Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 15 May 2018 to Question 142744 on the Educational Testing Service, how many people whose results were marked as questionable were given the opportunity to (a) re-sit a test with another provider and (b) attend an interview; and of those people how many were subsequently refused immigration leave.

No action to refuse leave on the grounds of a questionable certificate was taken against anybody without first giving them the opportunity to re-sit their test with another provider or attend an interview with a Home Office official. Whilst ETS notified the Home Office of 22, 694 questionable UK test certificates, the actual number where it was relevant to require a fresh test and an interview with a Home Office official was much smaller.

Data is not held centrally in a way that allows us to give an up to date answer to this question without manually checking individual case records which could only be undertaken at disproportionate cost. UKVI transparency data does provide details of refusal, curtailments and removal decisions in response to the abuse of secure English language testing. A link to the most recent available data is provided here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/temporary-and-permanent-migration-data-february-2017

The table in SELT_02 is the closest match to the information requested. The data was last published in February 2017 and only contains data to the last quarter (December 2016). ETS data is no longer published after this date