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Tim Oates is Group Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment. Tim joined Cambridge Assessment in May 2006 to spearhead the rapidly growing Assessment Research and Development division. He was previously at the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency (QCA), where he had been Head of Research for most of the previous decade.

Tim has produced work which commands national and international respect. With Mike Coles, he developed the new pan-European 8-level qualifications framework. He is active in transnational comparative work on examinations standards, regulation and management of national assessment arrangements, and post-16 vocational education and training. He has advised the UK Government for many years on both practical matters and assessment policy. From 2010 to December 2011, Tim was Chair of the Expert Panel advising the Secretary of State for Education on the review of the National Curriculum in England. He continues to advise Government on the development and implementation of the National Curriculum and allied policy.

Paul Newton is Professor of Educational Assessment at the Institute of Education, University of London. His research focuses primarily upon issues related to the evaluation of large-scale educational assessment systems, and he is particularly interested in theories of validity for educational and psychological measurement, past and present. He has published on a range of assessment topics, including validity, comparability, assessment purposes, national curriculum test reliability, and the public understanding of measurement inaccuracy.

Having obtained a PhD in developmental psychology, Paul moved into educational assessment and has spent most of his career as a researcher within a range of assessment agencies – including the Associated Examining Board, the National Foundation for Educational Research, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Ofqual and Cambridge Assessment.

Paul is a member of the Editorial Board of the international journal Assessment in Education: Policy, Principles and Practice and has served on a variety of national and international committees, including the Executive Committee of the International Association for Educational Assessment. He was a member of the Assessment Reform Group, until its retirement in 2010, and is a Fellow of the Association for Educational Assessment – Europe.

Dr Nick Saville is responsible for overseeing and directing the work of the Research and Validation Unit at Cambridge English. Nick holds a PhD from the University of Bedfordshire in language test impact. He also holds degrees in Linguistics and in TEFL from the University of Reading. He has specialised in language testing and assessment since 1987. Before joining Cambridge Assessment in 1989, he worked overseas at the University of Cagliari (Italy) and managed test development projects in Tokyo. Nick represents Cambridge English at the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE). He is also a member of the Cambridge University team responsible for coordinating the English Profile programme.

Nick has close involvement with other European initiatives, such as the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and related 'toolkit'. His research interests include: the development and validation of tasks and rating scales for Speaking tests; the development of models for investigating test impact; the implementation of quality management systems (QMS) in test development and validation; and the uses of language assessment for migration and citizenship purposes. Nick presents regularly at international conferences and has published widely on issues related to language assessment. He has been an associate editor of Language Assessment Quarterly since its launch in 2004.