Education and Skills Bill

My name is also attached to the Question whether this clause should stand part of the Bill. I must declare interests both as a member until the time it was disbanded of the advisory body to the regulatory section of the QCA, and as chair of the quality and standards committee of the City and Guilds Institute, the major provider of vocational qualifications. My reason for supporting the Question is to try to clarify exactly what Clause 142 is meant to do and what the future of Ofqual will be. Certainly I welcome in the clause what appears to be a move away from the absurd ratification of each individual qualification, particularly once the new qualifications and curriculum framework is put into place. It would mean the ratification of every single unit within each qualification, which would be an impossible task and impose a huge burden not only on Ofqual but on every single one of the providing bodies. I hope that this is a genuine move towards what I have prayed for over many years, and that is accreditation of the providers, making sure that their own quality control systems are robust—as the chair of one such provider, I am very confident that it is robust—and allowing them to get on and do as they please. I am simply concerned that although we breeze through 12 subsections where the providers are being accredited, not the individual qualifications—which would be an enormous step towards the kind of root and branch change my noble friend is asking for and which I wholeheartedly support—we come to subsection (13) where we talk about a qualification ““accredited by the Authority””. Is the authority still going to accredit individual qualifications? I hope that the Minister is going to tell us that it is not.