Government facing pressure to cancel vocational exams, after students told to attend despite lockdown

Warning that forcing students to sit BTECs will be unfair and unsafe

Education secretary Gavin Williamson has rejected calls to cancel vocational and technical exams due to take place through the rest of January.

Students were told in a late-night tweet from the Department for Education on Monday night that the round of tests would go ahead from Tuesday morning despite Boris Johnson’s “stay at home” order shutting down schools and colleges.

Exams for BTECs and other vocational and technical qualifications (VTQs) went ahead on Tuesday morning amid anger from students, some of whom stayed away, and warnings that colleges will struggle to find people willing to act as invigilators.

And more than 125,000 people signed a parliamentary petition calling for them to be halted and replaced with teacher-predicted grades.

The Association of Colleges told ministers it was “simply untenable” for the exams, involving around 135,000 students in England over the next four weeks, to go ahead as planned, while the National Union of Students said alternative arrangements should be put in place as soon as possible.

But the DFE said the exams would carry on.

A spokesperson said: “We want to support schools and colleges whose students have worked hard to prepare for assessments and exams where necessary. This may be particularly important for VTQs which require a ‘license to practice’ which can only be fulfilled through practical assessment, such as an electrician.

“Schools and colleges have already implemented extensive protective measures to make them as safe as possible. We will continue to work with Ofqual, awarding organisations and other stakeholders to discuss the next steps and provide more detail on the way forward, including ensuring other students have a way to progress with as little disruption as possible.”

AoC chief executive David Hughes said the decision would disappoint students and colleges, many of which were likely to call off exams anyway.

“The risk is that this continues the confusion, leads to more uncertainty for every student and puts thousands of young people and their families at risk, as well as the college staff managing the exams,” said Mr Hughes.

Labour’s lifelong learning spokesman Toby Perkins said ministers had made no adaptations to VTQ exams to take account of the disruption experienced by students and offered no help to colleges with the additional cost of social distancing and sanitising measures.

Mr Perkins said vocational students had been treated as an “afterthought” by the government, adding: "BTEC exams simply cannot go ahead safely and fairly this week. The government must cancel them and work with schools and colleges to develop a genuinely fair alternative for pupils this summer.“

In a letter to skills minister Gillian Keegan appealing for the exams to be called off, Mr Hughes said that it was “patently not safe” for students and their families, even with the best mitigations colleges are able to put in place.

And he said it felt “wrong and hard to defend” that  students taking vocational qualifications were being treated differently from those due to sit academic GCSEs and A-Levels, which have been cancelled.

The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leavers, Geoff Barton, said  that many students listening to Mr Johnson’s televised address on Monday night were likely to have thought that they were expected to follow his “stay home” message and not turn up for exams the following morning.

“It feels to me pretty impossible that you could be running those exams this week even though we would have wanted them to run, because you are just going to increase the unfairness of some young people being there, some not being there,” he told BBC Breakfast.

Salsabil Elmegri, the NUS’s vice-president of further education, said: “The government now urgently needs to provide clarity for students, especially BTEC students.

“Furthermore, it is clearly unsafe, unfair and unworkable to make students take exams this month and alternative arrangements should be put in place as soon as possible.”