08 November 2002
Officials at the Department for Education and Skills, possibly working under instruction from the former secretary of state, undertook a media campaign to dismiss the chair of the exams watchdog before the results of an independent inquiry into the A-Levels fiasco were made public, MPs were told this week.
Sir William Stubbs, who was sacked from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority by Estelle Morris, said that two senior DfES officials – Morris's special adviser Chris Boffey and the department's head of news, DJ Collins – led the spin campaign to discredit him.
Appearing before the Commons' education select committee on November 6, Stubbs claimed he was targeted because he had dared to criticise the DfES for interfering with the Tomlinson inquiry – which revealed that only a small number of A-levels needed re-grading, despite the enormous fuss.
Morris claimed he was dismissed because there had been a 'breakdown in trust' between Stubbs and the education sector.
But, in his brutally frank submission, Stubbs told the committee that Collins and Boffey had briefed journalists that the QCA was 'dead in the water' and that he would be out of a job long before the results of the Tomlinson inquiry were published.
Collins and Boffey threatened to 'cut off' reporters who did not cover the issue in a way that was favourable to the department, he said, before adding that Morris was aware of the campaign to 'manage the news' and did nothing to stop it.
'Either [Collins and Boffey] were acting as free agents… or they were acting under instruction,' he told MPs.
Ministers, he said, had created a 'crisis of confidence' in the A-level system which was later shown by the inquiry to be unfounded.
'They lost their nerve… in the light of hostile press criticism,' Stubbs added.
Barry Sheerman, chair of the committee, said he was 'minded' to bring Collins and Boffey before the committee to give the department's side of the story.
Commenting on the beginning of the fiasco, Stubbs said the DfES 'had not accepted' his advice that there was no evidence to doubt results from two of the exam bodies and that the number of contentious results at the OCR – the only body that re-graded papers – was 'relatively small'.
PFnov2002
