Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, the purpose behind this amendment is to make sure that Ofqual, which is an organisation that I thoroughly support, has the powers necessary to make a proper evaluation of the quality of examinations. There is a great difficulty in judging the quality of an examination from within the examination system itself. For instance, if you have two GCSEs in French from different boards and you can see from the pupil data that the pupils in one are doing much better, relative to their other educational attainments, than the pupils in the other, you cannot, of itself, tell whether one of those examinations is easier or whether one of them is better, in that the way it is set out and the educational material with encourage its pupils to excel. The only way in which you can get at that information is to look outside the examination system. With GCSEs that is easy; you watch what pupils go on to do at A-level. For example, how many of them take French and how they do in it, particularly those who are taking French with different boards or in different ways? That enables you to form a picture of whether the excess performance, as it were, in one examination is laudable or is something about which Ofqual has to do something in order to tighten up the standards in that exam. Amendment 225 would ensure that Ofqual had access to data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Without such information, you cannot really get a handle on A-level performance. You need to look at what pupils have gone on to do afterwards, which courses they have chosen to take and how they have done in them, to see whether the A grades being awarded in a particular examination reflect learning and the quality of the student or whether they are created by an examination being in some way made easier than it should be. I have dealt with the HESA in a private capacity as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide and I have found it exceptionally difficult to deal with, unco-operative and unhelpful. I suppose that that experience motivated me to put down this amendment. I have not been disappointed in the letter that the Government got for me from the HESA. It is clearly not an organisation that is accustomed to reach out the hand of comradeship to other parts of government. It very much says, "If you give us a cheque, we’ll think about it". My advice to Ofqual is that one of the first things that it should do is to write to the Higher Education Statistics Agency requesting that it start collecting proper statistics on which schools students come from. It should connect those statistics back into the student database so that it is possible to track at least a good proportion of students from the point where they gain their qualifications from an English school to the point where they get into university and achieve results in their degree. At the moment, that data collection is extremely lackadaisical, is not undertaken with any sense of dedication or urgency and contains a great deal of inaccuracy. It needs to be of better quality if Ofqual is to be able to do its job. I very much hope that Ofqual will take up the letter from the HESA and pursue it to try to ensure that those data are fit for purpose. The second part of the amendment would ensure that Ofqual had the ability to do the research that it needs to look outside mere examination statistics. One thing that has gone against our belief in the maintenance of examination quality is the methods that have been used by the QCA to, in its view, maintain standards. That has been largely a matter of comparing one year’s examination results with those of the immediately preceding year. That short-term comparison within a system is always subject to error and those errors tend, in the natural human way of things, to be cumulative. You would expect a system based on that reference to drift over time. I am not surprised that many people think that GCSEs in particular have drifted in that way. You need to conduct proper research into the underlying capabilities of students, through sample testing and other investigations, to enable you to look beyond the examination system and to look back in history with some accuracy. When you have a pattern of the requirements of a particular qualification changing over time, you need to have an unvarying reference point that you can go back to in understanding the capabilities of the students taking it. I am concerned that Ofqual should have the power to undertake those investigations. I beg to move.