Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
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It didn't have to be this way
No, it could easily have been much worse.
And if the government had refused to act on the advice of SAGE and the overwhelming consensus of scientific and medical experts and closed the schools it probably would have been worse.
There was no perfect answer to this.
Once that advice had been followed, the logical consequence was that special measures would have to be taken in respect of exams.
Different schools put pupils forward for exams at different stages and no one model describes all of them, but there are certainly students who take public examinations at various stages well before the end of their school education - I took one or more public exam at the end of my fourth, fifth, lower sixth and upper sixth years.
Schools were closed well before the point by which all students who were taking public exams that year would have moved entirely over to revision.
The disruption to the education of all children this year, and especially those who were taking public exams, was such that some sort of special adjustment or alternative arrangement to exams was inevitable if there was to be even an attempt to to ensure something resembling fairness. And no easy way to do it.