Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. The Secretary of State seemed to get the wrong end of the stick when he responded earlier. He appeared to be under the illusion that the exam boards were complaining that the new body would be too powerful and would hold them to account too effectively, but they have precisely the opposite concern—a concern that may be reinforced by the somewhat ambiguous responsibilities that the Bill gives Ofqual. Clause 125(4), for instance, gives it a duty to ““promote public confidence”” in qualifications. That leads us, in the context of some of what it has said recently—including the views that it expressed about the key stage testing fiasco—to question whether it will be an effective watchdog, or will see its role as that of a cheerleader. The Select Committee has made recommendations which, in my opinion, could make a real difference to whether Ofqual discharges its responsibilities effectively. The Committee's report makes absolutely clear its view that not only should Ofqual be a fully independent organisation, but it should have the power to carry out standardised sample testing for the purpose of monitoring particular cohorts of students so that, over time, we can see what is happening to educational standards without the results being distorted by ““teaching to the test””, or by changes in the ease with which certain qualifications can be gained. The Secretary of State chortled when I raised concerns over how Ofqual would discharge its responsibilities. In particular, he chortled at a sentence to which I referred and which, in fact, came from the Government's response to the Select Committee report. It is worth putting on record precisely what the Government's response was to the proposals on sample testing. They said, in July 2008:"““we do not accept that sample testing is necessary or desirable. In any case, Ofqual's role is not to monitor education standards as a whole; it is to regulate the qualifications and assessments which are one of the means by which those standards are measured.””" That is a very interesting observation. It raises questions—the hon. Member for Surrey Heath nodded when they were mentioned earlier—about the extent to which we can rely on existing qualifications for judgments about educational standards as a whole. I suggest that we need Ofqual to have precisely the powers that the Select Committee envisaged to carry out its own monitoring of educational standards without relying on qualifications which, particularly over recent years, have been persistently changed in a series of ways. No doubt they have often been changed with the best of intentions—to help youngsters to thrive in education, and to provide them with a testing and exam system which may in some cases be more meaningful—but in most cases the changes have had the effect of apparently improving standards; and that, alongside the Government's targeting system for education results, has had a very strong effect in pushing schools and youngsters into qualifications that may often be considered likely to help to deliver those targets. Although the Secretary of State indicated earlier that he would stand back from the whole debate about standards—that he would not make any grand claims, and that he would leave all this to Ofqual—we have also seen, in paragraph 50 of the Government's response to the Select Committee's report, the following very impartial assessment of the standards debate:"““Thanks to… regulatory scrutiny, we have every confidence that standards are being maintained and that tests are a true measure of learners' attainment.””" It seems that the Government, while pretending to be in favour of some sort of impartiality on standards, have already taken a clear position in the standards debate, arguing that much of the evidence cited earlier is apparently not accurate. In scrutinising the Bill, we shall want to spend a fair amount of time examining the Ofqual proposals. We shall want to consider whether the existing rather weak proposals can be turned into something far stronger, and can produce the sort of education standards authority that we have discussed over the last couple of years: an authority that would be more independent of Government, would be able to discharge the types of functions to which many of the exam boards have referred, and would be empowered to make its own judgments about educational standards without relying only on the existing qualifications.