Five years ago I wrote about what a disaster the National Tutoring Programme was, especially in its first iteration under the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). I found myself musing on it again this week, watching the angst over Pearson’s admission that it will deliver this year’s KS2 SATs results nine days late (16 instead of 7 July) thanks to “glitches and errors” in its new marking platform. It’s a lead story in Schools Week, complete with claims that Ministers are considering cancelling Pearson’s £180m contract.
Let me offer an unfashionable view first: catching errors and glitches before results are published nationally is a considerably better outcome than discovering them afterwards. Ask anyone who lived through 2008.
We have, quite literally, been here before
This is not a new story. It is the same story, on a loop, with the supplier names rotated.
In 2008 the QCA fired ETS Europe (the European arm of America’s Educational Testing Service), which had been handed a £156m contract to take SATs over from Pearson’s Edexcel. That fiasco (hundreds of thousands of scripts unmarked or mismarked) cost ETS £24.1m of the £40m it had been paid: £19.5m repaid plus £4.6m in cancelled invoices. It triggered the Sutherland Inquiry and the abolition of KS3 SATs altogether. Marking then went back to Edexcel, that is, Pearson, which ran it without major incident from 2009.
In 2018 the DfE’s Standards and Testing Agency decided to consolidate everything with a single supplier and awarded Capita (the former owners of much-hated edu MIS, SIMS) a six-year, £109m contract. Pearson was sufficiently unimpressed at losing that the STA quietly paid it £3m to settle a legal dispute over the procurement but neither party would say exactly why, citing “legal restrictions”. Covid meant Capita’s first live series wasn’t until 2022, which promptly produced thousands of missing papers, markers locked out of training, a helpline in meltdown and 7,000 pupils without at least one result on time. The DfE was contractually entitled to dock Capita £2.8m for that; it graciously waived £1.5m of it to “de-risk delivery”.
So in April 2024 the £180m contract went back to Pearson, largely on the strength of Capita’s failures. Pearson took over from September 2025. And in its very first series: a nine-day results delay caused by technical issues with the new marking platform and data transfer between its own systems. Markers scrambling through thousands of grammar-test questions after already-extended deadlines, in what one insider called an “omnishambles”.
ETS begat Pearson Edexcel begat Capita begat Pearson Edexcel. As the wheel turns; the invoices grow.
“Nationalise it!”, fine, but hand it to whom?
Amid the hue and cry, Schools Week reports calls for the SATs contract to be “nationalised and awarded to a public sector organisation, rather than outsourced to a private company”.
I’m sure that sentiment will be warmly received by Andy Burnham and Bridget Phillipson alike. But appoint whom, and at what cost? There would almost certainly have to be yet another tender (probably open to EU suppliers as part of Labour’s great EU reset). And given the DfE’s parlous track record in picking suppliers, it would almost certainly reach for an organisation it has worked with before, one of the edu-quango lanyard-class of usual suspects.
I can think of a few who might fancy their chances, but the front runner would surely be the EEF, led by Professor Becky Francis, who is also chairing the Government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, so hardly short of ministerial goodwill.
A few inconvenient facts might weigh against the EEF, if the mainstream media ever chose to disclose them. So what might those be?
One. The EEF ran the first phase of the National Tutoring Programme so poorly that the contract was then handed to Randstad, which managed the impressive feat of doing an even worse job.
Two. A disclosure failure that nobody (except, perhaps, me) pursued (I wrote to Pearson in 2020 and received no reply). Companies House records show that Professor Francis was a director of Pearson Education Ltd from 1 September 2019 until 20 October 2020, a period covering her arrival as EEF Chief Executive in January 2020 and a substantial chunk of the window in which NTP bids were being assessed. Applications for the first round of NTP tuition-partner contracts closed on 18 September 2020. Pearson was awarded one of the major contracts on 2 November 2020 – thirteen days after her resignation from its board. Yes, that’s right: the well-known education company of which she was a director was awarded a multi-million-pound contract by the organisation she led, less than a fortnight after she stepped down.
Three. Pearson had no UK tutoring business at all when it applied (as I noted in 2020). What it did have was an army of GCSE and A-level examiners who had just lost their paid marking work to the cancelled 2020 exams, and, as Schools Week reported at the time, it began soliciting them for tutoring roles as early as June 2020, telling them they’d been identified as having “appropriate skills and experience”. Pearson was the only exam board to apply to the NTP, and it offered a rather neat way to keep its examiner cadre paid and loyal at a moment when every board was scrambling to retain theirs.
And how did that examiner-tutor wheeze end?
With a regulatory fine, naturally. In a settlement agreed in late 2024 and imposed in March 2025, Ofqual fined Pearson £250,000 because in summer 2023 it had 195 people simultaneously working as Pearson examiners and as Pearson-contracted NTP tutors in schools. Those 195 individuals marked 7,244 exam responses from students at schools where they had a potential conflict of interest. Ofqual’s notice records that the examiners hadn’t declared their tutoring, but the delicious part is that Pearson itself held all the relevant information on both sides of the conflict and simply never cross-referenced its own systems. It didn’t need anyone to self-declare anything: it was paying the same people to do both jobs. In mitigation, Pearson said potentially compromised responses were re-marked before grades were issued and that no direct impact on students was found.
Within the same farrago were six instances of senior examiners involved in writing or advising on live exam papers while also working as teachers. Pearson’s own policy required producing multiple versions of a paper so no individual could know which version would be sat. It confirmed it didn’t follow that process for an A-level paper in 2023, found the same failing on another qualification, and, in a case where multiple versions were produced, admitted human error meant the senior team could still have worked out which version would be used.
Nor is that fine an aberration. It was Ofqual’s fourth monetary penalty on Pearson (£85,000 in 2016; £1.2m and £150,000 in 2022) and in December 2025 a fifth landed: £750,000 over its GCSE English standard-setting failures. That’s over £2.4m in regulatory fines, the two largest arriving while the DfE was evaluating and then mobilising Pearson’s £180m SATs contract. So much for due diligence.
Why didn’t Ofqual or the DfE ever chase the EEF, or the other exam boards and NTP suppliers, the way they went after (and doubtless will again go after) Pearson? Are their procurement and due-diligence systems still as weak as when they appointed ETS, Capita, the EEF and Randstad? On the evidence: indisputably.
The chickening-out clause
What we’re now watching is a game of duck-and-hide. Pearson apologises “unreservedly”. Bridget Phillipson laments that “this delay in results will be deeply frustrating”. But the best (or worst) response came from the DfE itself, which Schools Week reports as, “exploring all options for recourse, including financial penalties and cancellation of the contract agreed between Pearson and the previous government”.
That last clause is political partisan piffle. Yes, the tender was issued in 2022 and Pearson selected in April 2024, weeks before the election was called on 22 May 2024, but Labour won power on 4 July 2024 and Pearson didn’t actually take over until September 2025. Labour had well over a year to change its mind. The DfE’s Model Services Contract includes Termination for Convenience break clauses allowing it to terminate without supplier fault, compensating the supplier’s committed costs and sometimes lost profit. The DfE could have broken Pearson’s contract and rerun such a recent tender in far less than 24 months at fairly modest extra cost. It chickened out.
And in truth, was that the wrong call? Pearson has had a serious, but limited tech failure (name me a major system that hasn’t). Schools and parents get results nine days late, irritating but not hugely consequential. If the DfE now boots Pearson, it will be expensive, will probably take until Labour is out of power to replace them, and whoever wins the retender, up to and including the EEF, I doubt the winning bid comes in under £200m.
Who pays?
Taxpayers, who already shoulder the highest tax burden since WW2. Not a single member of the political elite, the Whitehall blob, or the parasitic usual suspects of the edu-quango lanyard-class.
As Dominic Cummings has long argued, Whitehall doesn’t fail randomly: the system optimises for process over outcome, failure is structural not accidental. Systemic failure by giants like Pearson and Capita is manageable within a 2026 media cycle – apology, penalty, review, retender, repeat. Cummings’s critique might be temporarily confounded if the DfE hired outside the Pearson/Capita duopoly; but if it awarded the contract to someone genuinely new, that supplier’s success or failure would inevitably be spun by politicians, activists and the media as proof that education needs yet another revolution.
In the meantime no heads will roll, not politically, not at Ofqual, not at the DfE, and certainly not in quangoland.
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