The head of a teachers’ union has called on the government to give further clarity on how this year’s primary Sats, GCSE and A-level exams will be managed during the coronavirus outbreak, saying it is not “credible” they can go ahead as normal.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said that prime minister Boris Johnson had not responded to a letter from his union about closing schools and that pupils facing GCSEs and A levels had been left in a “terrible position”.

“I think it’s a terrible position they [exam candidates] have been put in,” he said, speaking to the BBC today.

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Referring to the reformed GCSEs and A levels, which significantly reduced or did away with the amount of coursework pupils submitted before taking their exams, he added: “And not to make a snidey point but this is something we forecast when the government went to terminal exams only and gave up coursework and teacher assessment.

“It means that there is no base for a result at the moment. But the exam season is when everybody says currently that the peak of coronavirus will be, and during that period, a Year 11 child doing GCSEs might be expected to do 35 hours of exams across a few weeks in an exam hall.

“And it doesn’t seem credible that we’re going to be there without lots of children missing out, either before, because their teacher is off, or because they’re unwell, or because they’ve been told to self-isolate because their parent is self-isolating - so the run-up to that is going to be incredibly chaotic.

“The number of children who could possibly be there is going to be extremely unrepresentative - we can’t predict it, and I think the government needs to make a decision and say they are going to use some other method at this stage,” he said.

He said that it was difficult to say how exam grades could be managed otherwise, as the government had not shared modelling predictions of school closures with the NEU, “so it’s very hard to make those predictions” - but that “there is a world in which teachers would maybe have to make some assessment of the child”.

He added: “But the child would need some way of contesting that assessment and saying, ‘I don’t like that assessment so I’d like to do the year again.’”

Mr Courtney said that primary Sats exams should be cancelled altogether, as “Year 6 kids won’t be there”, and he added that “primary headteachers need to be able to think about what matters now - and that’s whether children on free school meals are being fed, whether other children in food poverty are being fed”.

Mr Courtney acknowledged the situation was more complicated for GCSE and A-level candidates who needed a form of certification, and said he hoped to speak with the government about this.

He said that the uncertainty regarding exams was preventing schools from responding to other aspects of the coronavirus outbreak, such as whether teachers with no underlying medical vulnerability could volunteer to keep parts of the school system running for NHS staff and other key workers. 

“We understand the point about the fantastic NHS workers, the overlooked food distribution workers, the people working on production lines making ventilators [who would be most affected by school closures if they have children],” he said.

“So we think there is a way of getting volunteer teachers who aren’t in those vulnerable [medical] categories to re-imagine what schools are like. But there’s going to have to be some decisions made for that. The government has to say something about the GCSEs and A levels, because that’s causing more chaos.”