Company selling short GCSE-equivalent information technology course at �13,000 per class

A company has offered to visit schools to teach an information technology course, an element of which counts as a GCSE in league tables, over a period of up to nine days at a cost to the institution of �13,205 for one class of pupils.

The charge by the Coventry-based firm PET-Xi would amount to £528.20 per pupil, or more than a tenth of the per-pupil funding for the entire year for the school that raised concerns about it with us.

It has been described as an example of the “incredible” susceptibility of regulated qualifications to league-table gaming, although a spokesperson for the company said the course was not being offered as a short-cut to better headline results for schools, that the course was offered with high staff:pupil ratios and that its profit margins were low.

PET-Xi sent an unsolicited email to our teacher source two weeks ago, with the subject line: “Are you looking for an alternative Basket 3 Qualification that counts towards Progress 8?”

This is a reference to the fact that part of the course that PET-Xi offers, called a TLM level two qualification in IT user skills (open systems and enterprise), counts towards the Progress 8 metric, the key statistical measure in secondary school league tables. As a qualification that can be used in “Basket 3” of Progress 8, the TLM level 2 qualification counts the same as GCSEs in subjects such as art and drama.