Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, there is no such thing as perfection in this, but the Government certainly recognise in their proposals to change the performance tables that, at the end of the day, most parents want some form of simplicity. Yes, there are a thousand different ways of measuring a school; I would not find it difficult to produce 40 or 50 relevant measures even for a primary school. If you have skill and experience, you should be looking at that and, anyway, you should be visiting a school to see what it feels like. However, while there is a need for a measure of how well a school is doing academically—I agree that you may need to split this assessment into different bits—how many should it be split into? At primary level we have English, science and maths. Can you really lump them all together into one figure, or should we see them separately? Should we just publish the individual subjects that are taken at A-level and not try to lump them together because how can one add physics to drama? The whole process within the breadth of A-level or GCSE of allocating the same grades to totally different subjects is one which, in essence, is a compromise but it is meant to mean something; it is meant to indicate a level of difficulty, a level of achievement; and it is putting things on a common scale because they are easier to understand that way. At the end of the day, even if people want to see the complexity, they also want the simplicity. They want the overall Ofsted judgment on a school as well as the 40 or 50 different criteria by which Ofsted makes its judgment. To get down to one measure, you need a way of translating a BTEC into a GCSE. That is what the point system is for. I am not saying that in any way it is perfection but that it is a useful measure for parents who have to make decisions about schools.