Challenge for Government is to make right choices in a timely way

THERE is a very old Morecambe and Wise sketch featuring the composer and conductor Andre Previn in which Eric Morecambe, pulled up for his piano playing, tells the maestro that he is playing all the right notes, but “not necessarily in the right order.”

It has been broadly agreed by most people that when it comes to managing the horrendously difficult coronavirus crisis, the Government has similarly been mostly doing the right things – but also not necessarily doing them in the right order.

Late lockdown; mishandled and badly delayed decisions on a range of issues and – yesterday – a belated, confused but ultimately correct decision to rule out GCSEs and A-levels for the vast majority of students this year, all fit the pattern.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is surely on borrowed time after last year’s examinations debacle, when grades were initially awarded using a flawed algorithm, only for him to be forced to make a U-turn and switch to teacher assessments after massive unfairness was revealed in the results.

Now, though, is not the time for cabinet reshuffles and Mr Williamson must keep his job until the Prime Minister can concentrate on re-casting his government, once we are through the worst of the pandemic.

One saving grace for the Education Secretary is that it appears he learns at least something from his mistakes. Pupils who would have taken their GCSEs and A-levels this year will be given grades based on what Mr Williamson described as “a form of teacher-assessed grades with training and support provided, to ensure these are awarded fairly and consistently across the country.”

That will come as a relief to school staff, parents and – most of all – to pupils. Youngsters mostly get just one shot at the bulk of their school examinations. It would be wrong to say that a child’s whole future hinges on their school examinations; but they play a part and the results must be as fair as possible, however they are arrived at.

The problem for Mr Williamson is that – as has so often bedevilled ministers during this pandemic – he gave a “cast iron assurance” last month that examinations would go ahead this year, only to have to carry out a 180-degree turn yesterday. It is not as if he hasn’t had time to plan. All the signs were that even as early as last autumn the likelihood of continuing disruption to the school year could have been foreseen.

Critics say that it is the virus, not the Government which is calling the shots. But that is to state the blindingly obvious. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in recommending his latest lockdown order to MPs yesterday, said that when the facts change, policies had to change too.

That, surely, is a lesson that ministers across government need to take to heart and have tattooed across their foreheads in mirror-image, so it confronts them in the bathroom every morning. Flexibility – from whether we lockdown to what vaccines are going to work best against the virus – must be the watchword. That way we all stand a better chance of making the right choices at the time when they need to be made.