Exam board ‘sorry’ for mistakes

David Leitch, a senior supervisor at OCR, was last night reported to have found wrongly calculated final scores in a hundred papers from last summer that schools had referred for checking.

A wider search found “hundreds more” mistakes by the same markers but Mr Leitch claims he was instructed to inform only schools which had requested paid-for remarking.

Dissatisfied with a review ordered by regulator Ofqual, he last week emailed 30 schools directly to alert them to errors.

OCR confirmed that Mr Leitch had been suspended while an investigation took place.

A “formal and extensive investigation” of the initial problem had found 16 cases where pupils had received lower grades than they should have done, said qualifications director Clara Kenyon.

But she insisted OCR had not been made aware of the existence of further errors.