Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Kazakhstan did better than us and I thought that was worrying. If the Minister is relaxed about that, it reflects curiously on him because he is normally a tiger on standards so I would have thought that he would be worried. In addition, as he knows, many high-performing European countries, including Flemish Belgium and Finland, were not in the study, and as he also knows a welter of other studies, including PISA—the programme for international student assessment—tell a very different story about what is happening. It is important to ensure that we have a degree of independent corroboration, which is why I support the introduction of Ofqual. It is natural that the Minister should choose statistics that flatter his Government's record; his predecessor the Minister for School Standards—now the Foreign Secretary—always quoted from PISA when it appeared to flatter the Government, but when PISA tells a different story, it is no longer flavour of the month or year in the Department. That is entirely understandable and I can appreciate why Ministers do it, but it is why we need Ofqual.