Weaker schools will need help from outstanding schools to ensure their teacher assessment is sufficiently “robust” if exams are cancelled for a second time, a former head of Ofsted has said.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the former Ofsted chief inspector, told BBC Radio 4‘s World at One that the government must tell high-performing schools to work with weaker ones so that internal assessment is carried out properly. 

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“My advice to the government would be to make sure that schools are absolutely crystal clear what the criteria for assessment and achievement will be - past papers, coursework, mock examinations and so on - and make sure that the moderation process which went badly wrong, it seems to me, in the summer, is a lot more robust,” he said.

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“A school that’s in special measures, a school that has serious weaknesses, will not be assessing those children well,” Sir Michael added.

“And it’s really important, therefore, that the government - knowing that this is a contingency arrangement that will possibly happen, internal assessments will go on again, teacher evaluation will go on again - should ensure that the system is robust. It should be contacting outstanding schools to say, ‘Work with weaker schools to make sure assessments are robust.’”

Sir Michael said he understood why some headteachers wanted exams to go ahead in 2021 following the “fiasco of the summer”, but questioned whether students from deprived backgrounds would be ready for exams next year.

Responding to comments from Serge Cefai, the head of Sacred Heart Catholic School in Camberwell, South London, who said students should sit exams so they could feel they had earned their grades, Sir Michael said: “I’m not surprised he’s come to that position, and I would broadly support that.

“But the key question is this - will youngsters be ready to take an examination in eight months’ time? He will do well because he runs a very good school, which I know well. It’s a London school with a good intake. There’s obviously been good online programmes and catch-up programmes over the last few weeks.

“But I’m also working in places like Blackpool and Manchester, with some of the poorest youngsters in the land and some of the weakest schools in the land, where there are some of the highest infection rates.

“And you have got to recognise that a lot of these youngsters, particularly poor youngsters, have lost six months of formal education. About 20 per cent of youngsters are still not going to school. Staff absence is high to the extent where a headteacher phoned me up the other day and asked me to teach.”

Earlier this year, in June, Sir Michael said schools rated less than “good” by Ofsted would have “very unreliable internal assessment systems” for calculating GCSE and A-level grades.