Whatever GCSE results my son gets, it will be no thanks to this negligent government

Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson failed to plan for this year’s GCSE and A-level education, despite the same disruption as last year

The pandemic turned all of our lives around. No one is going to deny that. In March 2020 things had to change, plans had to be put off, life looked different. Some things had to be created on the hoof, new plans made, old ways abandoned. A hell of a lot of slack was cut, it was unprecedented, right?

Well, yes it was, it was unprecedented until it wasn’t. In May 2021, 14 months after the initial lockdown, I sat at my kitchen table once again, head in hands, weeping at how badly my eldest son had been treated as we prepared for his GCSE exams. Yes, exams – because although it was announced that grades would be awarded based on assessments by teachers, in reality pupils at his school sat them anyway.

It wasn’t just that there were huge and obvious gaps in his knowledge base after nearly a year off school, or the fact that I remembered how much of my final GCSE year had been focused on teaching us to understand and pass the exam, which he seemed to be also largely missing. The worst offence was not that 14 months later he had not been offered a single minute of extra tuition, it was that there seemed to be absolutely no plan at all when on the morning of him going to sit his assessments, he was isolated from school. In the assessment period for my son, he had to isolate twice. How after 14 months could there be no plan for children isolating during their assessments?

Midweek in his second period of isolation we received some of his papers through the post and were asked to do them under exam conditions, so we wrote a timetable up for him, giving him two days to prepare. The following evening we received an email stating that in fact he would go in and do them at school the following week, while other students had their off week from assessment. He would then pick up the next set of assessments at the same time as other students without the break. He returned to school the following Monday with absolutely no idea which assessment he would undertake that morning. Walking into school cold.

Last week, when the Institute for Government released its report, Schools and Coronavirus: The Government’s Handling of Education During the Pandemic, I read in horror at why my child and many other children in my constituency had been so badly let down. The report states that: “A No 10 insider says that there was a ‘clear steer’ from the prime minister not to make contingency plans because, ‘if you prepare for these things not happening, then the outcome is that they are far more likely not to happen … people will look for the easy way out and take it.’ This left the government and schools unprepared when exams had to be cancelled a second time in spring 2021.”

The prime minister wasn’t sitting round a kitchen table trying to get his kids across the line, he wasn’t driving around his constituency trying to get laptops to kids who had nothing, and he doesn’t get to accuse parents like me of wanting an easy way out

The prime minister played chicken with my kid. The Labour shadow education secretary and many others, including myself, begged and pleaded with Gavin Williamson to start planning for the 2021 GCSE and A-level cohort immediately after the same fiasco the year before. All the while he and Boris Johnson were basically judging kids like my son, parents like me, and brilliant teachers and schools like his school as if we wanted an easy life and a simple option. They decided to take us to the brink and gently nudge us over.

How dare the prime minister be cavalier with my kid. He wasn’t sitting round a kitchen table trying to get his kids across the line, he wasn’t driving around his constituency trying to get laptops to kids who had nothing, and he doesn’t get to accuse parents like me of wanting an easy way out.

Gavin Williamson and the prime minister have failed in their duty to educate our children. What has been crystallised in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of pupils is that the government cannot be trusted. Every single time they insisted that exams would go ahead, and then went back on it, it was an abject lesson. I didn’t want the easy option for my kid, I wanted him to sit his exams and attend school just exactly as he always expected to.

As a family we have had to think about what’s next, we have to play with the hand we have been dealt as best we can. We will think of options, work out possibilities, and find solutions. We will make a plan. I just wish that the government had bothered to do the same in the 14 months they wasted.

Tomorrow, as my son strolls down to school to pick up his results, he will not be cutting the government any slack, none was cut for him or any kid in a state school in our country. Dereliction of duty doesn’t cut it, they were negligent.

Jess Phillips is the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley.