Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It was under a Tory Government and a Labour Government; I am afraid that I had to witness both. I am trying to stress that the levels of education that one receives from the baccalaureate are very different from those that one gets from GCSEs. O-levels have not disappeared from the world that we live in. Someone who goes to an international school in Singapore can still take O-levels—the same exam that many of us here in the Chamber took when we were at school. But if we get students doing GCSEs today to sit the O-levels in the same subjects, we will find that many of them cannot pass because of the difference between the two. I echo the comments made by our Front-Bench team in pleading with the Government to be honest and give us an opportunity to judge and scrutinise the current situation. We are happy to be proved wrong, but I am convinced that we will be proved right. If we are, we owe it to education, our pupils today and the next generation, who will be competing in a very difficult world, to ensure that we have the right level of standards and that we do not have more and more grade inflation.