Education Bill

My Lords, my noble friend has made strong arguments for making comprehensive, transparent information on exam results and school performance available to all and we are committed to increasing the amount of information available so that people can build their own measures and reach their own views about progress in the education system. We have already published more information than ever before. The 2010 tables enabled users to download the school-level data underlying the table so that they could carry out their own analyses. In January 2011, school spending data were published alongside performance information. In March 2011, we published school-level information on attainment in individual GCSE subjects. As has been stated, in relation to exam marks, the candidates do have the right to request their marks. In practice, awarding bodies do provide marks—and, where requested, exam scripts—to schools and candidates. That means, for instance, universities can ask applicants to provide individual marks in order to differentiate performance within a grade. In relation to publication of marks in data sets, we want to make as much information as possible available about exam results, and we are happy to commit to considering the practicality of obtaining and publishing marks as part of the national school-level data we are releasing. I understand my noble friend will be speaking to officials about this at a meeting on 25 July. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has said, there will be practical issues that we need to consider. Collecting individual marks rather than just grades would mean a significant increase in the quantity of data that the department would need to collect and process, which we would need to ensure we could manage without undue cost. That said, although it is the Government’s intention to collect and publish as much information on qualifications as we can, in relation to having both marks and grades it is the case that the same mark on a harder paper would represent better performance and it would not always be fair to candidates simply to add up the raw marks to give the overall result. A uniform mark scale puts all those raw marks on the same scale, which is then converted into the grade boundaries. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, mentioned confidence in exam awarding bodies. Ofqual was established by the previous Government to improve and strengthen confidence in the standards of exam awarding bodies. Ensuring that that confidence is restored is what Ofqual has at its heart. It may of course be that our memories of the olden days when everything was so much better have somehow managed to make us feel that it was better; I seem to remember from my days of A-levels that there were still quite a lot of queries to the boards, but we were much more intimidated in making those queries. I hope that, with the assurance that we will give serious consideration to the practicality of publishing marks as part of the school-level data that we are making available to all, my noble friend will feel able to withdraw his amendment.