Good morning. It is a great pleasure to be here with you for this year’s second online Schools and Academies Show. My name is Simon Lebus and I am the Interim Chief Regulator at Ofqual.
I have found it to be a daunting task to have so many of my interactions with various different interlocutors mediated exclusively through a computer screen rather than face-to-face. I can only hope I am able to rise to the challenge as effectively and with as much panache as so many of you have managed to do.
It is a problem I have also faced at Ofqual. Having started there on 4 January when we were in lockdown I have never actually managed to meet any of my colleagues there face to face. That was also, of course, the day on which the Prime Minister announced that the summer’s exams would not proceed normally and my time at Ofqual has, therefore, been very different to how I imagined it when I agreed last year to take the role on. In particular, I have found myself presiding over a major departure in how we manage Year 11 and Year 13 assessment in the form, for general qualifications at…
