Awarding of Qualifications: Role of Ministers

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

I listened carefully to the Secretary of State’s speech. Apart from the litany of excuses that he offered to explain how the exams fiasco came to unfold—none of it his own fault, of course—he did not offer a compelling reason why the document that the Opposition motion calls for should not be released to the Education Committee. I appreciate that he intends to give evidence—I hope it will be fulsome—to the Select Committee when he appears before it next week, but our motion asks for a higher degree of disclosure than is the normal practice when Secretaries of State attend Select Committee hearings. He offered nothing substantive about why that should not happen as our humble address suggests.

For all the young people who have been on the receiving end of this Government’s incompetence, the inescapable conclusion that they will draw from all that they have heard from Government Members today is that, rather than being the result of a “mutant algorithm”, the blame for this fiasco lies squarely at the Secretary of State’s door. When he was warned about the problem with the exam system, why did he not address the issues that were raised? We had no answer on that point today. Why were the Government so willing to preside over a situation in which the top grades at private schools were increased far beyond those of their state school at counterparts? We had no answer on that point today either.

I want to address the situation in relation to BTECs, and I welcome what the Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), had to say about that. The situation has been very much mishandled, and that is depressing to see. BTECs do a great job of contributing towards social mobility, which has been, frankly, limited over the past decade. The Secretary of State will know that almost half of students whose parents are in routine or manual jobs study BTECs or a mixture of BTECs and A-levels, compared with just over 22% of those whose mums and dads work in higher managerial administration roles. Half of white working-class and black British students in England get into university with qualifications that include BTECs. Those students should not have been left languishing at the back of the queue, waiting longer than anybody else for their results to be confirmed. They have been treated with a particular degree of disrespect, and it would have been good to hear the Secretary of State give an apology at the Dispatch Box today to BTEC students and a confirmation that they will not be forced into the same position next year.

What we have seen unfold over the summer is not simply a story of Government incompetence; it is the inescapable end point of the political approach that has been adopted by this Government, one that has degraded teacher assessments and coursework. They must change course before next summer.