Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I have great sympathy with the amendments. We have been through painful periods of public lack of confidence in standards—the creep in A-levels, GCSEs and so on. Some device, whether via Ofqual or some other agency, is badly needed to assure the public that standards are not falling and that examinations are kept up to the mark. I am personally a great advocate of some kind of agency which keeps item banks which are properly valid and which do not represent league tables of individual schools or local authorities, but which sample representative groups within the school population. Year on year, using properly validated item banks, they could tell us whether and where the performance in schools is rising or falling. However, I am not sure that Ofqual is necessarily the right agency to take this on. In default of any other agency I support the concept of Ofqual as the place where it should happen.