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‘97% seemed absurd’: Labour’s Stephen Timms on the English test scandal that wrecked lives
(www.theguardian.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
There was one crucial statistic in the cheating allegations that the Home Office levelled against more than 35,000 overseas students that instantly alerted Labour MP Stephen Timms to the likely presence of a huge miscarriage of justice.
Two Home Office ministers have admitted to him privately that they know something went wrong, but the department has failed to take steps to allow students to challenge the allegations against them without having to enter into prohibitively expensive legal proceedings.
A decade after the Home Office first made a blanket accusation of deception against tens of thousands of students who had travelled to the UK seeking a British university education, Timms is perplexed by how few people understand the huge scale of what went wrong.
He notes that there has been none of the public expression of dismay that the Post Office scandal provoked, despite close parallels between the two issues: large numbers of innocent people accused of deception on apparently flawed evidence.
Despite having been stabbed several times in the abdomen during a constituency surgery in 2010, Timms has continued to hold appointments every Friday afternoon in East Ham (with security just slightly improved by the addition of a bigger desk separating him and his visitors).
He is very critical of ETS for its mismanagement of the tests and blames Theresa May’s Home Office, which was working to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands and which introduced a series of hostile environment policies at the time that students were being accused of cheating.
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