Missing assessment recordings and inaccurate certificates have led to a £150,000 regulatory penalty for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, with the failings disclosed by England’s qualifications regulator on October 14.
Ofqual published its final notice and announced the settlement on Wednesday. The enforcement panel’s decision itself was made on October 7; today’s development is its public disclosure, not a fresh decision imposing the fine.
The case concerns safeguards that allow a learner’s result to be checked after an examination. ABRSM accepted that it failed to retain assessment evidence needed for a small number of marking reviews and a malpractice investigation. Where the underlying recording has disappeared, reviewing how a mark was reached becomes harder even if the original result was correct.
Ofqual’s notice also records that 72,064 learners received certificates bearing an incorrect qualification title. ABRSM subsequently notified learners and offered replacement certificates, but the regulator found that its initial response did not meet the requirement to take all reasonable steps to address the error.
The board admitted breaches of its conditions of recognition and agreed to the financial penalty. It will also contribute £10,000 towards investigation and enforcement costs and commission an independent audit of its arrangements for retaining learner assessment data.
The settlement reduced the penalty from what Ofqual said it would otherwise have imposed in a contested case. That reduction reflects cooperation and admissions; it does not remove the regulator’s findings about the deficient systems.
The notice gives ABRSM 28 days from its date to pay and describes a statutory right to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal. It does not report that an appeal has been filed. The independent audit is intended to test whether the records needed for future challenges can be retained and retrieved reliably.
