A LEVEL RESULTS FIASCO (20/09/02)

Downgrading of thousands of A’ level papers has caused distress to students, parents, and schools in Somerset.

Christopher Wolverson, Conservative Spokesman for Education on Somerset County Council said, ‘The anguish caused to students whose future university plans have been thwarted by this scandal is immeasurable. As a parent, I know only too well the tension in a home as A level results are received and university places sought.

‘This latest fiasco will yet again impact on the hard pressed schools as they embark on the new academic year. How much longer can this Labour Government be allowed to damage our children's education? Their complete lack of supervision of their regulatory bodies is unacceptable.

‘We just experienced the chaotic implementation of vetting checks on school staff by the Criminal Records Bureau, whose Chief Executive, I have just learned, was previously in charge of the Passport Office's crisis of 1999. Enough is enough.’

Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith has said that whoever is found responsible ‘should pay with their own future’.

At a meeting of British Asian Conservative Link, the Rt. Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP said, ‘Qualifications matter because they are supposed to provide an irreproachable measure of academic attainment…. So the current row over this year’s A level results is nothing short of heartbreaking.’

Estelle Morris said yesterday, ‘there has been no political interference at all in the workings of the QCA and the examining boards.’[1] However, it has since transpired that while students were sitting their exams, she met twice with Sir William Stubbs, chairman of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

‘The chaos now’, said Dame Ruth Deech, chairman of Oxford university’s admissions committee, ‘shows what happens when you start opening the door to any sort of social or political engineering of marks and outcomes.’[2]