Exams and Accountability 2021

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement regarding testing and examinations in schools and colleges next year.

The pandemic continues to cause disruption throughout our education communities and, once again, I pay tribute to all our teachers, school leaders and support staff for the enormous efforts that they are making to keep young people of all ages learning. I also pay tribute to the winner of the global teacher of the year award, which recognises the most outstanding teacher from around the world. Our very own Dr Jamie Frost, maths lead at Tiffin School in Kingston-upon-Thames, has been shortlisted for this after his tuition website went viral during lockdown, helping millions of pupils in the United Kingdom and around the world to continue their studies at home. He has already won the covid hero award, and I am sure that the whole House joins me in wishing him luck with the overall prize. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]

We will not let covid damage the life chances of an entire year of students by cancelling next year’s exams. Exams are the best form of assessment that we have, and we are therefore taking steps to ensure that any student preparing to sit them in 2021 has every chance possible to do their very, very best.

We support Ofqual’s decision that, in awarding next year’s GCSEs, AS and A-levels, grading will be as generous and will maintain a similar profile as those grades awarded this year. This is to recognise the exceptional circumstances under which students and teachers continue to work and to make sure that students are not at a disadvantage compared with those in previous years.

Ofqual is also working with the exam boards to make sure that students studying for vocational and technical qualifications and other general qualifications benefit from the same generous approach. I know that students and teachers are making enormous efforts to catch up with any lost learning. To support those most affected by the continuing disruption, at the end of January, students will be given advance notice of some of the topic areas that will be assessed in their GCSEs and A-levels. That means that they will be able to focus on these areas in more depth and target their revision accordingly. Students will also be given exam aids, such as formula sheets, in recognition of the time lost in the classroom and to give them more confidence and reduce the amount of information that they need to memorise in preparation for exams.

All these measures have been drawn up with the most affected in mind, and we will be sharing the advance notice about what exactly the measures will entail with schools and colleges at the end of January. Students taking vocational and technical qualifications or other general qualifications can also expect a number of concessions, including a reduced number of units to be assessed. We want as many students as possible to be able to sit their exams, and for that reason we have a contingency package to make sure that they can do so, including spacing exams more widely, as well as enabling vulnerable students to sit exams at home if they need to.

In the minority of cases where students cannot sit all their papers or where a very small number of pupils miss all of them, there will be means by which they can still be awarded a grade, including additional papers available after the main exam series.

The fundamental problem with this year’s exams is that we tried to award grades without actually holding exams. We will not be repeating that same mistake again. With the measures that I have outlined, we are confident that every student who is preparing to sit exams this summer will be awarded a qualification.[Official Report, 6 January 2021, Vol. 686, c. 4MC.] As the virus continues to be a fact of life for all of us, schools and colleges are making impressive efforts to ensure that education can continue for those students who must remain at home. We have reviewed and updated the guidance for remote education so that schools, parents and pupils all know exactly what to expect from it. Primary schools need to provide an absolute bare minimum of three hours a day on average of remote education, and secondary schools, an absolute minimum of at least four. Schools will be expected to check and provide feedback on pupils’ work at least weekly as well as informing parents immediately where engagement is a concern. The Department will ask schools to set out details of their remote provision on their websites so that parents can better understand their schools’ remote education offer.

As levels of covid infection continue to fluctuate, we know that different areas will experience varying levels of disruption to learning. We will therefore commission an expert group to assess any local variations and the impact the virus is having on students’ education.

I turn to the measures we are taking in respect of the school and college accountability framework for 2021. We need to ensure that the arrangements for inspection and performance measures are fair and reflect the current public health situation. They need to take into account the enormous challenges that schools and colleges have been facing, but, equally, we must continue to provide the information and reassurance that parents need about their children’s education. We will not be publishing the normal performance tables based on test, exam and assessment data next year. Instead, my Department will publish data on the subjects that students have taken, how well schools and colleges support their students to their next destination, and attendance, taking account of the impact of covid-19. We will also publish national and regional data on 2021 exams, tests and assessments. Importantly, we will make the exam data available to Ofsted and to schools, but we will not publish it in performance tables.

I will now let the House know how our plans for schools and colleges are affected by inspections. It is our intention that Ofsted’s routine graded inspections will remain suspended for the spring term but will resume in a carefully considered way from the summer term. In the meantime, Ofsted will carry out monitoring inspections in the schools and colleges most in need of support. That will include those currently judged inadequate and some in the “requires improvement” category. Inspectors will focus on areas that are particularly relevant at this time such as curriculum delivery, remote education and, importantly, attendance. There will also be a focus on those pupils who are particularly vulnerable. However, I stress that inspectors will not make graded judgments and any inspection activity will be sensitive to the additional pressures that schools are working under at this time.

As in the autumn, Ofsted will be able to inspect a school in response to any significant concerns about safeguarding but also about the delivery of remote education by that school. In both the early years sector and the independent schools sector, the intention is also that standard inspections will remain suspended for the spring, with assurance inspections in the early years and non-routine inspections in independent schools taking place in the meantime. I trust that provides the House with reassurance that we are providing the right balance in our accountability and inspection arrangements.

I will finish by outlining our proposal for the curriculum and testing in primary schools, recognising the particular challenges they face. Assessments in primary schools next summer will focus on phonics, mathematics and English reading and writing. That means that for 2021 only, we will remove all tests at key stage 1, the English grammar, punctuation and spelling tests at key stage 2, and science teacher assessments at both key stages. The introduction of a multiplication tables check will be postponed for a further year, but schools may use it if they want to. It is a resource available to all schools, and we encourage them to do so if they can.

We will also add more flexibility to the timetable, so if there is any disruption due to coronavirus in a school, pupils will be able to take the test when they return to the school. These measures will help us to address lost learning time and will give us a chance to support pupils in schools who need help. They will also provide vital information for parents and better help for pupils to make a successful step into the next stage of education—going to secondary school.

Everyone in all our schools and colleges is working as hard as they can to make sure that no pupils lose out because of covid and that the future they are dreaming of is still very much within their reach. I am determined that the coronavirus will not jeopardise the life chances of this year’s pupils, and I am confident that the plan is the fairest way of doing this. I commend this statement to the House.

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and for the advance copy of it. I also thank the Minister for School Standards for briefing my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and me yesterday. I join the Secretary of State in congratulating Dr Frost and wishing him well for the finals of the global teacher of the year award.

I am glad that the Government have finally responded to the pleas of students, their parents and teachers who have been asking for months how next summer’s exams will be conducted fairly. While I welcome measures to help pupils be assessed on what they have learned and to ensure that reserve papers will be in place for pupils who might miss out, and am pleased that performance tables will be suspended and that routine Ofsted inspections will not resume in January—many of these are measures that Labour called for—today’s announcement still bakes in fundamental inequities between students who have suffered different levels of disruption to their learning. The Government have known since September that an ongoing pandemic would create huge challenges in schools, and for months they will have heard school leaders, parents and Labour Members calling for a credible plan to address them. It has taken until December to provide one, so can the Secretary of State tell us what took him so long? Why did he leave students in a horrible and uncertain limbo?

The truth is that the delay has limited the Department’s options. Had it acted sooner, it could have done more to make the system fairer. I welcome the decision to make the distribution of grades similar to last year’s to ensure that pupils sitting their exams this year do not feel unfairly disadvantaged, but we know that last year while grades rose across the board, some pupils—particularly those in private schools—were more likely to see a sharp rise. How will the Secretary of State ensure this year that the distribution of grades is spread evenly across schools and postcodes to ensure that the most disadvantaged pupils are treated fairly? Is he not concerned that providing information in advance about subject content will at best benefit pupils at random, with those who happen to have already covered the assessed material benefiting at the expense of those who did not, and at worst will mean that pupils who faced the greatest disruption to their learning lose the most?

I am glad that the hon. Member could bring herself to welcome the measures, albeit slightly grudgingly, at the start. It is no thanks to the Labour party that schools are back and children are in schools. It is no thanks to the Labour party that we were getting over 1.6 million children back into school before—

Order. Is it possible to face me a little bit as well, Secretary of State?

I know that you always love Secretaries of State to look adoringly at you, Mr Speaker. I have been dutifully rebuked.

The Labour party has never championed pupils, because it has not fought to get students back into schools. It was actually the Mayor of Greater Manchester who wanted to send children out of school and back home. But the Conservative party stands for getting children back into school.

The shadow Secretary of State highlighted a number of issues. It is disappointing that the official Opposition have not engaged in a positive debate. They could not even be bothered to respond to the Ofqual consultation about exams. They seem to have missed the opportunity. Maybe it got lost in the post—or maybe, quite simply, they just could not be bothered. We do recognise that there are significant challenges in delivering education at this time, which is why we have put together a package of truly unprecedented measures to assist schools, teachers, and, most important, pupils themselves.

I am sure that the hon. Lady would grudgingly acknowledge that all academic studies have continuously highlighted that children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, including children from black and ethnic minority communities, are the ones who always exceed predicted grades when they sit exams.

It is good to see that we have a common view, although—I note the chuntering from the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who is sitting in the Opposition Chief Whip’s seat, on the importance of exams. We recognise that children will have missed out elements of the curriculum, but giving advance notice will give them and their teachers the opportunity to use that time to focus on the areas of the curriculum that they know they will be tested on. We are also recognising the importance of technical and vocational qualifications, and we will be looking at ensuring that information on those is shared at a similar time as information on GCSEs and A-levels.

The shadow Secretary of State highlighted some important issues, including the potential for extra appeals and ensuring that there are proper extra resources in place for that process; we will certainly be doing that. We recognise that there are challenges from giving extra learning time and moving most exams back by three weeks. For example, this will put added pressure on the exam boards. We are working closely with the exam boards to support them to get the right resources in place, and to deliver the grades as and when we would expect them—at the end of August.

It is right that we have exams in some form next year, because that at least gives pupils much-needed structure. I thank the Secretary of State, because there is no easy or perfect option, but I have two questions that I would like to ask him. First, are we possibly baking grade inflation into the system, as happened in 2020? Could we not ensure that grade boundaries are in line with 2019 results, or at least between 2019 and 2020 results, so that we can revert to the standards of 2019, while no one loses out, and start transitioning back to normality? From a social justice perspective, does inflating all the grades just move the goalposts, in that the difference between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers remains the same?

Secondly, we know from the DFE’s own data that 798,000 pupils in state-funded schools were not in school for covid-19-related reasons on Thursday 26 November. Is there a way that we could track every single child to assess the learning that he or she is getting from the school? Will my right hon. Friend give Ofsted a much stronger role to ensure that children are learning, and will he use the £143 million allocated to the catch-up programme to ensure that every pupil is prepared for this year’s exams, rather than rolling over that funding into next year?

We have commissioned an Education Policy Institute study on the individual learning loss, and we are getting data into the Department on it. We will be asking the expert group to look at that and how best to address it. I take my right hon. Friend’s point: he would have preferred more of a middle ground in the grading between 2019 and 2020. I firmly believe that, for those children who have had to deal with so much in terms of the pandemic, it is really important that their exam grading is reflective of their work but also recognises the fact that they have been through a tremendous amount this year. It would be unjust for them to have grades, having sat exams, that were substantially lower than the ones received in 2020.

Let us head up to Birmingham to see Jack Dromey. [Interruption.] He looks a lot younger! That was not Jack Dromey; we have not arrived in Birmingham yet, so we will head to North Thanet, to see Sir Roger Gale.

The work that my right hon. Friend does in connection with exams is likely to be considered wrong by some people, but I congratulate him on coming up with what is probably the least worst option available to him. He will remember that at Education questions a couple of weeks ago I raised the issue of SATs, which is of particular concern to primary schools this year. He touched on the testing regimes for primary school children and secondary school children. Could he expand on that, and indicate precisely what he expects of teaching staff and whether he believes that, for this year only, assessment might be the way forward?

My right hon. Friend is right that there is not an easy pathway, which I think the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) also recognises. Any route taken presents quite significant challenges in delivering assessments and examinations, but I believe that this is the fairest and most robust way of doing it. We have removed SATs from performance tables. That is an important measure, but SATs do present a really important way of measuring a child’s attainment and position, and they will be vital for schools in making that assessment and supporting children to catch up on lost learning. We hope that removing them from performance tables will remove a lot of the pressure that teachers sometimes feel and help with the delivery of SATs.

Securing fairness for all students will be absolutely key, so while I welcome some of the measures that have been announced today that go in the right direction, I am worried that the creation of an expert group is simply kicking the fairness can down the road. Given the huge variations in learning between individuals, schools and local education authorities, when, specifically, will the expert group report on its proposals, and when will the House be able to scrutinise them?

The whole set of measures that we have put in place, whether in extra learning time, changes to assessment, advance notice or giving exam aids, is to support children who have suffered from lost learning. The expert group, which will report to me in the spring, will make a proper and thorough assessment of some of the challenges that students have faced.

This year’s students, such as those at Petroc College in North Devon, have faced unprecedented disruption to their studies as a result of the pandemic. Those who are due to sit some of the most important exams of their lives so far have perhaps felt this disruption most acutely. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that the measures that his Department is taking will ensure that these students are treated as fairly as possible in both academic and vocational subjects?

I assure my hon. Friend that the measures we are taking are truly exceptional—they are not measures that we would ever have expected to take in any normal year. The only reason we are taking them is to support students in her constituency to ensure that they achieve the very best grades that they possibly can and unlock their future life chances.