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Education and Inspections Bill

The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, reflect her concern that at 14 you choose to go left or right in your education. As I read the Bill, we are talking only about entitlement. A young person choosing the vocational route could nevertheless have the opportunity to take items from the alternative route if the school was willing to offer them. That should be normal. For example, let us suppose that the school—I know one such school; I am its patron—chooses sport and the performing arts as its specialism. It seems very reasonable for pupils from that school to want to do music, dance or drama on the left-hand side, but their future, as they see it, might lie in construction. I do not see why that should be closed off in a specialist school when this is the specialism and they should go the other way as well. I also rather like the idea of being able to take modules within a framework which are pinched from over the fence but which can count. The whole idea of my recommendations in 1997, and to some extent those of Tomlinson, was that one should be able to build up elements into a qualification and that you should not be circumscribed to pick entirely from the left or the right. You should pick predominantly more from one than from the other, but there should be some scope. There is an issue here that merits further consideration.