Ofqual was not robust enough. As the Minister knows, it deliberately told one exam board to lower its marks. That exam board did so under protest and said that GCSEs would no longer be comparable with exams taken in the past. The Minister also knows that one of our leading headmasters has said that the new science GCSE has a

"terrifying absence of real science".

Another leading headmaster said that its content had been reduced so that it was no longer appropriate for intelligent students. One hundred and eighty-seven independent schools now do not take the Government's GCSEs and they do not bother with the Government's league tables; they prefer the international GCSE, which the Government's own watchdog has acknowledged is "more demanding". We now have a system that has been compared by one headmaster to that of South Africa, where richer students can take more prestigious exams and poorer students are denied the same opportunities. Will the Minister ensure that opportunity is made more equal and insist that state schools can offer the more robust IGSCEs?