England’s chief regulator of exams has put up a staunch defence of Ofqual after it was forced to withdraw a decade of statistics detailing the number of students granted extra time and other assistance for A-levels and GCSEs.
In his first interview with a national media organisation since his permanent appointment as head of Ofqual, and just weeks after the data was dramatically pulled, Sir Ian Bauckham said there had been no error in the figures, blaming instead the way they had been interpreted.
He also denied that the data “misunderstanding”, which comes five years after Ofqual’s disastrous attempt during Covid to award GCSE and A-level grades by algorithm, had further undermined confidence in the organisation, saying: “We’ve got a qualification system in this country to be proud of.”
In an interview with the Guardian, the chief regulator also addressed the debate surrounding the government’s curriculum and assessment review, warning against any wholesale move from exams to coursework because of concerns about students’ growing use of AI.
He also urged caution over the introduction of digital exams, saying that any assessment innovation must be secure and deliverable, and should not disadvantage poorer students who may not have had the same access to digital devices and software as their wealthier peers.
Ofqual, which was set up in 2010 to regulate qualifications in England, shocked the education sector when it announced on 17 July that it was withdrawing official statistics for special access arrangements for exams going back to 2014, because they “significantly overstated” the number of students.
Access arrangements are adjustments to exams for students with special needs, disabilities or injuries, with 25% extra time being the most common. In 2012-13, 107,000 students in England were granted extra time, but in 2024 Ofqual said it was nearly 420,000 students, an increase of nearly 300%.
The data appeared to show that 30% of students had been granted 25% extra time last year, with particularly high rates in private schools where nearly 42% of students received adjustments. Ofqual now thinks the actual rate is far lower.
Bauckham said the confusion had arisen because, rather than showing access arrangements solely for students entered for GCSEs and A-levels in one particular year, the data includes a much broader list of access arrangements.
Each access arrangement lasts two years. There can be duplicate applications for the same student, and the list may include pupils with special arrangements in place who did not sit exams that year at all.
“It wasn’t an error, because the published data only ever claimed to be the long list of approved access arrangements,” Bauckham said. “It never claimed to be that data mapped against actual exam entries, but it was interpreted as that.
“I’ve been clear that moving forward … we need to publish actual granted access arrangements that relate to actual entries in the year in question.”
He said the final figure is likely to be much more in line with the proportion of pupils in England with special education needs and disabilities (Send), which according to the most recent official statistics stands at 19.5%, including those with education, health and care plans
“Just because this figure is significantly lower, doesn’t mean that there may not have been a rising trend,” Bauckham added. “I would be very surprised indeed if the final data, when we’re able to pinpoint it, doesn’t indicate a rising trend. So I don’t think it takes away the problem, but it alters the scale of what we’re thinking about.”
On what appeared to be a growing gap between the use of access arrangements between private and state schools, he said: “Of course in independent schools there is a slightly higher proportion of Send than there is in state-funded schools.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hypothesise that there will still be a difference between state-funded schools and independent schools, not least because of that higher Send figure, but I’m absolutely clear that we must have data that informs the public debate on this issue.”
Bauckham, who after a year as interim chief regulator was permanently appointed in February, said Ofqual had moved on a long way from the chaos of Covid when exams were cancelled and grades calculated using an algorithm had to be scrapped. “Five years later, we’ve moved back to examinations which are widely trusted as the fairest way to accredit and assess what students know, understand and can do,” he added.
On the government’s curriculum and assessment review, due to report later this year, the Ofqual chief acknowledged concerns about the volume of exams pupils currently face, but he warned against reducing assessment to a single paper per subject. Students “really value the opportunity to have at least two bites at the cherry, by which I mean two opportunities in two separate exam papers in the same subject”,” he said.
He is in favour of AI being used to support teaching and students’ learning. “But I would be very concerned about moving wholesale to a system where exams were replaced by extended writing coursework, because that would, in current circumstances, be open to malpractice.”
“I’m not worried about the future of qualifications,” Bauckham said. “I think qualifications are going to be needed more than ever in the future, but I think in education, we’ve got to be clear that students still need rigorous intellectual training. They still need mastery of key knowledge.
“We still need to set our sights high for them and we mustn’t succumb to the confused thinking that says, because AI will enable future workplaces, we don’t need students to know, understand and be able to do skills and demonstrate knowledge at a high level, because I think the opposite is true.”
