Comedy turns to tragedy

3:00pm Friday 4th July 2008

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THE HEADTEACHER of a Trowbridge secondary school where pupils were taught the wrong book for their A-level English exam has said he is carrying out an internal inquiry into the incident.

The group of 25 students at St Augustine's Catholic College had a shock when they turned over their exam papers three weeks ago to discover the questions were on a completely different Shakespeare play to the one they had studied.

Their English teacher had assumed at the beginning of the year that the texts would be the same from year to year.

The pupils had spent the whole year studying Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream but when they turned over their exam papers they found questions on The Bard's tragedy Hamlet instead.

Headteacher Brendan Wall said: "Some of the pupils were dismayed, some were upset, some were shocked and some were angry.

"However we got the students together and explained what we were going to do."

Mr Wall contacted the examining board AQA who said they would give the students a grade based on the five other English exam papers they had done instead.

He also contacted the universities himself to tell them about the error and said they all stated they would take the incident into account when offering students places.

He added: "It has all been looked at and we are trying not to disadvantage students.

"I am carrying out an internal inquiry and we are now putting all syllabuses on our website for parents, students and staff to see."

He said no member of staff at the school would lose their job and the mistake was down to human error which was 'indefensible, but does happen'.

The incident happened in the same week as the school was the subject of a surprise Ofsted inspection.

The inspection was one of the first of a series of new inspections examining literacy, numeracy, under achievement and the inclusion of all pupils.

Ofsted inspectors rated the school as 'outstanding' in each of these areas.