A day after it emerged Gavin Williamson offered his resignation to the PM over the A-Levels, GCSE and BTEC fiasco series, this morning Nick Gibb revealed to LBC he too considered his resignation before concluding it “would have been the wrong thing to do” ahead of inevitable enquiries by the parliamentary education select committee and others. To be fair to Gibb and Williamson, abandoning the DfE in the middle of the storm, and weeks before all schools are set to return, wouldn’t have helped anything…

Responding to Nick Ferrari’s blunt claim that he “wouldn’t have the balls to stay in post” if he’d presided over this scandal, Gibb claimed he’d given the question “a lot of thought”.

The rest of the schools’ minister’s morning interview round was less clear, however. Gibb managed to both defend the algorithm itself – saying “The model was a good model” though something went wrong in its application – and defending the decision to scrap the algorithm. If Gibb had resigned as schools minister, it would have ended his 13-year run with the portfolio – ironically longer than any students’ time at school from nursery to Sixth form…