We appoint a publisher partner for many of our qualifications, particularly GCSEs, AS and A Levels. These are mainly major educational publishers and are usually selected by open tender. We do this to ensure that teachers have at least one good textbook/set of resources for first teaching.
Publisher partners work closely with our subject specialists and have access to the new specifications that they support during their development. They do not, however, get any preferential treatment when it comes to the endorsement of their resources.
On some occasions, we do establish commercial relationships with publishers, where we pay for the development of a resource. This is usually where it is not financially viable for the publishers to invest in production of these resources themselves, or where they provide some technical expertise that we do not have ourselves.