Iqbal Mohamed

I absolutely agree. After my last exam at university, I promised myself that I would never take another exam. Before I became an MP—not since—I had nightmares where I believed I had an exam in the morning and had not revised, which is a common feeling among many. This debate follows the House’s passing of Third Reading of the Mental Health Bill yesterday. I spoke about remembering the importance of centring young people’s wellbeing and mental health, and how we must create policy and legislation that fits them and their experiences and needs. A constituent recently told me that both her daughters have needed mental health support, primarily because of issues in school and the stress that came with that. The pressures of our education system are part of that picture, and cannot be ignored. We have heard arguments about some of the benefits of exams, and we should try to find an adaptable hybrid model so that schools can adapt how they test and assess the ability of individual children rather than forcing them down a single, cookie-cutter, regimented process that does not show their capabilities, intelligence or resilience. Teaching children about resilience has to come from real-world scenarios, and exams that concentrate stresses into two-hour chunks at the end of an academic year do not reflect the realities of life. We all experience stresses, and we should all try to deal with them, but I do not believe, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) mentioned, that they help strengthen children’s resilience. With the independent curriculum and assessment review expected soon, we have a crucial opportunity to rethink how we assess young people. Reform must place wellbeing, creativity and fairness at its heart, because a child’s worth should never be defined by how they perform under pressure, but by the full range of their potential.