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Dear All One of our external examiners has questioned our approach to students with learning needs in his examiners report. They said the following: "I also requested some clarification on the policy concerning Special Circumstances. With some essays, I was asked to mark ‘content alone’, a practice I was not happy with. If students had received support in the writing of their essays, then expecting them to be marked differently from other students ran the risk of doubly benefiting some students. I did not receive clear reassurances on this." They feel that we should be supporting students in their writing, but not marking their essays differently. I have practical concerns about this as we have a large number of students with dyslexia in proportion to our size as it would be difficult to do this in-house and many of the students don't seem to be taking up their one to one study skills support through Access Summit. I also feel that some mistakes will be made despite the support and students shouldn't be penalized for that. I need to respond on behalf of our exam board, but not sure of the approach to take. Is general practice to mark the work differently (I have found a number of policies on this) or do we need to go with what the examiner wants and support students in their writing. Our faculty sometimes struggle to mark work on content alone so advice on how I can help our faculty with this would be appreciated too. Thank you, Helen.