Education secretary Gavin Williamson has suggested that GCSEs and A levels in 2022 and onwards will have adjustments to make them fair to students hit by the pandemic.

Speaking to the Commons Education Select Committee this morning, he said: “We very much hope for exams to go ahead in 2022 as well as vocational and technical qualifications.

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“We’re considering what we need to do to ensure that there’s fairness and the right level of support for pupils as they take these qualifications.

“We had quite an extensive package of measures that was intended for this year’s awarding session supporting youngsters as they took their exams and we will look at having a similar set of measures that can be brought forward in order to be able to support pupils as they take assessments.”

Asked if adjustments would be made for a few years, he said he expected mitigations would be put in place as students currently in Years 10 and 12 would have suffered from disruption caused by the pandemic. 

“You don’t have the situation of immediately switching back to the absolute sort of same state of the situation as it was back in 2019,” he added.

Ofqual interim chief regulator Simon Lebus has previously said he was unsure about a return to “full-fat” exams in 2022, and that some “easement” to account for learning loss was likely.

Today, asked by MP Caroline Johnson how he would ensure that students got a grade that met their potential this year, Mr Williamson said that “putting our trust in teachers was the absolute right and best approach in terms of the situation we are dealing with”.

“It is why we have put so much work in terms of the guidance, the training and support of teachers as they reach those teacher-assessed grades,” he added.

Ms Johnson also asked about the rise in the number of A grades last year and asked what level of grade inflation would be “reasonable” to the education secretary.

Mr Williamson said: “There’s a quality assurance in terms of what happens within the school and also what’s being delivered by the exam boards.

“We don’t have the sort of data where we can see the inflation and obviously when you have many, many different schools submitting that information, it isn’t going to be feasible to make that prediction but we’ll look at the data as it comes in.

“We did make a decision that we’re going to put our trust in teachers and we recognise all pupils have suffered an extensive amount of disruption over the last year and a half.”