Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

The hon. Gentleman has made a very important point. I was not aware of that, but it underlines the need for appropriate regulation of the private training sector. We all remember the fiasco of individual learning accounts some years ago, when it was easy for companies to come in and abuse the system. I am a little concerned about the possibility that the impact of the economic slowdown and the increase in the number of new training opportunities for those who have lost their jobs will once again give rise to a less than satisfactory private training sector. I want to make a couple of points about issues that are not in the Bill, but perhaps ought to be. The first is the issue of school admissions. The last two education Bills have contained useful and important provisions that have moved the policy forward and helped to strengthen the Government's approach to fair admissions, but perhaps more needs to be done. My clear recollection is that following the recent consultation on the new admissions code, the Government responded that they accepted that the definition of fair banding needed to be revisited so that it was based not on the total number of children who applied to a school, but on the total number and distribution of children within a given area. That is an important distinction. Improving the definition of fair banding would, without question, move us even further along the route of a fair admissions policy. The Government also said that they would seek to make the change at the next legislative opportunity. As far as I can see, this is the next legislative opportunity, and I therefore give notice that I may wish to table an amendment to that effect in Committee. The Bill does not deal with primary schools as such. One of the big stories in the last few days has been the impact of the Cambridge primary review, and we all await with interest the outcome of the Rose review of primary education. It seems to me that at some point the Government will have to legislate for changes in our primary curriculum, and perhaps our system of assessment. In his opening speech the Secretary of State did not state, but indicated, that this would not be the final education Bill in the current Parliament. It would be very helpful if the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills would give an absolute assurance in his winding-up speech that there will be another Bill, preferably featuring a big bang and not just a whimper. I found the criticisms of the Bill made by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)—the shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families—rather curious. He did not say directly that he was against the Bill: there was nothing specific in it that he opposed. He spent half his time talking about standards. Of course standards are extremely important, but I suspect that the level of concern about them and the vociferousness with which Members express that concern are related to a wider concern with destabilising the Government, and that in reality the issue of standards is more complex. The shadow Secretary of State quoted a number of academics, but did not quote any of our examining boards, although they are clearly best equipped to make judgments about standards over time. As I have said, however, the issue is complex. We are not comparing like with like. The shadow Secretary of State did not take on board the impact of new content and new structures on examinations—the impact of modular structures, for instance—and the fact that some examinations are now designed to cover a far wider age range. An example of that is the transition from the old O-level to the GCSE. All those factors are relevant to any debate about standards. I agree that the issue of standards is crucial, and I think it important for either Ofqual or a contractor to it to have a statutory responsibility to monitor that over time. However, we must draw a distinction between genuine concern and a rigorous analysis over time, and the use of the issue as a bit of cheap populism with which to bash the Government of the day. If Opposition parties use that opportunity time and time again, August after August, all that they will do is undermine the achievements of hundreds of thousands of young people who have worked their socks off throughout their school careers and are achieving better results than any previous generation. The shadow Secretary of State argued that, in almost all aspects covered by the Bill and in education policy more generally, we should deregulate, leaving things more and more to the market. He gave the example of Sweden, but I am not convinced that buying a 99p ticket to fly with Ryanair to an airport 40 miles out of Stockholm and looking at a couple of schools is necessarily the best way in which to form an education policy in this country. I also found it curious that the hon. Gentleman cited Finland as one of the highest achieving countries, but did not pursue the logic of his argument by putting the case for the structures and approach to the curriculum that it has adopted. Given the events of the last 12 months or more, including the total collapse of the international banking system and the financial services sector as a result of a completely deregulated approach, it strikes me that this is not the best time to argue for more deregulation. There is not a direct analogy between what happens in financial services and what happens in education, skills training, health or any other area of public policy, but the principle remains: we must get away from our obsession with total deregulation, or even light-touch regulation, and concentrate on appropriate regulation. In my view, the way forward for our education policy is appropriate regulation and the right balance between coherence, strategic planning and managerial autonomy for individual institutions. I believe that the Bill, with its diverse package of measures, moves us one important step further down that road.