Awarding of Qualifications: Role of Ministers

Tracy Brabin Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab/Co-op)]

We know what has been going on this afternoon. We are trying to ask for transparency from the Secretary of State, but I will use my limited time to talk about those young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are suffering the injustice of having their vital GCSE and A-level grades marked down because of the school that they went to and their postcode. I will, if I may, illustrate my comments with the experience of a couple of my constituents. One young man, Hamzah, who was hoping to go to Leeds University, was on course to achieve the grades. He was originally marked down by the algorithm. By the time he managed to get his appeal the course was full, so he is now waiting another 12 months.

Haaris is another young man with a bright future. He was informed by his college that it would be unable to award him centre-assessed grades. On the same day, Ofqual announced that external candidates could transfer their exam entries to a new centre, one that could assess them and award them grades, so he transferred to a new AQA exam centre, Cambridge Street School in my constituency, and called AQA to ask if that would be okay.

The following sequence is just a Kafka-esque nightmare of flip-flopping that has really impacted on Haaris’s mental health. He was told on that day, 15 May, that that was the deadline for submissions, a deadline that he and his school were unaware of. The next working day they submitted a late entry, accepted as long as basic information was supplied. There was then a long period of silence, with calls and emails unanswered. AQA has said that around the entry deadline in May it experienced an extremely high volume of inquiries from exam centres, parents and students. It is clear that the exam board was not properly prepared or resourced. Had it been able to reply, AQA could have told Haaris earlier that he would not be considered because Joint Council for Qualifications regulations would not allow CAGs to be awarded where a prior relationship did not exist between a student and a centre.

What happened was that after a period of assessment and mocks, Haaris got A*s and As, and it looked like he would be going to a university of his choice in London. However, when AQA was contactable it said that Haaris’s entry would not be processed and that he would not get grades. Then it changed its mind and said that it would process the application if the unique candidate identifier was available. Within hours, that was snatched away again when AQA said it could not process his application.

The back and forth impacted severely on Haaris’s mental health and sense of self-worth. Four years of dedication and hard work in extreme extenuating circumstances have all been for nothing. Students like Haaris and others really do deserve transparency from this Government. We need full disclosure. I support the motion 100%.