The entire board of Victoria’s curriculum authority has been sacked after a review into the state’s VCE cheat sheet bungle last year.
The blunder, during last year’s year 12 exams in Victoria, saw the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) accidentally publish exam content weeks before students sat for the tests. The review found the sample cover pages containing exam content had been viewed about 6,000 times.
Sixty five tests – more than half of the VCE subjects – contained questions either identical or very similar to those contained in the seemingly blank practice exam cover sheets.
The review revealed there was “inadequate oversight” during the two-day rewriting process, which involved about 100 staff.
The Victorian deputy premier and education minister, Ben Carroll, on Tuesday announced he had dismissed the entire board of the VCAA. An interim board will now lead the authority for the remainder of the year.
Carroll said the overhaul of the VCAA would help establish a “much stronger and more accountable” authority so families, students and schools have full confidence in VCE exams.
“VCE is like the AFL grand final for students after 13 years of schooling. Nearly 80,000 students every year sit down for their VCE examinations,” he said.
“It’s a big thing. It’s an important thing to get right, and, unfortunately, the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority has not got it right on more than one occasion.”’
Carroll pointed to 2022 when there were errors in mathematics exams and 2023 when there were more errors in both mathematics and chemistry.
He said a review of the VCAA discovered that a software tool was used to create the actual exam cover letters that was “unauthorised and unmitigated”. Once the error was uncovered, 150 VCAA staff mobilised to rewrite exams but “some of the rewriting was not up to scratch”, he said.
“I want to say to the staff, they have worked incredibly hard, and they have tried to do the right thing by students and parents,” Carroll said.
Carroll on Tuesday announced Andrew Smith would commence as the permanent chief executive on 1 June. Smith is now the head of Education Services Australia, having started his career as a teacher in Victorian state schools.
Smith and the interim board will oversee the implementation of the report.
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Andrew Smith and the interim Board will oversee the implementation of the Blacher Review’s other recommendations, including increasing accountability and risk management for the exam development and publication process end-to-end, and stopping the publication of cover pages.
The review, led by by former Victorian public servant Yehudi Blacher, made eight recommendations, including installing a new VCAA board, ending the creation of sample cover pages for exams and creating a more senior executive role at the authority to improve accountability.
The state government has accepted all the recommendations of the review to ensure changes are in place for this year’s exam period.
Carroll last year ordered the review after the 65 tests had questions leaked.
The debacle led to the resignation of VCAA’s chief executive officer, Kylie White, who was replaced by Marcia Devlin during the exams.
The opposition education spokesperson, Jess Wilson, said she did not believe the review would ensure the “exam blunders of the past three years do not occur again”.
A second report will review the VCAA’s culture, structure and operations.
