Education and Skills Bill

Presumably, when the Government draw up regulations under Clause 2, they will have to accommodate examination systems worldwide, because pupils will be arriving in this country having gained all sorts of qualifications. They may have been abroad with their parents and been educated in the American system, they may have been to the Lycée or the German school here and followed those courses of education. To deal with those oddities, there will have to be an equivalence for all sorts of examinations that do not fall naturally within the British examination system. I therefore very much hope that, whatever decisions the QCA may reach on the suitability of individual examinations, such as the IGCSE and the Cambridge Pre-U, for the state system, the Government will not seek to perpetuate the rather unfortunate collection of ruffled feathers in the Bill, which, to my mind, has a rather different purpose and where the QCA ought to be considering their equivalence because they are examinations that are widely taken, rather than in the light of any particular UK requirement. I hope that, over time, the noble Lord will manage to settle those ruffled feathers. It seems very odd that the IGCSE should be excluded and I hope that the Cambridge Pre-U is set to come within the system. I understand that discussions have been fruitful, or at least positive in that direction. To have a system where, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, says, we are running different educational systems between private and state merely because the state, out of some amour-propre, refuses to recognise those qualifications, seems very unfortunate. If the IGCSE had just been welcomed into the fold as another way of doing GCSEs, no one would think that there was any difference. It would be just a question of what examination you took. The same applies to the Cambridge Pre-U and A-levels. It is a different board; it is a different way of doing it; it may suit different circumstances. By keeping those examinations outside the fold, the Government are creating an image of difference and an image that state system children are allowed only second-class qualifications. That is unfortunate in itself and especially unfortunate in view of the aspiration, which I share, that one should aim for vocational and other practical examinations being valued more than they are. Creating that sort of über-class of academic examinations and giving them that added status by fighting shy of them goes very much against the Government’s best interests.