My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. I remind the Committee that I am associated with City & Guilds, which obviously has an interest in what happens under this part of the Bill. I will leave remarks on intellectual property, as far as I can, to the next group, which seems to focus on that subject.
As part of the Sainsbury review, we have a proposal that each of the 15 routes that it suggests should have a single awarding body allocated to it and that those awarding bodies should be subject to review every seven years. The Department for Education took a long time thinking about this structure in regard to GCSEs and decided against. It decided to keep the current three and a half, as it were, awarding bodies available for every subject and I think it did that for a very good reason. A single awarding body is a single point of failure. If it goes wrong, we are stuck.
5 pm
A seven-year franchise within education is a very short timescale. You really do not get time to invest in something, develop it and then make any money out
of it. On a seven-year franchise, the awarding bodies cease to become long-term repositories of how to do things well and they lose any interest in the long term. In addition, we do not have a structure proposed for IFATE which offers the capacity to take on that long-term role. The institute employs 80 people. Apparently, 33 of them are involved in approving apprenticeships, presumably a similar number are in quality control, there are some in management and there are none left over to perform the role that the Government are proposing to destroy by having a single awarding body.
If you have multiple awarding bodies, with two or three bodies within a route, each thinks that it is probably there for the long term. Even if their fortunes fluctuate, they expect to be there. It is worth their while to build for the long term and to compete with the other awarding bodies in that route for the favour of employers and training providers. If you go for a single awarding body, particularly in an area such as this where the individual routes are very different from each other, why is an awarding body going to maintain an ability to create qualifications in, say, construction, if they are not the awarding body for that route? Come seven years’ time when you have the retendering, who else is going to be there except the existing awarding body? How would an awarding body begin to think that it could recreate what it had lost? Even if it did, why should it afford that level of investment when it has only a chance of becoming the next sole awarding body and may well—probably will—fail? You get to a system where awarding bodies that are in possession have no interest in improving the qualifications that they are in charge of and become impossible to remove from their posts. That seems to be not an ideal way of doing things.
We had a lot of debate, as noble Lords doubtless remember, about going to single awarding bodies for each GCSE qualification. The DfE must have somewhere in it an institutional memory of why it came down in favour of the system of multiple awarding bodies, but here we seem to have moved straight from a report to a Bill without going through a White Paper or a real digestion of whether this is actually the right way of dealing with awarding bodies.
We also have a proposal that all existing qualifications, names and reputations are to be swept away, so that we will just have IFATE qualifications. They will be that, and they will remain that whatever the awarding body is for any individual route. Have we really thought through whether we want to lose all that reputation and whether, in areas where employers really think they have some good qualifications, we want to junk them? Sometimes these qualifications have international reputations, particularly in areas such as technology. Are we going to say that this is a qualification we originated, the awarding body that supports it is here, but we do not recognise it in this country? Will we say that we have a history of employers recognising these qualifications and there is a hierarchy of people who have come through this qualification and are now looking for people to follow them, but we have abolished it?
In some areas, particularly technology, there is a system of qualifications which is independent of this country. In technology, CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft
and various other companies and bodies are creating qualifications acknowledged around the world and what employers want. Will we really say that we will not recognise them in this country but recognise only the IFATE equivalent? Is that what employers are asking for? I talk a lot to technology employers, and I am unaware of any of them who would like to go down that route.
I do not place any particular value on the wording of the amendments—I am not sure I have that right; I am happy just to address the principle—but I encourage the Government not to do something in the Bill which makes it impossible to go down the same route as we decided to go down for GCSEs. Do not make it impossible to stick with the existing qualifications if that is what an industry wants. Let us give ourselves the time that it will take to put IFATE and the other structures together to consider whether we took the right decision on GCSEs or whether the Sainsbury proposals are better. I have great worries that, in our enthusiasm to create something better, we are destroying all that is good. I beg to move.