The education secretary continues to support compulsory maths and english GCSE resits, saying people do "a lot better" in their lifetime if they pass. Gillian Keegan has offered a "massive congratulations" to those receiving their GCSE results, saying "resilience has shone through with this year group", as she joined students opening their results at Paddington Academy in West London. Report by Brooksl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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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.