Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, Amendment 227 is also in my name, and I shall also speak to Amendment 229, which again is in my name in this group. I support very strongly what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has said about the importance of timeliness. A similar amendment was put down in another place and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary from the DCSF said that there was no reason to make timeliness explicit in the Bill because: ""Public bodies are under an implicit duty to exercise their functions reasonably, which includes acting in a timely manner".—[Official Report, Commons, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill Committee, 26/3/09; col. 622.]" If it is true that all public bodies are under an implicit duty to act in a timely manner, I can say only that an awful lot of them, in the general experience of the public, are not fulfilling their implicit duty. It is extremely important that people are not left hanging for a very long time over something as crucial as decisions about examinations and examination results, and indeed about any queries about examinations. There is nothing more unpleasant or unfortunate, so I very much hope that the Minister will feel able to add this quite simply to the end of line 9. Amendment 229 relates to Clause 125, in which Ofqual’s objectives are laid down. I have absolutely no quarrel with the excellent list of its objectives, qualification standards, assessment standards, public confidence objective, awareness objective and efficiency objective. I just feel slight anxiety that nowhere in the subsection on Ofqual does it come through clearly enough that one of its objectives must also be to ensure that the interests of employers are reflected. Again, I declare my interest as chair of the City and Guilds Quality and Standards Committee. Ofqual regulates vocational as well as school examinations, and employers are frequently heard to say—indeed only yesterday I heard it from the employers on my committee—that the qualifications with which young people arrive are not always what they need and want. It is essential that we have it in the Bill that Ofqual is concerned with meeting the needs of employers. That applies not only to vocational qualifications, of course, because it is also vital that schools produce the basic functional skills, as we must now call them, that employers are asking for but which in many cases they find that schools have not delivered. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will feel kindly towards these two unexceptionable amendments.