General Matters

John Denham Excerpts

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I wish to speak about the marking of the English and English language GCSEs this summer.

At the beginning of the school term, I was asked to visit one of my local secondary schools, which had been confidently predicting 58% A* to C grades in English and English language. The students have been marked down at 32%. At the same time, stories started to appear in the local newspaper, the Daily Echo, about schools in neighbouring Hampshire. Some schools that have regularly had 84% to 90% A to C grades achieved just 60%. It became clear to me, as it did across the country, that something had gone enormously wrong in the marking of GCSE exams this summer.

I wanted to speak in the debate because I believe that a huge injustice has been done to that group of students who sat the exams this summer. It is an injustice that has a real effect on their lives: I have heard already of students who have been denied access to the college or the course that they wanted, or who have not been allowed to go on to the apprenticeship that they had been promised, or who are worried about the future impact of having low grades when they might come to apply, for example, to selective universities.

Equally importantly, there are those students who, from the beginning of their school career, needed considerable support, inspiration, nurturing, cajoling and confidence building just to stay the course. They left school in June confident that they would achieve a reasonable result, but they now feel so bitterly let down that they say they are turning their backs on education altogether.

This is not the time for wider debate on education standards; that will take place another time. I want to focus on the marking of those exams this summer. I believe that the students are innocent victims, caught in the crossfire of a wider and sometimes highly partisan debate about education. We need to focus on the position that they are in, but up to now Ministers—and, I am afraid, the Secretary of State—do not seem to have understood the injustice that has been done. The concerns of students are being brushed off, like so much dandruff from the Secretary of State’s collar.

Why am I so convinced that an injustice has been done? First, because the students, however we look at it, fulfilled every expectation of their teachers and, in turn, of the exam boards. Students look to teachers to guide them on what they need to know—the skills and the aptitude that they need to demonstrate—but there is simply no evidence that, peculiarly this year, they were catastrophically let down by their teachers.

Let us look at the schools involved. It is not as though this is poor performance concentrated in schools that had traditionally been weak or had struggled to achieve decent results. As is very clear, the unexpectedly poor results occurred in schools that had traditionally been among the best-performing in the country. It defies belief that so many teachers in so many schools should, collectively, turn into poor teachers in that one month of June this year.

Those teachers were supported by the exam boards. In the school that I visited, because the controlled assessment was new, there were regular checks with AQA on the way the work was being moderated and to ensure that the approach to the teaching was in line with the exam boards’ expectation. The school was told that it was in line with expectations—a school that had been praised for the excellence of its moderation and the quality of its predictions.

We got the Ofqual interim report, but it really does not convince in any way that Ofqual has, clearly and transparently, got to the bottom of why the results turned out the way they did in so many schools.

One reason for my participation in the debate is that I am one of the architects of Ofqual. It was my joint decision with my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), when he was Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and I was Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to establish Ofqual as an independent regulator. The truth is that the guarantee of independence that we delivered has not turned out to be a guarantee of competence. Ofqual has failed to deliver the quality of service that is needed to inspire confidence among students and teachers.

The interim report that Ofqual published failed to provide a convincing explanation of what happened; indeed, as the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders said to the Select Committee on Education, in the one exam that we are talking about there has been extraordinary variation: 26.7% of those sitting it got a C grade in June last year; 37% got a C grade in January; and 10.2% got a C grade in June 2012. As he said,

“there is no evidence that those papers had any difference in the level of challenge in those examinations”.

In other words, it is all down to the extraordinary way in which the exam was assessed.

Ofqual tried to say that the problem related to January, but its figures do not tell a convincing story that gives a full explanation. In any case, students have the reasonable expectation that if they deliver what they were asked to deliver by their teachers and the exam board, that will be reflected in their result. For them to fail their exam, as they will be seen to have done, is deeply unfair; it will have a lasting impact on them.

Last week, the Secretary of State said, or is reported to have said, the following to the Select Committee—the transcript is not yet on the website—about the Welsh decision to reopen the question:

“the children who suffer are children from Wales who, when they apply for jobs in England, will hand over certificates that profess to be good passes, and English employers will now say, ‘I fear, through no fault of your own…that I cannot count your exam pass as equivalent to this other exam pass.’”

As with many of the Secretary of State’s statements, there is absolutely no evidence for that. Indeed, if it were true, we would be seeing schools, colleges and employers turning down children with the January qualifications, on the grounds that those qualifications were not good enough.

Ofqual says—I have given a health warning about its report—that performance overall is down by just 1.4%. Perhaps we should treat that statement with caution, but if that is the case, it can hardly be claimed that re-grading to around the expected levels would invalidate the whole set of qualifications this summer. It would, however, make a massive difference to the students affected. Allowing the injustice to remain uncorrected will do far more damage to the students than any possible consequences of allowing a re-grading consistent with the January results to go ahead.

Why did the Secretary of State not consider that course of action, or, given the questions around the Ofqual report, set up an independent inquiry? I am convinced that a re-grading is the only fair way forward, but I can understand that a necessary first step is an independent inquiry into what happened. I fear that the real reasons do not reflect well on the Secretary of State. He is a highly political, highly partisan Minister who wishes to play every issue for his personal promotion and party advantage. When the issue came to light, he thought, I am sure, “This is a party opportunity.” After all, Labour had introduced controlled assessments, and Labour—indeed, I, as Minister—had introduced Ofqual. He thought it was an opportunity to attack Labour’s record and burnish his credentials as a defender of standards; that is what he set out to do.

However, surely there has to be a limit to the amount of damage that we are prepared to do to innocent students just to promote a Secretary of State’s career and political stance. We are all in politics, and we all make partisan speeches at times, but none of us has the right to make others the victim of our politics.

I am convinced that an injustice has been done to thousands of students; they worked hard and did what they were asked to do. I am convinced that many of them will suffer as regards their careers, academic qualifications and job opportunities. This situation cannot be allowed to last, and the issue must not be lost in the wider, legitimate debate about educational standards. I hope that the Government will, at this late stage, agree to an independent inquiry, so that we can get to the bottom of what went wrong and make sure that the students concerned are treated fairly.