Waveney Valley MP calls for rethink over school summer exams

Speaking to BBC Suffolk’s Wayne Bavin, he said the UK was “only scratching the surface of what we need to do”, and said he had used summer exams as an example of how we needed to rethink society.

“Could exams be held at a different point in the year, maybe a couple of months earlier,” he added.

“It’s the sort of thing we will have to start thinking about in the next few years.”

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Last summer, Baroness Brown, who heads the Adaptation for the UK Committee on Climate Change, called for the scrapping of GCSE and A-Level exams in June.

She told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme rising temperatures left school halls too hot for students to perform well.

Dave Lee-Allen, director of the Suffolk Association of Secondary Headteachers, said change would probably be welcomed but the education system was “fixated” on a September to July academic year.

“Whether its SATS at primary school, GCSEs or A-levels, the whole structure is predicated around that timetable,” he explained to Bavin.

“The idea itself has a lot of credibility but you would have to deconstruct the whole system and recalibrate it, in order for the exams to be taken at a different time.”

The DfE said it had a £20bn plan to rebuild more than 750 schools, which were designed with effective ventilation and shade to stay cool.

Existing buildings were being made more resilient to a changing climate through a £710m retrofit programme, it added.

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