Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I happily support Amendment 225. In fact, I think that Ofqual simply could not do its job fully without engaging in forms of research, which would probably include sample testing. I assume that it would be in train to do this but let us be reassured that it has the power, the capacity and, where appropriate, the budget to do so. I wholly agree with the spirit of Amendments 230 and 231. Whether they are necessary, I am not completely certain, but it would evidently do no harm to have this emphasised at some point in the Bill. However, my reckoning on Amendment 236 is that we have just given the future Ofqual the good news, and it has been warmly welcomed on all sides of the Committee. The bad news is that we are handing it a ticking time bomb that will go off in eight months’ time. This is important work which must be done, but saddling a new agency with many tasks to carry out in its first eight months will not help it and will not help it to focus where it should be focusing in its first year of delivery. However, I tie that, and the suggestion implicit within it, to Amendment 316, because it may well sit much more happily with a similar proposal to look for international benchmarks. I accept the remarks just made about the difficulty of doing this. It is difficult to produce international benchmarks that will have total confidence even in all parts of the OECD but it is important that we do so. We should test ourselves and our education system against the best in the world and, within that, we should look to see what consistency of standards there has been over the years. Perhaps I might add, not completely facetiously, that if one wanted a quick and dirty test in the absence of Ofqual carrying out this survey in its first eight months, I could invite all noble Peers and Peeresses to identify which A-levels they sat and we could all get together to sit the current paper and see how we get on. There may or may not be evidence of a rise or fall in standards—who knows? Seriously, there is an important point here but surely not one that should be dealt with in the first eight months.