in the criteria that are listed on our website on how we go about examiner appointments. We apply those criteria and try to put the best quality examiners in place, while we are cognisant of the fact that we do have an examiner supply problem.