One of arc exams primary goals is offering a great examination experience at the keenest possible price. We’re acutely aware of the financial hardship many of you are facing, courtesy of the ‘cost of living’ crisis and coupled to the fact that virtually all private candidates receive no formal financial aid for their study or examinations costs.
However, like you, and unlike schools, arc exams receives no public funding to provide the assessment services we offer. The income we rely on to run our business, day to day, to fund fair staff salaries (exceeding the minimum ‘Living Wage’), building/utility costs, IT infrastructure, ongoing investment, room hire and invigilators etc are all financed from the examination entry fees we charge you. Rest assured, we carefully and consistently scrutinise all our costs to ensure we can avoid passing unwarranted costs onto our customers.
As you will no doubt be aware there is no escaping the inflationary pressures that affects each and every one of us. Despite headline inflation falling from its peak in November 2022 (14% and 10.7%, for RPI and CPI respectively), to 9% & 6.8% recorded this July, it is still at a historical level not seen since the early 1990s!
Therefore, whilst conducting our Annual Fee Review, arc exams were very mindful to ensure our examination entry fees did not rise by more than the current lowest measure of inflation, (CPI 6.8%). Well, we pretty much achieved that! All, bar one of our 555 GCSE, IGCSE & A Level examination entry fees, are increasing by between 6% and 6.4%, comfortably lower than headline CPI. The one exception was to remedy a fee that we had inadvertently underpriced by £40 last year. Some you win … some you lose 😉
As well as keeping our entry fees as low as possible we have also capped the increase applied to our A Level Science CPACs to just 2.3%, three times lower than CPI and resulting in a fee that is significantly lower than that offered by other providers.
We very much hope you can see the efforts we have made to keep your examination costs as low as possible, we’d very much welcome your consideration when deciding where to sit your exams in future.
One final thing. We’ll shortly be announcing a new initiative where £1 from every examination entry made with arc exams will be donated to a charitable cause. More to follow on that shortly.