Double Marker: Draft Letter for Parents

Subject: GCSE English Mock Examinations – Introducing Double Marker

Dear Parents and Carers,
As part of our commitment to providing the highest quality preparation for your child’s GCSE English Language and Literature examinations, we are introducing an innovative new assessment system for our upcoming mock exams: Double Marker, developed by No More Marking.

Why We Are Using Double Marker

Marking GCSE English mock examinations is exceptionally demanding for our teaching staff. However, engaging deeply with official exam board mark schemes is essential to ensure our pupils understand how they will be graded in their summer exams. Traditionally, schools have faced a difficult trade-off between the absolute accuracy of holistic marking and the structural necessity of official mark schemes.
Double Marker resolves this dilemma by combining the best of both worlds. The system establishes an exceptionally reliable relative rank order of papers across the entire year group, while dramatically reducing teacher workload. Instead of spending dozens of hours grading entire cohorts of papers, our English department will mark a small, highly targeted selection of scripts. This direct workload reduction allows our teachers to dedicate their valuable time to planning targeted, personalised classroom interventions to address the learning gaps highlighted by the mocks.

Rigorous Human Quality Control and Oversight

We want to reassure you that your child's final mock grade is never determined by an automated system or AI in isolation. Double Marker is built around a robust, human-led verification process:

1. AI Comparative Judgement (First Marker): The platform evaluates all student scripts holistically to establish an exceptionally precise relative scale across the cohort.
2. The Human Teacher (Second Marker): Your child’s teachers log into a secure, online platform to mark a small, carefully selected sample of scripts using the official exam board mark scheme. Crucially, teachers mark these papers "blind," without seeing any computer-derived scores.
3. Rescaling and Calibration: Double Marker's advanced optimisation engine compares the teacher's marks with the holistic scale, ensuring that the AI is neither too harsh nor too generous, and rescales all results to perfectly align with official exam board criteria.
4. Senior Marker Overrides: If a teacher's mark for a script differs wildly from the holistic scale, the platform automatically flags it for manual review. In any case of a discrepancy, a senior human marker reviews the actual script and holds the absolute final authority to override the system.

Data Protection and GDPR Safeguards

We treat your child's personal data with the highest level of security. Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), our school remains the Data Controller in absolute charge of your child's personal details, and No More Marking acts strictly as our Data Processor under a legally binding contract.

• Secure Data Residency: Your child’s scanned exam papers and basic details are stored securely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 and MongoDB Atlas servers located in Ireland (EU), backed up nightly, and protected by advanced industry-standard encryption.
• Strict Privacy with AI: The secure AI tools used for transcription and checking are bound by strict enterprise-grade agreements. They are strictly prohibited from using any student data to train their models, and all processing is entirely transient, with data removed after a maximum of 30 days.
• Minimum Data Collection: We only upload the bare minimum details required to generate your child's reports (First Name, Last Name, Date of Birth, Year Group, and Gender).

For further details regarding how student data is processed, stored, and deleted, we encourage you to read the Double Marker Parent GDPR Help Guide. This guide outlines these technical safeguards and your rights under UK GDPR in comprehensive detail.
We are incredibly excited about the precision, depth, and speed of the feedback this system will deliver to our pupils as they prepare for their GCSEs, and we thank you for your continued support.
Warm regards,
[Name of Headteacher / Head of English]
[School Name]

Updated on: 19/08/2026