The troubled Scottish Qualifications Authority denied yesterday that this year’s results were threatened by contractors who had “fried” one of the three computer servers designed to collate exam grades.
The £350,000 IBM machine was destroyed at installation by being connected to the wrong electricity supply at the authority’s Edinburgh headquarters, the magazine Computer Weekly reported.Officials confirmed that the server had been destroyed, but said the problem would not affect the timing of examination results.A spokesman said the machine was part of two backup systems installed to help avoid a repeat of last year’s administrative fiasco when thousands of sixth-formers were cent incorrect or incomplete results.It had not been used to process exam marks and its destruction would not affect exam grades to be published on 14 August. A spokesman said one back-up machine had been installed to prevent a computer breakdown delaying this year’s results. A new second back-up machine would now be installed.”We were working on a belt and braces,” he said “Now we have belts. There was never any test data on this machine let alone live data. This was nowhere near this year’s results and this year’s exams. We are very confident that we will have the results ready on time,”We still have a number of stages to go through between now and 13 August.

We have hit every deadline we have been required to and we have great and increasing confidence that we will have everything ready on time.”He said the SQA’s IBM computer system had been ordered and installed before the appointment of the former IBM director John Ward as the authority’s chairman.. State schools have just started the long summer holidays but many head teachers will already be looking ahead with dread to the autumn when they won’t have enough qualified staff to cover all classes. Part-time education for some pupils is a distinct possibility in the early days of the new term. State schools have just started the long summer holidays but many head teachers will already be looking ahead with dread to the autumn when they won’t have enough qualified staff to cover all classes. Part-time education for some pupils is a distinct possibility in the early days of the new term. Teacher shortages are a long way from being solved although successive initiatives by the Government to increase the flow of people into teacher training are now bearing fruit.

So the good news is that, in cash terms at least, teaching is now a good career option. Training bursaries, child care allowances, golden hellos, and performance-related pay make teaching an attractive financial proposition in a way it hasn’t been for 30 years. Earlier this month the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) announced that this September more than 1,100 people will take up places on the Graduate Teacher Programme, working as unqualified teachers in schools while they follow an individual training programme. This is an 85 per cent increase on the numbers joining the programme last year when 548 places were allocated. The sharpest rise in successful applicants has been in the key secondary school shortage subjects of maths, science, technology, modern languages and English, with 510 places allocated for September compared with 213 last year. Places for primary teachers in shortage subjects have risen by more than 90 per cent.