Schools and Colleges: Qualification Results and Full Opening

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, my apologies: I thought that the noble Baroness the Minister was going to repeat the Statement.

I start by congratulating young people across the country on their GCSE and A-level results, which have caused them much more anxiety than necessary. Labour is absolutely clear: we want children back in school and we want them to stay there safely. As the shadow Secretary of State said yesterday, we will always work constructively with the Secretary of State to achieve that, and the questions that I put to the Minister should be taken in that spirit.

The vast majority of schools will reopen fully over the next few days. We welcome that, but many issues of concern remain. For example, schools were denied the necessary information to prepare for reopening, with the Government’s guidance for head teachers to plan for tier 2 restrictions only being published last Friday.

Over the past month, we have been presented with the extraordinary saga of the 2020 examinations. Ministers’ fixation on avoiding grade inflation led to the adoption of a statistical approach that was never going to survive contact with real live students. Mr Gove’s reforms to exams meant that there was no back-up to call on. It beggars belief that the Secretary of State was warned of the debacle and yet allowed such flawed results to reach publication before the inevitable retreat, thereby causing not just distress to so many students but chaos in the university sector. It seems that we have a Government that resolutely refuse to recognise problems that are so obviously coming down the road, proclaiming absolute confidence in their ostrich-like convictions until the moment of the screeching U-turn.

With regard to this summer’s exam results, can the Minister say when the Secretary of State first knew of the potential problems with the flawed standardisation approach, and what action he took as a result? The evidence given by Ofqual to the Education Committee today has raised serious questions about the Secretary of State’s role in the fiasco. We welcome the apology in the Statement but not his repeated attempts to blame Ofqual and officials for the exams crisis. It is now clear that he was responsible. The head of Ofqual has gone and the head of DfE is going. As we say in Scotland, Mr Williamson’s jaiket is on a shoogly nail.

In a helpful letter to all noble Lords last week, the noble Baroness the Minister stated:

“The relevant awarding organisations have assured the DfE that students will receive their results by this Friday.”


That was 28 August. Can the Minister say how many BTEC students have still not received their results?

On the national tutoring programme, can the noble Baroness say when it will take effect? Yesterday, the Secretary of State merely referred to “this academic year”, which is, to say the least, open-ended. Is she also aware that there is scope for the independent sector to demonstrate public benefit under its charitable status by becoming registered tutors under the programme? Not all the work should be handed to private tuition agencies, but whoever is involved it must start soon.

Finally on the return of schools, can the Minister say why early years and post-16 providers remain ineligible for the catch-up premium, and what extra support will be available for children with SEND?

Turning to the 2021 examinations, the tinkering around the edges proposed by Ofqual does not begin to address the scale of the problem that Years 11 and 13 have faced this year and will face next year. The call by teaching unions to change the exams more fundamentally is right: we need to address how we can “build back better”.

Two immediate principles should underpin exams in 2021. First, as the noble Baroness may recall, I argued—in response to the Statement of 8 July—that a plan was needed when schools returned, not in desperation as June 2021 approaches, to cope with the disruption that has already happened, and, just as importantly, for what may happen next year. A robust system does that, and it is surely a condemnation of the Government’s approach that there was no such plan this year. Failing to announce a plan that would have gone some way to reassuring students that they will not be penalised because of the possible future impact of the pandemic amounts, essentially, to a head-in-the-sand assumption that the next academic year will run smoothly and exams and progression in 2021 will operate as if nothing much has really happened. That is surely wishful thinking.

Schools, colleges and universities need time to plan. What discussions are Ministers having with the sector and UCAS to ensure that workable arrangements are in place? Can the Minister guarantee that a contingency plan will be put in place this month in case exams are disrupted again? Removing the cap on admissions by individual universities without a strategy for dealing with the fallout from that decision merely pushes the problem into next year.

Children and their families should have been the Government’s top priority over the summer, but their interests have been placed below those of the Government and Ministers. That must now change, for the good of all young people--for their education and their futures.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I was slightly confused because I thought the Minister would start by reading the Statement—I do not quite know what happened, but I have obviously got that wrong.

We welcome the fact that children and young people are returning to school, and we have to do all in our power to make this work successfully—and to make it safe. Naturally, the Government have produced reams of guidance for schools. Head teachers have told me that some of it is quite contradictory. I shall give one example. The guidance says:

“No-one should be excluded from education on the grounds that they are not wearing a face covering.”


Yet it also says that when children are walking down corridors or are in open-access areas in schools they should wear a face covering. However, the guidance says that, no, you should not be excluded or told that you had to wear one. That guidance has to be there—I understand that—but head teachers, schools and teachers are looking for simplified, easy-to-follow advice that they can adhere to.

During this period of school closures, children have fallen further and further behind, particularly disadvantaged pupils and those from BAME communities. Schools should be doing everything in their power to ensure that those children are able to catch up on those lost months of learning. I have seen it floated that the Government are considering doing some formative or summative testing to find out what the gap is and what the loss of learning is and how that can be supported. I welcome that—it is an important initiative that should happen.

I am concerned about three areas. One is that, during the period of school closures, children and young people who were excluded from school—they were not on any register because they were excluded—and those young people in alternative provision were the most vulnerable pupils in our system, and they need extra support and help. I do not know what the Government view on that should be, but alternative providers are concerned that those young people could easily get into further trouble.

Then there is the question of the 60,000 home-educated children. I strongly believe, as I suspect the Minister does, that now is the right time to introduce a policy to ensure that home-educated pupils are registered so that we know what is going on in their learning. However, I was concerned to see that external, home-schooled students have not received an A-level or GCSE grade. Could the Minister shed light on this? I am told that 20,000 students have been informed by their institutions that they will not receive a GCSE grade this year.

Let me give noble Lords the case of a young man from Oxford—I apologise to the Minister for throwing this out now and I will give her the correspondence afterwards. Due to personal reasons, he had to be home educated and do his own learning for biology, chemistry and physics at GCSE and A-level. He had a place at a university, but he has been told—I presume that this is true of other young people too—that he will not get a grade because he was an external candidate, not through a school. That is incredibly worrying. Could the Minister look at this issue?

Finally, I go back to mainstream schools. If, God forbid, a pupil is tested as Covid positive, who tells the school? Who tells the head teacher? Is it left to the parents to inform the school? Who is it left to? I am told by head teachers that there are no processes whereby the testing regime should automatically inform the head teacher. That is crucial for the well-being of schools and pupils, and to making the return to full-time education successful.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Watson, in thanking young people for their resilience during a crisis this summer that no-one intended them to have to go through. I repeat to your Lordships’ House the apology made by the Secretary of State and in my letter to noble Lords. I thank the noble Lord for his wish to work constructively on these matters.

On schools reopening, the main guidance to put in place the hierarchy of controls, on the need for bubbles or for year groups to be kept separate in secondary schools was issued on 2 July—well in advance of the end of summer term—and enabled schools to prepare. However, for the thankfully very small number of situations where there are additional restrictions, the guidance was issued only recently.

On the noble Lord’s questions about exams, it is important to remember the principle that Ofqual was a body created by Parliament. It was created by statute and is answerable to Parliament. There are good reasons in principle why the regulation of public examinations in this country is not subject to direct government interference. It was Ofqual’s responsibility to have the data to develop the algorithm and then send that algorithm to the various examination boards. There was a reaction at the stages at which the department was made aware of additional concerns and Ofqual met regularly with the department even from before the announcement was made for exams to be cancelled. The department reacted, but Ofqual is the independent regulator.

On sharing data, in the week running up to the A-level results the system was as per any normal year. On the Monday or Tuesday some headline data is given to the department. On the Wednesday that data is shared with schools and is then published on Thursday. To respect the normal division of responsibilities between the department and Ofqual, that long-standing practice was abided by and Ministers did not see the detail of results for individual students or the schools that would have been affected.

Only a tiny fraction of BTEC examination results remains to be communicated to students. That is where further information is needed. Each year there are normally, unfortunately, a small number of results outstanding. Pearson has assured us that it is working to issue these remaining results as soon as possible.

It is envisaged that the first services from the national tutoring programme, which is being delivered by the EEF and Teach First, will be delivered in the second half of the autumn term.

On the specific questions on early years catch-up, of the £350 million tutoring programme, £8 million has been awarded to Nuffield for early language development and there was an announcement that there will be small-group tuition for disadvantaged 16 to 19 year-olds. They are now included in the catch-up.

On the issue around special educational needs students, as noble Lords will be aware, the Oak Academy’s provision of online lessons has of course included some for those with special educational needs. The guidance and the links to the various resources on the Department for Education’s website include links to these. We have been working closely with the sector. Over the next year an additional £730 million will go into the high-needs budget, meaning that it will have grown by £1.5 billion, or 24%, in just two years. We are responding on special educational needs. The £650 million of main catch-up funding going out to schools has been weighted per pupil for specialist schools, because we recognise the higher per pupil costs in those settings.

There will be a contingency plan for examinations next year. There has already been guidance on the curriculum so that schools knew what they were doing from the moment they came back. For instance, in English literature they know that pupils will potentially be examined on only three of the four set texts and there have been changes to field work in geography, et cetera. The question of whether there will be a delay was part of Ofqual’s consultation on the 2021 series, and that will be confirmed as soon as possible.

There is now a higher education task force, chaired by Michelle Donelan, the Minister for Universities, which meets regularly with Universities UK and other stakeholders to work with the sector on the implications of the change in the awarding of grades for A-levels.

Turning to the questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I specifically checked and, while it is my personal preference to read the Statement, I was told that in this hybrid situation I do not repeat it. However, I put my view that I want to read it to noble Lords because it helps.

A lot of specific guidance has had to be set out for the sector. Officials and the sector have worked very closely to try to get the right boundary in not being able to be prescriptive, because we have over 20,000 schools in about 70,000 buildings. There must be the framework and the principles for head teachers and other school leaders to make their risk assessments and the changes to their buildings.

Masks are recommended only where we have something such as a tier 2, where there is a local lockdown, but schools can advise their students on that. I hope that the guidance is not contradictory on that matter.

Disadvantaged pupils are of course a concern for noble Lords and for the department. That is why there is the £1 billion catch-up fund. On excluded pupils, many of whom will have been in alternative provision, all schools reopening includes AP schools. At the end of the summer term we announced additional funds for those leaving AP to make sure that they had additional support and did not end up not in education, employment or training. We are working to ensure that they do not fall within the gaps.

On home education specifically, yes, we are particularly concerned. Going back to the cancellation of exams and the work the exam centres did, obviously some home-educated students then register at a school and sit their examinations in that school. As far as possible, we asked those schools to evaluate the performance of that student if they had any data on which to do so, but of course there were situations in which it just was not possible. That is also about the integrity of head teachers and teachers who did not feel they could give a grade. That is why the autumn series of resits in all subjects will be so important, particularly for home-educated students.

There was a recent consultation from the department on whether to have a register with local authorities and whether to pay exam fees for home-educated students, because we are concerned about the rise in the number of home-educated students. The reasons are not, as perhaps they were 10 or 20 years ago, well-meaning parents. Some who are in home education are potentially not getting the education they deserve, but we do not have the data. I will update the House as soon as I can on what is happening with that consultation.

Finally, I thank noble Lords for their support. I hope we can work constructively, going forward.