The government has “tunnel vision” about exams going ahead next summer and needs to plan for the possibility of “enormous numbers” of students not being able to sit them, the Liberal Democrats education spokesperson has warned.

Daisy Cooper, MP for St Albans, told the party’s conference that there has been no discussion about what should happen if pupils are unable to sit GCSEs or A levels next summer because of the coronavirus.

She said she would put pressure on the government to recognise that there were scenarios in which Covid-19 disruption would mean “some children or enormous numbers of children” were unable to sit exams.

Ms Cooper also told a virtual meeting at the party’s conference on education technology that “digital poverty” was driving the attainment gap during the lockdown and that some pupils did not get access to the devices they needed until the final day of the summer term.

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Commenting on what will happen with next year’s exams, she said: “One of the things I find incredibly frustrating and I don’t want to get too party political about it but the Labour party have been calling on the Conservatives to delay the exams next year and there is no agreement among MPs whether it should be delayed by one week or two or three weeks but that is generally the bracket they are talking about.

“What is not being discussed are the various different scenarios about next year.

“To my mind, and I have discussed this with the National Education Union, there are probably about four different scenarios that could play out next year and under two of those scenarios, some children or enormous numbers of children won’t be able to sit exams.

“There are scenarios under which exams can’t be sat and in which case, there will need to be some sort of process by which their grades are allocated and at the moment the debate seems to be around when are the exams taking place and how long are they going to be delayed and how can that be managed in terms of [students going] into universities?

“There seems to be this kind of tunnel vision assuming that exams are a good thing, which we could all dispute, but also this obsession that they are going to go ahead.

“So I will certainly be raising this with the government and saying: ‘There are scenarios in which some individual students or groups of students may not be able to sit their exams at all and therefore we have to get across these issues’.”

Ms Cooper said that the A-level fiasco and the Covid-19 pandemic had put the debate about digital access under the spotlight.

She added: “The attainment gap between disadvantaged and the less disadvantaged really comes down to digital poverty.

“I am the MP for St Albans and we are a relatively well-to-do middle-class area but we still have pockets of poverty and there were some children who needed digital devices and they didn’t arrive until the final day before the summer holiday.

“So they had months and months and months without any digital access and even if you have the device you do not necessarily have internet access.

“When we have big discussions about things like AI, we need to remember that there are some basic things here that we are not getting right.”