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Education and Skills Bill

To respond to the noble Baroness’s point, which I absolutely understand and accept, we on these Benches are arguing about the nature of the accreditation. At the moment it is so rigid it has to be through Ofqual—the QCA as was. Yet multinational companies like Microsoft, BP and British Aerospace offer a real gradient of qualifications which are not accredited by anybody but themselves. If a young person who has been through such a programme—be it McDonalds’ well-graded system, Microsoft’s or whoever—and are looking for a job elsewhere, employers are going to be just as happy, if not more so, with that than with an ““educational”” qualification that has been through the tortuous processes of accreditation by Ofqual. We are asking for something that bursts the rigid boundaries of Ofqual. It is a pity to vilify the new organisation, the QCA, and its tortuous processes of accreditation when there are other perfectly respectable forms of accreditation, including from those employers, which are not within its boundaries.