UPDATE – With regret we have to announce that the NSWLearning exam centre will close after the May-June 2020 exam session. We worked hard to find another individual or organisation able to take on the exam centre, but without success. Ultimately, the exam board’s requirement that the exam centre had to have a staffed office for the whole of the year, along with expensive insurance requirements meant that it was not viable for others to take over the exam centre.
At the end of 2018, we began a review of the future work of the NSWLearning exam centre. Folks who follow us on Facebook will already be aware of this.
We completed this review a few weeks ago. For a number of reasons, we took the difficult decision that we would close the NSWLearning exam centre after the June 2020 exam session. With regard to CAiE, we are currently in discussions with another organisation with the aim of them taking over the CAiE exam centre. We cannot guarantee that this will lead to the CAiE exam centre continuing beyond June 2020, however.
We had planned to make this announcement on Monday 1st April.
However, a situation arose with regard to Pearson/Edexcel on Friday 29th March. We were informed by Pearson (Edexcel) that from August 2019, they would be increasing their minimum spend for all exam centres to £3000 per annum. Previously it had been £1000. Pearson is not our major exam board, in terms of candidate numbers or exam entries. They are the only exam board that we work with that imposes a minimum spend.
Based upon last year’s figures, this change would mean that we would have to pay in excess of £2000 to Pearson over and above the normal exam fees, significantly more than we actually received from parents in exam entry fees. For a small exam centre like ours, this is an impossible situation since we would be operating at a significant financial loss.
We have therefore been compelled to take the decision that 2019 will now be the final year that we operate as a Pearson/Edexcel exam centre. Linked with this, we have decided that it makes sense to bring forward the end of our relationship with OCR, since we actually only have a small number of exam entries with OCR.
We are not happy about bringing this closure forward – we realise that this will have a impact on families.
We will be offering CAiE exams in 2020 and hopefully we will be in a position to announce an extension beyond this in the near future.