Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Yes, 256. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his usual pithiness and focus. I want to focus on three broad areas that we are particularly concerned about. The first is the proposals for Ofqual. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) led with them in his scrutiny of the Bill and, in my view, they are and should be regarded as the most important aspect of the Bill. Secondly, I shall deal with the provisions that introduce central control of education by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the issue of bureaucracy, which is already a matter of concern to many who work in schools, including school leaders. Relevant here are the details of the new schools complaints procedures, the practicalities of the right to request time off for training, the powers of search—the hon. Member for Surrey Heath touched on them—and other requirements connected with physical constraint. Those are all important issues, which prompt serious concerns about the practicality of some of the proposals. I shall finish on a third concern about the Government's mechanisms for delivering improvement, the powers of intervention that the Government are assuming for themselves and the way in which the Young People's Learning Agency will interrelate with the academies programme and the oversight of education. The Bill's potentially most important proposals relate to Ofqual and the attempt to restore some confidence in standards of education. We are now coming to the end of a long period in which this Government have been in office and a large number of educational proposals have been made: 17 Bills, 60 to 70 Green Papers, and more than 1,700 regulations. It is clear from our debates over the last couple of hours that there is no agreement about what has been achieved in the sense of improved outcomes over all that time and through all the additional money invested. The Government's own statistics suggest that many of the most important measures of performance—GCSE results and key stage tests—have improved significantly since 1997. Indeed, in parts of the country, especially inner London, the improvement in results in some communities since 1997 is almost literally unbelievable. If that educational improvement is real, the Government, the teaching profession and local authorities in those areas deserve a great deal of praise, but there is an alternative picture—that painted by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, in which there is great uncertainty about just how much of that apparent improvement in results is real and how much is a consequence of inflation of standards and distortion in relation to teaching to the test. Those concerns about the most basic elements of understanding of what has been achieved in education are echoed widely, not only by particular political parties but across political parties. We saw them in the excellent report on testing and assessment produced by the Select Committee in May 2008. If we, as a House and as a country, cannot even reach clear agreement on where we are in education and what is improving and what is not, all the other debates that we are having about education policy are difficult to hold in a sensible context. Paragraph 170 of the Select Committee report highlights the paradox that"““whilst test scores are improving at home, international rankings are either static or falling.””" That provides an ambiguous conclusion about what is happening. The Select Committee, in criticising the Government in clear and blunt terms, goes on to say that"““it seems clear to us from the evidence that we have received that the Government has not engaged with the complexity of the technical arguments about grade inflation and standards over time. We recommend that the Government addresses these issues head-on, starting with a mandate to the QCA or the proposed new regulator to undertake a full review of assessment standards.””" We welcome, of course, the modest attempt that the Government are making to put the assessment of educational standards on a more independent footing, but the question is whether the proposals in the Bill anything like match what will be necessary to restore confidence in standards. Our suggestion is that they do not. A number of hon. Members have already mentioned the start that the new shadow Ofqual has made. It has not been entirely inspiring, with that organisation having persuaded one examination board to lower its standards and having already admitted in the board minutes confusion and uncertainty about how to maintain standards in an environment where the qualifications that underlie those standards are changing over time. As has been mentioned, some major examination boards have put on the record their concerns about whether the proposals really meet a standard of independence that will give us confidence in the new Ofqual. Cambridge Assessment says in its representation to the Committee:"““We have serious concerns about the proposals as set out in the legislation—specifically in relation to the independence and accountability of the regulator, the qualification development process and ability to deliver qualifications in a timely manner.””" AQA has also made clear its concerns about the proposals:"““Ofqual needs to be given an explicit statutory power within Clause 144 to enable it, if necessary, to direct a recognised awarding body to set the standards in a specified qualification, on a specified occasion, at a specified level.””"