Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, on my amendment, I am grateful, completely satisfied and thank the Minister and her team very much for the effort that they took during the holidays to get us to this position. I am delighted that those on my Front Bench are so thoroughly in favour of the independence of Ofqual. Voting for the independence of bodies such as Ofqual is a hard thing to do in government, but it should be relatively easy to do in opposition. I hope that my noble friend will pursue something along the lines of Amendments 230 and 231. It is important to have that clearly set out as an Ofqual objective for the public appreciation of what Ofqual is and where it stands, if nothing else. The importance of that was illustrated by the story my noble friend told of the instruction Ofqual gave to an exam board to reduce the pass mark in an examination. Knowing a little of that story, I suspect it took the right decision, but there should have been someone on the board who would have told it what the public reaction would be and how it ought to be managed. Something the Secretary of State might bear in mind when he is choosing the board is that the members should not all be inward-facing; there should be some outward-facing members too. The Minister was wrong when she criticised my noble friend for criticising the 20 per cent pass mark. If I employed a plumber and he said, "Yes, I’m a qualified plumber. I got 20 per cent in my exams", I would not be happy. If 20 per cent is the pass mark in an exam, it is the wrong examination for the question that is being asked. If we want to know whether our young people have a competence in, say, mathematics, we ought to set an exam that requires at least a 50 per cent pass mark. That is where the exam ought to settle. If you are down to a 20 per cent pass mark, you do not know what bit of the 100 per cent the pupil in question has learnt. You are so far off the purpose of the qualification that a pass mark down there does not belong. Just in theoretical terms, my noble friend’s criticism of pass marks having got down to that level has a great deal to it. However, I am delighted that the Minister supports independence, and I shall hold her to it when we come to Clause 138. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Schedule 9 agreed.