Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It is indeed an important warning of the risk that arises from the manner in which the Government have established Ofqual, the degree of independence that Ofqual will, or will not, have, and in its tightly defined remit, which are designed effectively to stop it making the judgments about standards that it needs to make. Although the Minister herself, in giving evidence to the Public Bill Committee, suggested that it would be possible for Ofqual to use sample testing, she later qualified that by indicating that that could be used only in the context of the specific objectives in the Bill, which prevent such testing from being used to make judgments about educational standards and changes in those standards over time. That is why we tabled a large number of amendments, both in Committee and on Report. Amendment 90 requires comparable international assessments to be made by Ofqual in a way that is similar to new clause 3, which was introduced by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. Amendments 72, 74 and 75 deal with the need to establish a proper educational standards objective in place of the long list of objectives that the Government have designated for Ofqual, none of which addresses the fundamental issue of standards, and judgments about standards over time. Amendment 71 seeks to address the soon-to-be-topical issue of the introduction of the modular GCSE, and the impact that it is likely to have on results. We heard some interesting evidence from the Minister and others in Committee about the effect that the introduction of modular GCSEs is likely to have. Many of us suspect that when they are introduced, there will be a rise in GCSE results, even though there will not be an improvement in underlying GCSE standards. We heard ambiguous evidence from the Minister about whether a rise in apparent standards as a consequence of changing to modular GCSEs should essentially be suppressed by ensuring that similar-ability cohorts of children end up with similar GCSE results, or whether in fact the modular GCSE will allow the results to rise in a fairly predictable way that, no doubt, will be used by the Government, if they are still in power, to claim that standards have risen. Amendment 73 deals with the need for standardised sample testing, in relation not only to the existing Ofqual objectives, but to the wider standards objective that we believe there should be. Amendment 91 deals with the issue of coherence v. choice in qualifications, a subject that we touched on in Committee. Another fundamental debate is hidden away in the amendments and new clauses before us. That is in relation to what was, when we were debating the Bill in Committee, the famous clause 138 which, under the reordering in the new Bill, becomes clause 139. This is the clause that gives to the Secretary of State the ability to determine the minimum requirements in respect of skills, knowledge or understanding that someone must be able to demonstrate to gain a particular qualification or type of qualification. That is a very significant power. It allows a Secretary of State to prescribe, potentially in great detail, what should be in each and every regulated qualification. The example that the Minister gave during our Committee hearing was that particular authors might be considered to have a status that would justify a Minister insisting that they ought to be in, for example, a GCSE English qualification. The same approach could no doubt be sustained to justify the study of particular political theorists in a politics exam, or particular parts of history in a history exam. Under cross-questioning from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), the Minister initially said she was not sure whether this was a new power or a power that the Government already had. In her letter to my hon. Friend on 14 March, the Minister confirmed that at present there is no explicit statutory power to determine such matters—in other words, this is a new power being taken by the Secretary of State to prescribe in a potentially very detailed way what should be in particular qualifications. That makes us extremely nervous. We agree that there is a role for a Government in a broad-brush national curriculum. We believe it is right that there should be a political view of the broad nature of subjects that should be taught in schools and what should represent the core curriculum. We cannot accept that it should be for a politically appointed Secretary of State to interfere and meddle in the subjects that young people have to study to achieve regulated qualifications. In our amendment 80 we seek to include in the Bill what is in the explanatory notes, which the Government have so far resisted writing into the Bill: that these powers should be used only in exceptional circumstances. In some of our other amendments, 88 and 89, we seek to put in place other safeguards to prevent the power being used by the present Government or by a future Government in a way that most people in this country would regard as deeply objectionable.