Education and Skills Bill

It is an odd grouping of amendments which brings together the question asked by my noble friend Lord Lucas about how many hours constitute part-time or full-time and the issue of accreditation. It is worrying that accreditation is being used as a blanket and that all education and training has to be accredited to have any valency in the context of the Bill. I chair the quality and standards committee for the City and Guilds of London Institute. We were recently shown statistics for failure rates in different qualifications. The figure for the plumbing qualifications was particularly interesting. There is quite a high failure rate. We asked for more detail on why there was such a high failure rate and were shown a spread of the different items of the course and what was failed. While the plumbers were doing wonderfully on their practical plumbing and could fix your boiler, put in a central system or fix your leaking tap, they could not write essays. Because the course is accredited and leads to a qualification, the excellent academic standards that come into play as soon as one starts accrediting require that they have to be able to write. I think that most noble Lords in this Committee would agree that, when you call for a plumber when your heating is not working, you do not mind whether he can write an essay about your plumbing; you would quite like him just to fix your boiler. A distinction should be made between practical, on-the-job training and accredited courses, which inevitably involve a test and an exam where educational standards come into play and people have to answer questions, write essays and tick boxes. I hope that the Government will be a little flexible—we are asking for another area of flexibility—in allowing for good on-the-job training that does not include an accredited qualification with all that that brings in its train alongside their quite proper wish for more accredited qualifications.