How collaboration has made an impact and won us two BETT Award nominations

View all tags

We’re shortlisted for two BETT Awards for Transformational Impact and Collaboration with a School!

As education and technology have evolved in recent years, collaboration with schools has been at the heart of our work to enhance learning and assessment across the globe. We’re honoured to be recognised for this work and to be BETT Awards 2023 finalists – in not one but two categories!

So why have we been shortlisted? When we asked our Assessment Director, Hayley White, she believes “it has much to do with how we’ve worked alongside schools to problem solve, harness the latest innovations and make solutions a reality to benefit teachers and students”.  

BETT Awards 2023 Finalist logo

Transformational impact – onscreen assessment

In 2022, we became the first exam board to provide International GCSE students with high-stakes exams onscreen rather than on paper.

With 65% of teachers and school leaders we surveyed stating they’d be ready to move to onscreen assessment within four years, we partnered with six schools and their 600 students across the globe to trial onscreen Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (9–1) English Language exams. The journey to exam day involved working with schools and technology in innovative ways:  

  • supporting at every step – from technology setup and guidance to materials that ensured students and teachers had confidence in the platform and in demonstrating skills, knowledge and understanding onscreen
  • evolving existing services to make onscreen exams a reality – from our onscreen Mocks Service to build familiarity with what the exams looked like, to ResultsPlus to deliver feedback analysis and insights digitally, to help teachers and students get exam-ready.   

Every student completed their onscreen exams successfully – testament to the technology, support and collaboration on the pilot. And 90% of students in the trial stated they thought their school should offer onscreen assessment in future. As a result, onscreen assessment is now available for all schools taking Pearson Edexcel International GCSE (9–1) English qualifications across the world. It joins our GCSE Computer Science and mocks service in going onscreen. This is just one part of our onscreen journey and we look forward to what’s next.   

Keep up with our onscreen assessment journey

Collaboration with a school – mocks moderation service

By working hand in hand with educators like the Greenshaw Learning Trust, we’re proud to have developed tools that make a real difference to the needs of teachers and learners. In December 2021, the Greenshaw Trust approached Pearson as their teachers were working furiously to help students to prepare for the first exam series to be taken in three years. During this time, senior leaders identified a need for confidence-building in:

  • knowledge of the mark scheme 
  • application of the mark scheme 
  • moderation of colleagues’ marking.  

With moderation of marking specifically, Greenshaw were concerned about creating an ‘echo-chamber’ delivering the same message repeatedly, as well as the impact this would have on learner progression.  

At Pearson, we were able to access a huge range of assessment expertise within the business and our wider examining community. In working through this question with Greenshaw, we were able to tap into our experts to craft a solution that could tangibly help support this group of schools.

Greenshaw told us that they didn’t want Pearson to mark all their mock papers, as even though this saved them time, they got a huge amount of value and insight from marking a small number of these themselves. What we could help them with was breaking the echo chamber of moderating students’ papers. We therefore worked closely together to create a support package to meet these needs and bring our Moderation Service to life. 

After the initial trial with the Trust, we’ve since expanded this service to help teachers across the country to develop their marking skills as part of their professional development. This has gone from strength to strength with new subjects added to the initial GCSE English and maths papers. 


Explore our moderation service

What this means to us

Our greatest reward is to hear from schools and students that what we do is positively impacting learning in classrooms and beyond. To be recognised for our work and particularly how we collaborate with schools to problem solve, harness the latest innovations and make solutions a reality is a privilege. A huge thank you goes to the schools involved and we look forward to what’s next

– Hayley White, Assessment Director, Pearson School Qualifications

We look forward to joining the brilliant fellow nominees on 29 March at the awards ceremony in London. You can also join us at the BETT Show (UK) on 29–31 March and see more of how we’re working to enhance learning and assessment. 

Filter by tag