Has anyone been an exam invigilator? Should I be one?

[Fauve]

Ds' secondary school is asking Year 7 parents to offer themselves as invigilators for public exams - GCSEs etc. £7 an hour, hours to suit.
I'm kind of tempted, so that I can have a squint at his new school from within, as it were. OTOH - like many people - I still have exam dreams where I'm about to sit an exam for which I've done NO work, and wake up sweating. So would I be walking into my own worst nightmare?

Oooh, good link, cod! Trying to spot cases of visible nits...hmmm...

Thanks to everyone BTW - I shall mull it over. The chance to play 'Mingers' Marriage' as per cod's link is perhaps too good to pass up. (Except they're all boys, actually.)

I did it last summer. Bloody boring and actually much more responsible than you might think. You have to be on for 3+ hours, no reading/crosswords/whatever, and in some cases there are 5-6 subjects in one room with 1-3 papers each. It can be a total nightmare, frankly!

And you don't actually find much about how the school operates.

Thanks, JanH - I thought I might sound out other parents of Yr 7s, since we're having a get-together this week. It's possible that those in the know will say don't touch it with a bargepole. Or they might say the opposite.

NB any teachers involved bobbed in and then disappeared - the whole point of paying non-teachers to invigilate is that teachers don't have to be there (having better things to do)!

Don't take the word of anyone who hasn't done it since last academic year, Fauve. Things have changed.

Gaaaaahhhh - what if all the testosterone and BO wafting around got to me, and I fainted on the exam floor, and all the candidates had to be given ten minutes extra at the end to compensate for the time spent trundling me off on a hefty stretcher, and finding a replacement invigilator...and then the results were so poor, the school slipped several notches in the league tables...it would be a nightmare...

I've done it as a qualified teacher when we had to invigilate exams at school.

That's changed now with union rules and teacher's can no longer be asked to invigilate external exams.

fauve- the worst thing that can happen is not fainting- it's a tickly cough that just won't go away . take a bottle of water in with you

Oh, I see. Hence the note of desperation in the letter to parents!

Fauve- my main concern would be discipline and who would be responsible/ in charge of the exam. As I said teacher's don't have to do it (unles they're supply teachers bought in for this purpose) The head's and deputies will have other things to do. I'd check if there are any qualified teachers in