Meet the Subject Officer – Tori Murphy, GCSE Religious Studies

What does the role of the GCSE Religious Studies Subject Officer involve? 

Much like teaching, the role of an SO varies a lot from day to day!  

The purpose of the role is to manage the qualification, but what does that look like in practice? Let’s start at the beginning of the process of qualification development.  

When a new specification is being designed, the SO is one of many people involved in ensuring it meets the needs of regulators, educators and learners alike. It needs to meet approval criteria while also being relevant and engaging. 
 
At the same time, I work closely with colleagues in the Professional Learning and Resources team to help create a comprehensive package of support to sit alongside the qualification, from guidance documents and sample assessment materials through to face-to-face training events.  

Once a specification is in place, the focus of my role shifts to managing the creation of assessment materials. Eduqas offers a range of different specifications for GCSE Religious Studies, each with various options – this means we need to produce around16 papers and accompanying mark schemes for each summer exam series. 

Our expert Principal Examiners write the papers, while my role as SO involves quality-checking to ensure fairness and consistency. We also have to balance coverage of the specification while ensuring the questions aren’t easy to predict, which is very challenging! 

Ensuring the marking process runs smoothly is another key part of the SO’s role. It’s my job to review applications from the teachers who apply to become examiners throughout the year. I highly recommend examining by the way, as it really is the best way to get to know the marking criteria! Once we’ve recruited, I work with the Principal Examiners and their teams to help train our new examiners, quality-assure their marking and monitor their progress.  

Post-exams I’m also involved in creation of our assessment feedback materials alongside our Prinicipal Examiners – this is vital, as it lets teachers know which areas learners excelled in and which they struggled with, allowing them to tailor their teaching accordingly for next year. 

In August once marking is complete and meetings to agree grade boundaries have been conducted, I turn my attention to the upcoming academic year.  

This involves planning our Professional Learning events, reviewing the successes and areas for improvement of the previous year and writing the first of our termly Back to School Newsletters to ensure our teachers have all the key information they need for the new academic year (if you haven’t signed up yet I highly recommend it). With a bit of luck I also manage to take some time off!

Supporting our GCSE Religious Studies centres

Supporting our centres is a key element of my role as SO. My team can easily be contacted via the email address on our qualification page, which is something Eduqas prides itself on.  

Along with our very knowledgeable Subject Support Officer (SSO) I do everything I can to respond to enquiries from teachers, parents or learners promptly.  

Supporting our centres is a real team effort – our Regional Reps also provide their expertise, visiting new centres to help them get up and running, and checking in on existing centres to make sure they have everything they need to teach successfully. If they need more in-depth subject knowledge, then myself and the SSO provide this. 

What do GCSE Religious Studies centres like best about Eduqas?  

The easy access to support we offer is definitely something centres appreciate, along with the free high-quality resources on the website that support their teaching, and the fact that materials from previous Professional Learning events are available on our secure Portal.  

But the thing schools and colleges I’ve spoken to like best about Eduqas is how accessible our qualifications are. Teachers regularly mention how impressed they are that we consciously consider the reading age of candidates and the pressures of exam conditions when designing our questions.  

They appreciate that we care about writing high quality questions that test what the students have learned, as opposed to testing their ability to work out what confusingly worded questions are asking!  

Customer experience - whether they are a teacher, learner or parent - is at the heart of all that we do here at Eduqas.