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Education and Skills Bill

I am grateful that the hon. Lady is enjoying the speech. I am seeking to make it clear that we believe the goal of increasing educational participation to be a good one. As I mentioned at the beginning, however, there is a difference between recognising that something is desirable and being concerned about the means that are used along the way to achieve that. With deference to the Labour party, I might call it the ““Iraq test””. We all recognise the desirability of removing Saddam Hussein, but how something like that is done can be crucial. [Interruption.] I fear that the Secretary of State was once again quoting the right hon. Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth), but, I suspect, very much sotto voce—that is Latin too, is it not? If we can get back to English, the pace of economic change and globalisation places an increasing premium not just on a more skilled work force overall but on ensuring that skills are distributed as widely as possible across the work force. As the pace of economic change is being driven by innovation and by the human brain achieving amazing things technologically and scientifically, brain power increasingly dictates destiny. Therefore, we should do everything that we can to harness every individual's intellectual potential. I should add one other rider to the economic arguments in favour of increasing educational participation. There are those who argue that educational achievement is primarily a positional good—a way of demarcating people's position in a hierarchy so as to secure a better reward proportionate to that of those below them. Those who make that argument contend that qualifications are basically a way of separating sheep from goats. I reject that case. I believe that the more people who have acquired meaningful qualifications, the better. There should be no arbitrary cap on the number who might acquire any qualification, and the creation of communities and a society in which learning is highly valued and knowledge widely dispersed is enriching for everyone.