Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The Bill contains much that is unwanted, unnecessary or both, but the clauses, new clauses and amendments that we are debating should be the most important and beneficial part of it. Unfortunately, we share many of the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) regarding the nature of the Ofqual that the Government have chosen to establish. Anyone interested in education ought to seek an objective understanding of what has happened to standards over a period of time. Indeed, it is difficult to have a meaningful debate about education and education policies without having an understanding of and agreement about what has happened to educational standards. We have heard from the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton about the disagreements about what Government statistics mean and about what has happened to standards over the past 10 or 20 years, and those concerns are echoed in the report on testing and assessment by the Children, Schools and Families Committee which was published last year and which received all-party support. I refer the Minister to paragraph 162, in which the Committee concludes that""the measurement of standards across the full curriculum is presently virtually impossible under the current testing regime because national tests measure only a small sample of pupils' achievements; and because teaching to the test means that pupils may not retain, or may not even possess in the first place, the skills which are supposedly evidenced by their test results"—" A damning criticism if ever there was one of the existing testing regime. In paragraph 166, the Committee concludes:""It is highly questionable whether a claim can validly be made that A-levels have remained at a consistent standard over a period as long as 20 years or indeed anything like it."" There are further criticisms in paragraph 171 about the difficulties of reaching a conclusive view on the issue of grade inflation and thus what we should conclude about what has happened to educational standards over the past 10 or 20 years. That is of fundamental importance because the Government's view, and their gloss on the statistics, is that there has been a staggering improvement in educational standards over the past 10 years, and perhaps even longer. In some parts of the country, the improvement in, for example, GCSE scores is quite breathtaking on paper. If it is true that there has been an improvement in standards of that magnitude, it is extremely important, and it has all sorts of implications for policy. However, if the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton is correct in saying that we cannot rely on those statistics, and if the Select Committee is right in its criticisms, we are in a difficult, and very different, position, which is presumably why, in paragraph 186, the Select Committee recommends that there should be a greater use of sample or cohort testing to establish what has truly happened to educational standards over time, and to make those judgments invariant to changes in the structure of qualification, and thus to restore public confidence in standards. We discussed in our debates in Committee, and previously, our great disappointment that the Government did not take up the Select Committee proposal and, instead, in their response to the Select Committee report, made it clear that they rejected not only the use of sample testing to measure educational standards over time but, as they state in paragraph 50 of their response, that in their view,""Ofqual's role is not to monitor education standards as a whole; it is to regulate the qualifications and assessments which are one of the means by which standards are measured."" When we look at the measures in clause 126 that deal with Ofqual's objectives, we discover on careful reading that what at first appears to be an impressive list of objectives—the qualifications standards objective; the assessments standards objective; the public confidence objective; the awareness objective; and the efficiency objective—requires Ofqual to make judgments of levels of attainment in comparable regulated qualifications, and in comparable assessments, which is not in any way a guarantee that, as the nature of those assessments changes, we will have a reliable measure of what is really happening to standards.