AN MP has urged the Prime Minister to ensure that GCSE and A-Level exam students who travel by train aren’t penalised by the train strike.

North Herefordshire MP Sir Bill Wiggin raised the plight of students travelling to Hereford Sixth Form College by rail from the likes of Abergavenny Station.

Sir Bill asked at Prime Minister’s Questions on Thursday: “Hereford Sixth Form College has over 600 students who rely on the trains to get them to their exams this week.

“What can my right honourable friend do to ensure these young people doing their GCSEs and A-levels are not punished by the train strikers?”

The PM replied: “I know how much my right honourable friend cares for students in his constituency. I can tell him that no exams have been cancelled as a result of the strike so far.

“We expect schools and colleges to have contingency arrangements in place to manage disruption.

“If students arrive late then schools should allow them to take the paper, and exam boards will determine if that paper can be marked based on how late the student is.

“I’m told that if the student misses the exam completely, the school can apply for their grades to be calculated based on other assessments they have completed in that subject.”

The college’s principal Peter Cooper admitted: “It is a challenging week for students, many of whom are sitting exams for the first time after two years of Covid disruptions.

“We pride ourselves on developing life skills and resilience and we hope students employ these as well as they can to overcome the travel adversities they face.”

He also told the BBC that transport workers union the RMT’s strike decision showed “callous selfishness”, and that unions “were created to avoid the exploitation of vulnerable people”.

Rail workers went on strike last Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, with the RMT claiming its rail working members had been subject to “pay freezes, threats to jobs and attacks on their terms and conditions”.

But Mr Cooper criticised their timing, saying: “It’s not a national secret when exams are.”

“Unions really were created at the beginning to avoid the exploitation of vulnerable people and there’s nobody more vulnerable than these students.”

“Many are putting friends up on sofas the night before vital exams,” he

“I just feel very sad for those students and young folks who are going to be affected by something that is nothing to do with them personally,” he added.

Writing in last week’s Chronicle, Monmouth MP David Davies slammed the strike action as “reckless.

“The unions are harming the very people they claim to be helping. By going ahead with these strikes, they are driving away commuters who ultimately support the jobs of rail workers.”

And the former British Transport Police special constable, who said he had carried out track training as part of his role, accused unions of blocking the modernising of maintenance practices designed to make jobs safer, such as the instalment of more cameras.