We begin public proceedings of the Education Committee. This morning we are holding our pre-appointment hearing for Sir Ian Bauckham, the Government’s preferred candidate for Chief Regulator of Ofqual. You are welcome this morning, Sir Ian. May I begin our questions by asking what led you to apply for the permanent Chief Regulator position, and what relevant experience you will bring to the role?

Thank you. I have spent a career in education. I became a teacher at the beginning of my career—I spent more or less 20 years in the classroom—and then had a variety of leadership roles in schools for the remainder of that time. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to undertake some national leadership roles. For example, I was in the presidential team of the Association of School and College Leaders for three years and president for one year. Roles like that took me into many different kinds of schools and colleges in different contexts up and down the country. That gave me significant insight and personal credibility to undertake this role but, importantly, it also taught me the supreme importance of having qualifications that are of good value, properly regulated and trustworthy, because qualifications accredit learning and act as a portable currency of learning for students who undertake educational programmes in schools and colleges. As the Committee will know, I have been undertaking this interim role for almost a year now and, when the opportunity became available to apply for it permanently, I did so because that deep knowledge of education in different contexts and different parts of England, and also the expertise in and knowledge of the qualifications world and how qualifications work, which I gleaned from my three years chairing the board of Ofqual, make me well qualified to undertake the role. It would be the honour of my life to be confirmed in this post, particularly because Ofqual acts as an independent regulator, which is a good structure for assuring the credibility of our qualifications.

If you are appointed permanently, what do you expect to challenge you the most in the role?

I expect to continue to be challenged by some of the things that have challenged me this year. The supremely important day job of Ofqual—if I can use that term—is to deliver qualifications in each annual cycle safely and securely for students. That means anticipating possible problems, hitches, threats and risks to qualifications delivery and to their trustworthiness. That is not an easy job. We can say a little bit more about that later if that question is useful, but it is continuing to do that and doing it also in an evolving policy landscape. The policy landscape is always evolving and will continue to evolve over the next five years for a range of reasons.

What have you learned over the last year in the interim role of Chief Regulator?

Probably one of the central lessons I have learned is that issues in qualifications and assessment are often complex and often not what they seem at first sight. Sometimes, particularly in the early days, I was momentarily tempted to rush to judgment on an issue that looked obvious, but on further consideration, research and dialogue with colleagues, that issue was often more complex than it seemed at first sight. If I can offer one example of that, it is the question of digitisation in high-stakes qualifications. Many people would say that because the world is digitising rapidly at the moment, qualifications should digitise at the same speed at the point of taking the qualification in schools. However, when you peel away at that and look under the surface—we have done a significant piece of research in this space during my year as interim Chief Regulator—you discover that a hasty digitisation plan for a qualifications system has significant risks, largely to do with equity, fairness and the different impacts on students of different ways of answering questions in assessments or examinations. It is more complex than it often seems at first sight.

What have been your major achievements in the last year as interim Chief Regulator?

I probably have to say the delivery of qualifications safely. We are the qualifications regulator. We regulate about 246 different awarding organisations over a huge range of qualifications—over 10,000 qualifications. This summer, we delivered A-levels, AS-levels and GCSEs to about 1.3 million students. Papers were marked by a workforce of approximately 72,000 examiners across the country. In addition, about 800,000 vocational and technical qualifications are offered specifically in the summer series. We did so this summer without major incidents or difficulty. In fact, the feedback that we had following this summer’s series was that it was one of the smoothest series on record and that includes before the pandemic. I probably have to count that as the No. 1 achievement because that is the principal purpose of our role. Some others are perhaps more specific. We have been working on a counter-fraud programme this year. Qualifications fraud is a significant issue in qualifications. It is a big market. Areas such as onsite construction, qualifications relating to the night-time economy, security and English, when it is used for immigration purposes, are susceptible to qualifications fraud. We have led—I chaired this a couple of weeks ago—a panel of industry leaders, including also the Home Office, with its obvious interest in the immigration question, to bear down on qualifications fraud, to get the sector to take this even more seriously, and to put in place measures to reduce it. I have been pleased with pieces of work like that.

We absolutely aspire to lead the public debate. Three principles underpin my approach to doing this. We have a responsibility to assure the public about the value of qualifications, the public and the students who take and hold those qualifications, and indeed the teachers who teach them. Assurance of the value of qualifications will be the first. The second is to do with explanation and information, because assurance at the right time needs to be backed up with detailed explanation and detailed information to demonstrate why what we say about the value and importance of a qualification holds true. The third is to do with listening: listening to the public, listening to the sector—by which I mean schools, colleges and others who teach—and listening to students, being attentive to potential shifts in public mood for specific feedback about different aspects of qualifications and responding to that as well. I aspire to do all those three things—assurance, explanation and information, and listening and responding—through a range of different media at a range of appropriate times in the qualifications cycle. The summer has a particular importance, at the time when so many young people are getting qualifications, to provide assurance that those qualifications that students have been working so hard for, and that teachers have also been teaching students for, are valid and worthwhile. For example, if we look back at this year, I undertook a number of engagements in the media—radio, television, the online media and also the printed media. I wrote an op-ed in one of the national newspapers that was published on the day of GCSE results, primarily centred around the importance of assuring young people and the public that qualifications are worthwhile. At other points in the cycle, we can build understanding by explaining why we assess as we do, what kinds of approaches to assessment best suit different kinds of circumstances, and different kinds of knowledge or skills, and, importantly, how grading takes place in GCSEs and A-levels. If I may, Chair, that is a useful segue into a brief comment on the third point of listening and responding. In dialogue with the Association of School and College Leaders and its current general secretary, I learned this summer that school leaders—its members—were confused about how grading happens at GCSEs and A-levels. Hearing that feedback and reflecting on it, it seemed to me that it would be opportune to work with ASCL and produce a product in which the general secretary of ASCL and I dialogued about how grading happens. I was in a position to explain how it happens and the benefits of the approach to grading that we take now, and for that to be made available to ASCL members and ultimately to the public. That is an example of that listening and explaining.

There is always room for improvement. Following the difficult events of 2020 and 2021, which are a matter of public record, clearly, Ofqual has made a strong recovery. Our perceptions survey work that we undertake to gauge public opinion and public perceptions of qualifications, and Ofqual in particular, tells us that Ofqual is trusted by the public. As I said at the beginning of my answer, there is always room for improvement and I will anticipate improving further the levels of trust in which Ofqual is held by engaging in the stakeholder engagements, which I described in my earlier answer, vigorously, sensitively, at the right time, in the right place, and to the right audiences to get those messages across.

Sir Ian, what will be your main immediate priorities upon taking up the role in January?

Again, I probably have to say the safe delivery of next summer’s qualifications cycle. That spans GCSEs, AS-levels and A-levels. The demographic is growing and so we have a slightly larger population of 16 to 18-year-olds next year. As I alluded to earlier, the safe delivery of qualifications and the maintenance of standards is always under threat, so my first priority is being clear in our risk assessment of those threats and risks and dealing with each one individually as it arises and pre-empting it. We are also potentially on the threshold of a period of some reforms in both vocational and technical qualifications and also in GCSEs and A-levels, which we call together general qualifications. The specific direction of travel is not yet completely clear, but that is beginning to emerge. Doing early work to make sure that we are ready for a period of reform that may come out of decisions taken by the Government will also be a significant priority. Also, we continue to need to be attentive to issues to do with the rise in technology. I could say a little bit more about artificial intelligence, but we may come on to that later. Thank you.

We will, and I will certainly come on to that. Looking forward a little bit more than the immediate priorities, what will be your long-term priorities for Ofqual for the five years?

A long-term priority will be to continue to enhance Ofqual as an effective regulator that has the interests of students, society and the economy at its heart, which will have led, by the end of five years, successful reforms in the light of evolving policy decisions, and which is ever more trusted by the public and by students as the guardian of safe, fair and trustworthy qualifications for everybody and also as a guardian of fairness in qualifications. Fairness is at the heart of our mission—ensuring that everybody is on a level playing field when it comes to taking assessments and achieving qualifications.

Sir Ian, if appointed, you will be the fifth Chief Regulator in four years. How will you work to restore confidence in Ofqual for both those within and those outside the organisation?

I know and have spoken to all previous Chief Regulators about the role. It is probably fair to say that the higher-than-average turnover in Chief Regulators in recent years has been largely, although not exclusively, due to the pandemic. I will restore trust. In addition to points that I made earlier about a laser focus on effects of communications, delivery of reform and fairness, simply remaining in post for the full duration of the appointment will help to restore stability because of the consistency of message, consistency of leadership, being a familiar voice and face in stakeholder and media engagement, continuing to repeat the important messages about the supreme importance of our qualifications, and being a trustworthy currency of the education that so many people work so hard for.

You have spoken to your predecessors. What advice have they given you?

They have told me to pace myself. It is a big job and a lot needs doing and quite a lot sometimes seems to be urgent. I will prioritise carefully to make sure that we do the big things and the important things first but will not neglect the other things, of course. They need to come, but we have to operate within a certain human and financial resource envelope. We will prioritise the priorities and do the important things.

For my last question, have you discussed any expectations for how long you expect to be in post?

Yes. If confirmed, I expect to be in post for the full period of five years.

Sir Ian, over the last five years we have seen significant variations in grading due to the Covid-19 pandemic and then efforts since to address that grade inflation. Are you confident that students are now assessed to the same standard as they were pre-pandemic?

The short answer to that question is yes, but allow me to give a little bit more context, if I may, Chair. In the immediate return to normal after the pandemic, in 2022, we put in place transitional arrangements to ease the transition of students back into normal assessments following the disruption of the pandemic. They had various supports at that time, including advance notice and so on, and also a midway grading standard. From 2023 and in 2024, we returned to a normal grading standard. I am absolutely clear that that is a comparable grading standard to the grading standard used before the pandemic. We can see that through a number of sources of evidence. First, expert examiner judgment is an important part of the grading process. When examiners meet to discuss marked scripts and look at possible grade boundaries, they are able to compare the standard achieved in exam scripts with the standards achieved in previous years by using archived scripts. Examiners across the different awarding organisations and across the different subjects tell us that in their judgment those standards are comparable. The second piece of evidence is grade boundaries themselves and where they end up. It is important to note that grade boundaries in some subjects and across awarding organisations always have some small variations from year to year occasioned by slight changes in the difficulty of any particular paper from year to year. However, when you look across the piece at all subjects and all awarding organisations, we see grade boundaries that are now in broadly the same places as they were before the pandemic. That is a second piece of assurance that we are back to a normal grading standard. A third piece of evidence is the results of the national reference test. Every year since 2017 Ofqual has run a reference test in February and March of year 11 in English and maths. That test is given to a scientifically selected representative sample of students in the lead-up to GCSEs, to gauge the underlying performance standard in those two subjects and to ensure that standards are not drifting and are pegged to a stable standard. Since 2017 we have seen some fluctuation and we saw some modest falls in achievement during the pandemic years, but broadly speaking the overall picture is stable. We have not seen dramatic fluctuations in that underlying performance standard. When we put all of this together and we look at the methodology that exam boards use to set standards, I am able to say with confidence that the grading standard that we used in 2023 and 2024 is directly comparable to the grading standard used before the pandemic.

Can I ask a supplementary?

Of course, yes.

It was interesting in the pandemic year that grades went up when it was down to teacher assessment. Some might say teachers were being generous because it was a difficult time. Did that make you reflect at all on the exam system and whether at GCSE level it might be better to have more input from teachers about how kids are doing rather than relying solely on an exam?

I was in the unusual and potentially privileged position of having one foot in the school camp and one foot in the Ofqual camp at that time, so I saw firsthand how that played out in schools. It was an incredibly challenging time for teachers and for schools. Teachers and schools up and down the country did their level best to act with integrity and award grades as they saw fit for the achievements of their students. Whether elements of particular sympathy occasioned by the pandemic underlay teachers’ and schools’ actions it is impossible for me to say. It is not impossible. My view still remains that for high-stakes assessments—and by that I mean assessments that are used for progression purposes, sometimes competitive progression purposes, and are also used for accountability for schools, and in some cases even individual teachers and head teachers—an objective system for assessments puts everybody on a level playing field. Examinations are marked anonymously by a range of different examiners. When an exam script arrives at an exam board, it is scanned and cut up. Individual examiners may mark a small subset of questions across many candidates. Every candidate’s script is marked by multiple examiners. All of that is done anonymously. The marks are then aggregated at national level for that awarding organisation and that qualification. That is then fed into the grading process. That feels to me like the most fair and even-handed assessment of young people for qualifications, which are of such critical importance both to them and to the teachers, schools, and colleges that teach them.

Thank you, Sir Ian, for your answers so far. Turning now to RAAC, exam boards recognised that RAAC adversely affected coursework and then extended the deadlines as a result. I know that you are on record pushing back against other uplifts, such as the 10% exam uplift that Durham University research suggested. Given those two things, how did you evaluate the risk posed to students’ academic prospects?

RAAC was another difficult episode hot on the heels of the pandemic. I remember when the RAAC story broke back in August at the beginning of the last academic year. I was still running schools at the time and so I first wanted to assure myself that all the schools I was responsible for were safe. Having done that—turning to the RAAC question and the way it affected exams—we were clear from the outset that as much support as possible should be put into schools that were badly affected by RAAC. Many schools were affected in many different ways, some profound and long lasting, others much less so. As you have alluded to, extensions to non-examined assessment completion were put in place. Contacts were given to schools of advisers who could offer information and support for schools. In extremis, it was made clear to schools that, if it was not possible to complete a whole component of an assessment for a qualification, the part of the assessment that students could complete could be used to award the qualification. All that was done to provide as much support as possible for those schools. We have a priority to ensure that the qualification system is even-handed and fair for everybody across the country and that qualifications awarded accredit learning that has been demonstrated by students at the point of assessment. We learnt both during the pandemic and otherwise that accrediting learning that we have not seen demonstrated fairly and even-handedly across the system is incredibly difficult and, I would say, impossible to do. For example, during the pandemic, we heard a number of calls to differentially adjust the outcomes for students in areas of the country and in schools that were differentially affected by the pandemic. That ask was taken seriously and worked through. The conclusion of it was that with so many different impacts on students and on schools, attempting to make a fair and even-handed adjustment for all of them is impossible. One truism about achievement in education is that there are always more differences within a school than there are even between schools and between regions. In the end, we came back to our statutory objective, which is to ensure that qualification results accurately and consistently represent the achievements of young people at the point of assessment fairly and comparably both across years and between awarding organisations. We decided that we could not make that adjustment for schools that had been impacted by RAAC in a range of different ways.

That makes sense. You have already answered this question in part. What pressure was placed on you to allow a special uplift for students in schools affected by RAAC?

A variety of sources made requests to consider this. Some of those came through the media. Some of them came through media outlets. I personally met with one Member of Parliament who wanted me to talk about a school in her constituency. I was open to meeting any Member who wished to discuss any particular case in their constituency. I met with that one Member. We had a lengthy discussion, and we stepped through all this thinking and all these difficulties. I cannot honestly say there was a meeting of minds at the end of that, but I did my best to represent our view with integrity and explain the rationale for the position we took.

Sir Ian, we touched briefly on the challenges posed by artificial intelligence within education, and you also included those challenges in your responses to the Committee’s questionnaire. How will you lead Ofqual to effectively respond as this technology develops?

Artificial intelligence—and other aspects of technology, but I will focus particularly on AI for now—is a big issue for us. We have initiated a programme of research to understand in depth the implications of AI, particularly for qualifications and assessments. Let me explore a couple of different angles here. The first is the use of AI for the assessment of students’ work. The position that we have taken at the moment—and probably I have to say “at the moment” in front of any answer to do with AI, because the picture changes rapidly and what seems imperative at the moment might not always be imperative—is that it seems to us imperative that a human oversees the marking of students’ work. That is for a range of reasons. AI still makes mistakes. It hallucinates. There is lots of evidence of that. Decisions made by AI evaluating pieces of work that students have produced for high-stakes assessments are less transparent and, therefore, less open to challenge than they might be if marked by a human being. You cannot easily ask a computer to explain to you how it has judged the marking of your work, but you can ask an examiner to explain that. There is also a public confidence dimension here. We have carefully sampled public confidence and attitudes in this space and in the area—and I speak only for my own area, not for other areas of public life—of qualifications. The public overwhelmingly wants a human being to oversee the marking of students’ work. None of that says that AI cannot be used for other purposes. For example, it can be used for the quality assurance of the examining process. It can sample. It can check. It can do arithmetical checks. It can retrieve samples of similar answers. It can compare them. AI can do lots of useful, helpful, quality-improving things, but marking work itself must be overseen by a human being.

Could you clarify that you are referring to awarding organisations as well as individual teachers within the classroom?

Yes. I am talking here principally about awarding organisations. JCQ, the exam boards’ collective, has issued separate guidance to schools and to teachers on the use of AI for non-examined assessment or submitted coursework. Ofqual has put in place a condition that requires exam boards to have effective and appropriate measures in place to guard against work being claimed as a student’s own when in fact it has been generated by AI. We have done some of those things in relation to schools and the role of teachers in schools. If I may, Chair, I will come on briefly to say something about how awarding organisations might use AI more broadly in the exam system. AI has some potentially exciting uses for generating question papers and comparing question papers year on year. Generating question papers that are broadly comparable in difficulty from one year to the next is labour intensive, difficult, and requires multiple layers of subject experts and quality assurance to get it right. AI may support that. I judge that that has fewer risks to public confidence, providing a human is in the loop for final signoff, than in the actual marking of student work. As I said earlier, all this is at the moment. If you ask me to look into a crystal ball and say what AI will do in five or 10 years’ time, I am reticent to make any specific commitments.

Additionally, what support does Ofqual provide to schools and teachers within this space?

We asked our exam boards to make sure that they had appropriate measures in place to detect plagiarism occasioned by AI. We also asked them to produce guidance for schools so that schools understood their responsibilities when it came to guiding students in the production of coursework, or non-examined assessment, and in the detection of work produced potentially by AI rather than by the agency of the student themselves. The underlying principle here remains that qualifications must represent the actual skills, knowledge and understanding of the student taking the qualification, not the skills, knowledge and understanding of the aggregated internet. That is not the same. That is not an educational outcome for the individual.

Mark, you had a supplementary.

Yes. To follow up, some of those answers are absolutely fascinating, especially the ones about generating questions using AI. I want to clarify something. You have said repeatedly that a human must oversee the marking of student work. When you say that, do you mean that a human should always be involved and actually mark the work, or do you see a process or procedure where AI might mark the work and then a human checks it?

In the vast majority of cases, a human will actually look at the scripts.

In a minority of cases, will AI look at the scripts?

There may be some simple, selective response items, like multiple-choice questions, which can be safely marked by a machine, but we would still expect a human to be in the loop checking that that was happening, sampling quality and so on.

Absolutely. You are talking exclusively about multiple-choice questions. You are not talking about scripts or English assessments where somebody has written paragraphs.

No. If I may add, Chair, the vast majority of assessments at GCSE and A-level involve some degree of extended writing. We always expect a human to be involved in gauging the quality of that writing and the level that the student was working at. For the reasons I evinced earlier, it is difficult to challenge a machine’s decision. Most of this AI is based on large language models, which are essentially predictive models about the most likely next word. How do you ask a computer why it has given a particular mark to a piece of extended writing based on that? It is not transparent and open enough to challenge. Challenge is key. Marking and grading must be open to challenge in a transparent system. It must be possible for a candidate or a school to say, “I want to see my marked script. I do not agree with that marking. I would like another human being to look at it.” That is much harder to do if extended writing has been machine marked.

Sir Ian, you told us in your response to our questionnaire that you will have a strong focus on vocational and technical qualifications. What is your assessment of the success of T-levels since their launch in September 2020?

Thank you. T-levels are a new and different qualification type in a range of different ways. They are large qualifications, essentially designed to be full time for the students taking them at level 3, normally between 16 and 18. I have spent part of this year visiting schools and colleges up and down the country and many of the colleges I visited have classes of students taking T-levels. Before we get on to some of the issues with T-levels—because there are issues, of course—it is probably helpful to put down a marker that says that overwhelmingly the students and teachers I have talked with, who have been teaching or taking T-levels, have spoken positively about them. Teachers have told me about the transformative power that the T-level is beginning to demonstrate with students who want a vocational route for their studies, who value a high-quality work placement as part of that route, and who are able to decide the particular occupational route that they want to follow at the age of 16. That segues into one challenge. One challenge with T-levels is that because they are large qualifications, it is not possible to combine them with other qualifications, as it is in other parts of the vocational and technical landscape. A 16 year-old has to be in a position to make a decision about a particular occupational route. That is one reason why the inception of T-levels has been relatively incremental or slow at the beginning. Only around 7,000 T-levels were completed this summer. The T-level is deliberately pitched at a demanding level to have some level of parity with A-levels, which is the other level 3 route that T-level candidates may also consider. T-levels also have a significant amount of content and a significant assessment burden. I should perhaps have said at the beginning that, rather than Ofqual, the Department for Education takes principal responsibility for the design and delivery of T-levels. We regulate the core and specialism bits of T-levels, but the other parts are overseen by the Department for Education and so it would lead reform. It would be possible to make a convincing case to in some ways improve, streamline and simplify T-levels to establish their role more solidly in the market for young people. However, I want to circle back to my opening remark because I do not want in any sense to be misconstrued as saying that T-levels are not successful. For the students who take them, they absolutely are successful, but they are a small part of the market at the moment.

More than one in four students did not complete T-level studies this year. In your view, what needs to be done to improve the quality and effectiveness of the qualification?

That is a worrying figure. That has happened probably for multiple reasons in the early days of a new qualification. The first is probably associated with the newness of the qualification and its pitching at such a high difficulty level for a vocational and technical qualification in this space. Probably some students were surprised at the burden and the level that was asked of them in T-levels. Probably some colleges—mainly, but schools as well and teachers—did not have sufficiently good-quality and coherent support for teaching them. This is me with my Ofqual hat off for the moment and with a wider educational hat on. If we want to get success in a particular programme of study, you need to have in place features like a well worked out and clearly sequenced curriculum so that we know what we are teaching and we know in what order. We need well-trained teachers who deeply understand the content that they are teaching and how they will go about teaching it. We need well-tailored teaching materials to enable teachers to put into practice their knowledge of the curriculum with their in-depth understanding of the requirements. Without those three key features, there will be faltering in the early delivery. I wonder—I should make clear that this is outside my brief as Chief Regulator—whether all that was sufficiently strongly in place at the beginning. However, with the right kind of reform within the T-level envelope, I remain optimistic that T-levels can be enabled to grow, flourish and succeed. You may want to explore with me—perhaps in a future question—whether T-levels should be the only part of the vocational and technical qualifications landscape. I will save my answers to that question for the future in case you want to ask me that, but that is where I am on T-levels.

I am happy for you to do so.

Yes, I would like to ask you that question: should T-levels be the only qualification in the future landscape of qualifications?

One of the almost unique features of T-levels in the vocational and technical qualifications landscape is that they are explicitly and specifically allied to the occupational standards in the particular occupational area that they provide a qualification for. That is not the case for the majority of other vocational and technical qualifications in the landscape. Those qualifications have no nationally defined standard or content. People talk a lot about BTECs. I should use the term Applied General Qualifications. The BTEC brand name belongs to one awarding organisation, but it is the popular shorthand for those kinds of qualifications. The main obstacle to T-levels being the only feature of the landscape in that vocational and technical space is probably its size. A qualification underpinned by an occupational standards and anchored in some objective content that we know commands the confidence of the industry concerned is good but, quite simply, some young people at age 16 are not yet sufficiently certain about the area that they want to go into to commit to an all-or-nothing option that T-levels represent. Therefore—I do not want to prejudge the recommendations of the curriculum and assessments review that will debate this—arguments will certainly be made for the inclusion of smaller qualifications—nonetheless rigorous, nonetheless good quality and nonetheless also pinned to occupational standards so that we know they are industry-relevant—in that landscape as well to allow some flexibility of combination for students.

Sir Ian, you are seeking confirmation as the Chief Regulator of Ofqual. You have mentioned the Department for Education’s important curriculum and assessment review, and you are a member of the review board. How do you see those roles playing out together? Do you foresee any challenges?

As far as the curriculum and assessment review is concerned, I offer the following comments. I am an observer member of that panel and so am in a position to provide expert advice on qualifications and assessment to the panel’s deliberations, which I have been doing, I hope helpfully, hitherto. I will not be part of the decision-making process of that review and so I will not be a signatory to the recommendations, thus putting some distance between Ofqual and the recommendations of the review. The recommendations of the review, of course, would still need to be accepted into Government policy—in other words, be accepted by Ministers—and Ministers will consider that matter when the recommendations are on the table. I do not want in any sense to cross the line into that space. That is not my role, but I hope I am able to offer effective advice and guidance and, also, contribute to the marshalling of Ofqual’s significant expertise and experience in qualifications and assessment and, indeed, in qualifications reform, and to bring that to bear on the deliberations of the curriculum and assessment review. Perhaps at this point I should underline that, as a non-ministerial Government Department, Ofqual is accountable directly to Parliament via the offices of this Committee, not to the Government or to Government Ministers. That is an important distinction for me to underline at this point in the discussion. It is for the Government to make decisions about qualifications policy and to oversee the provision of education, including the quality of teachers, the resourcing of schools and colleges, the training of teachers, decisions about the curriculum and what children and young people should be taught. All that sits in the domain of the Department for Education. When it comes to assessment, when Ofqual was established in 2009, Parliament decided that assessment should be regulated independently from the influence of the Department for Education and, indeed, from the appearance of influence. In my view, respecting that distinction of roles is important.

You made a couple of helpful distinctions there. Specifically on reforms, the previous Government sought to reform post-16 qualifications. We have spoken a bit about how they have sought to make A-levels and T-levels the main FE qualification options, but that is now under review. We have heard from other experts in the sector about that uncertainty. In your view, what has been the impact of that uncertainty on Ofqual?

I will talk about the broader impacts of uncertainty first. I have certainly heard about that—as I am sure you will have done from previous witnesses—when visiting colleges but also some schools. I particularly recall a school I visited in Gloucestershire earlier on in the summer. It has a sixth form with a large contingent of students taking vocational and technical qualifications who were concerned that they did not know what the future of those qualifications would be. That has caused uncertainty. As an organisation, we respect and welcome any work on qualifications in the 16-to-18 phase that aims to simplify and improve quality, clarity and navigability for students taking those qualifications. I said in my answer to an earlier question that some diversity will probably still be needed in that qualification space because of the size of T-levels and their all-or-nothing nature. I understand that the Government will announce the outcomes of their review of qualifications that were due for imminent defunding soon and I do not want in any sense to be seen to pre-empt that announcement. However, the only way to deal with this—given that we are on both a journey towards the establishment and growth of T-levels and also a journey towards potential reform of other vocational and technical qualifications in that space—is to consider what needs to happen year by year, with an eye to both designing a future landscape that we want to get to with clarity about the desired end state, but also thinking of schools, colleges and students who are in the system now and want and need to teach and take qualifications now. That can probably only be addressed by taking a granular approach and making decisions qualification by qualification.

What engagement have you had with the Department for Education on the current review that you have mentioned?

Ofqual’s role is to provide expert advice on qualifications and the awarding organisations that offer them. We are primarily the regulator of awarding organisations. We know those organisations well. We are also an expert organisation in qualifications and assessments. We participated in the first wave of the review of qualifications that was paused following the general election. Our role in that was to evaluate qualifications—literally qualification by qualification—as requested and provide feedback to the Government. However, the funding of qualifications—in other words, the decision about whether a qualification can be delivered in a state-funded institution in England—rests squarely with the Department for Education. We are not involved directly in funding decisions.

Will the findings of your assessment of those qualifications have been on the table when they made those decisions?

They will absolutely have been on the table, along with a range of other considerations. I do not want to risk speaking for them, but I will venture to say that the Department will also have been considering questions like enrolment. Some qualifications have very low or in some cases even zero enrolments. They will have been considering issues of replication and duplication of qualifications in a closely allied field alongside the qualitative information that we will have been giving them about the qualification following evaluation.

I have a final question, Sir Ian, which is about SEND. This Committee is taking a great interest in this issue, and we see rapidly increasing diagnoses of a variety of different special educational needs among students who are taking exams and increasing numbers of students assessed as eligible for extra time in taking exams. Do you have views about the interaction between that trend, how assessments are undertaken and whether the current framework is fit for purpose for increasing levels of SEND in our schools?

Yes, I have a couple of thoughts in response to that question, Chair. First, awarding organisations that award qualifications are legally obliged under equalities legislation to make reasonable adjustments for students with special educational needs or disabilities. They do that in a variety of ways. They do it through enlarged modified papers and papers on different colours. They do it through additional time and through the use of scribes, readers, and separate smaller spaces to alter the atmosphere in which qualifications are taken. As an organisation, we require awarding organisations to ensure that they comply with equalities law and make those reasonable adjustments available. It is true to say that we have seen an increase in recent years in the use of those reasonable adjustments. It is not clear exactly why that is happening, other than to note that we do have rising levels of SEND in the system. JCQ, the collective organisation for exam boards, undertakes visits and inspections of centres during the exam season. It monitors how centres routinely administer adjustments made under the equalities requirements and gives no systemic sense that that provision is misused. I circle back to a point that I made earlier. Ensuring that all students are objectively assessed on the knowledge, skills and understanding that they have acquired during their course fairly and at a level for all students across the piece sits at the heart of our mission. That is in line with our statutory objectives to ensure that standards are maintained between awarding organisations and across years. I assert that the criticality of those fair assessments for all is still paramount.

Sir Ian, thank you very much for attending the Committee this morning. That concludes our public proceedings.