00:00 Well this is a decision we made two years ago but what I want to say Chris is a massive
00:03 congratulations. You can feel the excitement in the hall today. Everybody, the parents
00:08 and most of all the students are very excited. I think the message has got through. There
00:12 was a lot of people very nervous about coming to collect their results but they have done
00:16 brilliantly. Resilience is something that's shone through this year group and they have
00:21 got fantastic results and really are all going to be able to go on to a huge variety of extra
00:26 things they can do at the next stage. It's really important that people have maths and
00:30 English. That's why we do research. You can see in the data that people do a lot better
00:35 over their lifetime if they get maths and English. So it is worth persevering with maths
00:39 and English and we are getting a lot more help to those people who need to catch up
00:43 with maths and English as well. Well the attainment gap was actually narrowing quite considerably
00:48 from 2010 to before the pandemic. So under this Conservative government we got it down
00:53 9.1% which was amazing and we were really pleased with that. Now it has taken a step
00:58 back in the pandemic. We have put £5 billion into catch up. Nearly 4 million catch up tutoring
01:05 courses have been taken. That's a lot of catch up that people have done and you see the evidence
01:09 of the catch up in the results today. I would always say, look this is one moment, this
01:13 is to get on to the next stage. There's many different destinations, there's many different
01:17 options for you and many people I know, I went to a school where 92% of the kids did
01:22 not pass their GCSEs, I was one of the 8% and many many people will find lots of different
01:29 routes in life and we are there to help you. Lots of different options for you to go on
01:33 and achieve your potential. It's really important to come to school, it's also really important
01:37 for MPs to come to Parliament.
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