My Lords, I want to follow the important point made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker. At the beginning of the first day of Committee, I said I hoped at the end of this to have a clearer understanding of the organisational chart and who was responsible for what. The longer the discussion has gone on, the more I am clear that this will be, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, a fairly draconian change, which may be for the better.
However, I offer a word of caution. Some of us have lived through the birth, life and death of the Council for National Academic Awards or CNAA, some of us through the B Ed, and some of us through the area training organisations. At one stage, one of
my roles at the former Institute of Education was to look after 48 teacher training colleges, which were training 26,000 teachers. It had a central and, it has to be said, very bureaucratic system of recognition for teachers at the university to ensure that they were all of the right standard and that all the institutions were offering the right quality. I emphasise that we had a complex and inadequate system. In trying to do something which is much needed and replace one system with a better system, we should not make some of the mistakes that we have all made—all Governments have made them; I am not trying to make a party political point—by creating a structure which turns out to be Frankenstein.