An epidemic of educational poverty has been allowed to sweep across the country – Q&A with Robert Halfon

Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow and chairman of the Select Committee on Education, says the exam results are a disaster, Ofqual is not fit for purpose, and that an epidemic of educational poverty has been allowed to sweep across the country because of the lockdown.

To get the schools open safely again in time for September, Halfon wants the Prime Minister to get out on the road and kick-start a national back to schools campaign with the same fervour as the one launched to save the NHS.

In an interview with Maggie Pagano, he also says Ofqual, the examining body, was warned by the select committee that the new marking process would lead to anomalies in grading, particularly for the disadvantaged. But Ofqual did not respond properly to these criticisms, offering only a helpline for students needing to make an appeal.

By contrast, he says the examining bodies handling the 250,000 or so students who take BTEC exams each year set a gold standard for the educational system.

Halfon is one the rare voices in government to champion the importance of vocational qualifications and apprenticeship schemes as part of a broader educational mix. 

Yet the efforts of BTEC students – who number roughly as many as those who take A levels – are persistently ignored by mainstream media and many politicians.

And why is Britain, the home of so many great innovators and engineers, the heart of the industrial revolution, so snooty about vocational students? It’s all about the dinner party: read on.

Maggie Pagano: You have described the government’s U-turn over A level exam results as a “mega-mess”. Do you think Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, should resign? 

Robert Halfon: I’m not getting involved in terms of decisions that are with the Prime minister and his Cabinet. But what I do think is that massive lessons have to be learnt about this from both parliament and Ofqual. All the priorities seem to be around the economy and health.

I understand the government’s priority was to avoid destitution and death at the beginning of the pandemic but what has happened to exam results is a symptom of what has gone on in the past six months, which amounts to a national disaster in my view, in terms of children’s learning and development. 

There are millions of children who have done no school work at all. There are millions of children who have had little contact with teachers despite the work of some great teachers and some great schools. This should not have happened and I just think the exams controversy is a symptom of all those problems. 

MP: Looking back do you think it was good to close the school so quickly?

RH: I think everyone was shell-shock and there was a really severe panic in some ways. When there was a lockdown on the 23rd of March it looked really serious and there were hundreds of deaths and daily press conferences. So, I do understand why the school closures happened. 

What I don’t understand is why from day one the Department of Education didn’t make it very clear about how much learning they expected children to do during the lockdown and that there weren’t regular conversations with head teachers up and down the country. 

I also find it hard to understand why Ofsted took a position of badgerlike semi-hibernation. They said they would do inspections but didn’t. What they should have been doing was being candid friends to schools up and down the country, helping them in terms of online work and safeguarding issues. They will say “well regulation x y and z couldn’t do this” but actually it’s amazing what you can do in a leadership role. 

This is a huge contrast to the Children’s Commissioner, who is in my view one of the few heroes in this, campaigning for kids to get back to school; campaigning for online learning; going on consistently about the risks to children of staying at home and not learning. We basically allowed an epidemic of educational poverty to sweep across the country.

MP: Did headteachers and the Department of Education just retreat?

RH: This pandemic is unprecedented, and there was a sort of shell shock throughout the country. To be fair, they did make exceptions for vulnerable children: around 85% of vulnerable children still stayed at home. I talk to the government and the unions about this now: it wasn’t all the unions’ fault, of course, but I do think they did everything possible to stop kids going back to school.

MP: Why were they – the unions – so reluctant to have children at school? Was it political point scoring ?

RH: I think they were concerned metaphorically about the “rum rations”, or the sailor’s on the ship. They demanded conditions that few other workplaces would have done. I think that is a shame because, to credit the government, they did do everything they could to try and get at least a modest opening at the beginning of June, something I strongly supported every step of the way.

MP: Take me back to the beginning of the decision to introduce a new grading system after exams were cancelled ? 

The decision about grading was made fairly early on. We had Ofqual before our committee in early June and we published a report a month later. We said that the standardisation model, the so-called algorithm, should be published so that it can stand up to the scrutiny of those in the know. The Royal Statistical Society offered to help but they were turned down by Ofqual. Apparently Ofqual imposed such stringent conditions that they couldn’t do it. 

We recommended in a report that the appeal system was much wider because in the initial appeals process you could only appeal if there was bias or discrimination. How on earth is a school going to identify that? We said that to Sally Collier (CEO of Ofqual) and the final thing we said was that the nature of the model would have a disproportionate impact on the disadvantaged. 

So, we sent off this report but Ofqual didn’t get back to us until a couple of weeks ago. The only thing they really did, that we asked them to do, was to put in a helpline if they were going to be appeals. They did, but they didn’t really make any other fundamental changes. I don’t know why they didn’t publish their model, it seems a mystery to me.

MP: Once you sent your report, did you take it to Williamson?

RH: It went to the Department of Education, and they would have seen it anyway because it was all over the media from July 10th. Ofqual would have looked at it: by statute, they have to respond, which they did but I only received that recently, pretty close to the exam time.

MP: Should heads roll at Ofqual?

RH: Clearly the organisation is not fit for purpose. It is dysfunctional. I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t know how it was allowed that Ofqual put some information up on a Saturday afternoon, and then took it down at midnight because they needed to discuss it with the board. They should have done that before they put it up. 

We need to find out what the lessons are and who said what to whom, what they told ministers, or did not. Perhaps we should consider putting Ofqual back into the Department of Education? Then maybe you should have an independent regulator accountable to government as well.

MP: What would you have done differently? 

RH: It’s easy to say with hindsight but maybe it would have been better to delay the exams to Autumn, and delay university entrance to January.

But we don’t know what teaching would have been done at this time. 

Another option might have been that you have predicted grades, but then you have an assessor checking it off. So a teacher would check, and then an independent assessor would go to each school candidate and say to the teacher: “we think you’ve either under-graded or over-graded”. That might have been an option. 

MP: Does grade inflation matter in such exceptional circumstances?  

Well, Nick Gibb (school standards minister) is right to focus on standards. But I do think all the focus is on academic capital, not social capital. It’s a classic Tory thing so, when I was growing up, I was a massive Thatcher supporter – my whole family were.

But the problem at that time was that we thought everything would come right through economic capital. And actually, that doesn’t happen because economic and social capital have to be built together. And as Conservatives we sometimes have the same problem in education. We say everything will be right if we have enough academic capital when actually you need to build academic skills and social capital together. 

Funnily enough, David Cameron understood this. This was what the Big Society was all about, although it didn’t work out in practice. The much-talked about trickle down effect doesn’t work, it doesn’t bring up social capital. I.e., strong families, communities, ties that bind us together.

MP: Will you be calling Ofqual before select committee when you get back?

RH: We’ve got Gavin Williamson coming in September and we expect to have the major players from Ofqual in too. I can’t say any more yet. 

MP: What needs to be done to make sure the schools all open in September?

RH: I’d like to see a major campaign from the government and the Prime Minister, like the “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives” to get our children back to school. There’s nothing more important. I’d love the PM to take this by the scruff of the neck, support it and do a campaign to reach parents and tell them there’s minimal risk at school – but that there’s a huge risk for children continuing to stay at home not learning.  Can you imagine if you are a single parent living in small accommodation in a high-rise block? How people have coped is extraordinary.

MP: The awards for BTEC students seem to have emerged fine through this mess. Why is that?

RH: BTECs are the silver lining in all this. They weren’t graded in the same way. They are the gold standard and I would pay tribute to the awarding bodies. About 2% of students have been affected out 250,000 taking the exams. Gavin Williamson has assured me that he’s going to sort it out.

MP: Why are BTECs so ignored by the politicians and the media? And how will this ever change? 

RH: I’ll tell you when change will have come. It’s when you are sitting around a dinner table and someone says: “My daughter just got into Oxford.” Everyone says, “Oh how wonderful”, and gets very excited. Then someone else says, “I did a degree apprenticeship at Nottingham Trent University” –  in my view one of the best universities in the country. I’d like everyone to say “wow that’s incredible how did you do it?  You’ve got no student debt you’re going to get a good skilled job at the end of it. Well done.” Then we’ll know our country’s changed, and we’re a long way from that 

MP: What more can be done to speed up that change? 

RH: First, we should have a 50% target of students doing degree apprenticeships, because that will build up prestige for skills and apprenticeships. The government should make the funding of the redbrick universities conditional on their pushing for degree apprenticeships.

Oxford closed the door, Cambridge has opened them for postgraduates only. At least it’s a start but you know if they could do this, the prestige would be enormous. We need a whole new load of policies on apprenticeships. For example, if any company wants to get a contract from government we should have a rule that says a certain percentage of your employees have to be an apprentice 

We should also use tax credits to help fund apprenticeships – we already have research and development credits why don’t we give tax credits to businesses that retrain their workers as long as it meets the skills of the age?  

MP: What could the PM and chancellor do to help more?

RH: None of this will work unless you have evangelisation from the top. I talk all the time about apprenticeship guarantees for every young person. That’s not enough. What we need is for to Boris to talk about it every day, then you would start to see a sea change in public opinion.

If my father was the age I am now speaking to me and he heard Boris saying that, he might well have told me to do an apprenticeship rather than go to university. 

MP: If you were education secretary what would be your first measure?

RH: I want to do four things. I want to address social injustice and I want to focus on skills. I call it the 4 S’s: social justice, skills, standards and support for the profession. I want to support the teaching profession, make it a Rolls Royce profession because we have a teacher recruitment crisis.

The thing that I’d like to do the most is investing in special needs. The service is in a shocking mess, and the government is complacent about that.

I’d love to set a policy in motion to try and guarantee an apprenticeship for every young person, a real apprenticeship guarantee, to go towards that goal of 50% students in 10-years doing apprenticeships. 

MP: How would that work? 

RH: We have a massive deficit in young skilled workers. So if you need engineers you have to put funding to where we need it. This isn’t easy, as we have to value everyone.

We have to stop this stupid squeeze we have between academic and technical. It’s part of the problem because academic is seen as prestigious and technical isn’t. But if you merge them together you solve that problem. I mean, I did Politics – people may think that’s a complete waste of time. I don’t, because it was my passion and I understand people who want to do History degrees, for example. 

But I do think that all degrees should not just be academic but based on work experience as well. For example, if you decide to do a History degree, you should spend part of your time (at least half a week) in the British Museum or any Museum; or if you are doing archaeology, you go digging. 

I think the world is changing – the Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us – and I think work experience is going to make a huge difference so I think every degree should have some significant work experience, whether it’s an apprenticeship or another kind of work. 

MP: What is bizarre is that Britain was a leader in technical and engineering innovation, and one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. Yet today the UK is dominated by the arts establishment and engineering appears to be looked down upon. What lies behind this cultural shift?

RH: Yes, engineering was in our culture, but for some reason it went away because the elites have been to Oxbridge or red brick universities. I went to Exeter, I can’t talk, but at least I understand the problem.

The best thing that ever happened to me and my life was to become MP for a constituency like Harlow, because it changed my politics. It changed my whole view of the thing, which is why I made my first speech on apprentices in the commons. Since being here in Harlow, I’ve visited our Further Education college more than 80 times to make sure I know what is happening on the ground. 

MP: What was it about Harlow that caused you to see the light ?

RH: When I was a parliamentary candidate in 2008 I visited this very dark building where there were these kids with a charity, Catch-22, from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were there trying to learn skills and I sat down with them and chatted. They said they wanted to do an apprenticeship and there were none available, and they didn’t know how to do it. One had been offered one in Leeds but how is a Harlow kid going to get to Leeds?

I literally walked out of that building saying to myself: “This is the answer to everything”. This is god’s honest truth –  it was my most important moment and that’s why I decided to focus on apprenticeships and skills when I got in and made by for a speech on it just because of that meeting.

MP: Do any of your other colleagues get it?

RH: Funnily enough, Gavin Williamson does. He’s one of the few Cabinet ministers to have gone to an FE College and he really does understand FE and he supports them. I’m fully with him on that, he understands the social justice element. The other is Sajid Javid, who also went to an FE college. There are very few ministers who went to FE colleges. It’s hard to see how incredible they are until you go to one.