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Education and Skills Bill

My difficulties with Clause 142 stem not so much from what it does—not that I am clear what that is—but from the fact that it appears to tinker around the edges of the QCA when radical action is required. Extraordinarily at the moment, the QCA seems to have budded Ofqual, but Ofqual has no separate legal existence and nothing is being done in the Bill to give it one. Even if you try to find a button on the Ofqual website that says ““About us””, which is pretty common thing, it does not have one because there is no ““us”” to be about. The QCA’s problems are, however, much deeper than that. It has become a Stalinist bureaucracy and shares with such bureaucracies all the faults that we associate with that period in Russian history. Although the right words might be stencilled over its entrance, it has become malevolent and something that destroys innovation and promotes mediocrity. The problems over the key stage 2 contract are merely the latest example. It has not been successful to date in delivering diplomas. They come through much more slowly that you would expect, they are elephantine and they will have no appeal to academic schools. The QCA’s management of GCSEs and A-levels has been deeply disappointing. The educational content of GCSEs has become widely derided. A-levels are having to be reformed, and not before time. It, in a way, is inevitable that an organisation which seeks to draw all power to itself and to control the way in which the curriculum develops, according to a very narrow set of beliefs and criteria which have become embedded within it, should create this kind of difficulty. The very concept of having a centralised QCA in this way is destructive of the schools system, because each time there is an innovation it has to be a catharsis for the whole system. There is no problem for a school swapping from A-levels to the IB, or bringing in the IB, because that decision is made by the school, after consideration of its parents, at a time to suit the school. That transition can take place in a totally natural way. But the transitions masterminded by the QCA have been periods of catharsis and disruption, which is inherent in the system. Innovation happens in the educational system, but it happens where the private sector has an influence, principally in A-levels and the academic curriculum generally. The IB has made inroads in this country. We have the new Cambridge Pre-U and the AQA Baccalaureate. At the fringes, we have AS-levels pioneered by Rugby and practical GCSEs pioneered by Bedale. Lots of things are happening, but they all are evolving outside the QCA because of inherent demands in the private sector, which are arising because of the failure of the QCA to provide a viable examination system for the ambitions that the private sector has for its pupils. The enormous hole is in vocational examinations. There has been no innovation in vocational examinations in schools, except for this elephantine diploma, which requires that seven of your eight slots for GCSEs are devoted to one examination. Where is, for instance, the GCSE in architecture, which would be a wonderful cross-disciplinary thing? It would engage people in practical applications, while teaching them the scientific underpinnings of architecture, and the artistic and historical sides of it. So much could be built into an examination like that, but there is no innovation in it. Those who might wish to pursue this fusion between vocational and academic are principally in the state sector and prevented from doing so because there is no freedom to develop those things within the state sector. There have been attempts to develop GCSEs in construction. They have gone immensely slowly and have not produced anything really attractive, again because everything gets dictated from the centre. An innovation around when I started to take an interest in education was business studies in Spanish. Where has that gone? It has been crushed. There are so many inventive teachers in the state sector. Exam boards have the ability to introduce a history of innovating, but they have been prevented from doing it by the structure of the QCA. We need a much lighter structure. Page 44 of the Bill demonstrates that in the level of English and mathematics it is presumed should be universal. If that was the mandated, universal provision in the curriculum, instead of the current overburdened mathematics curriculum, and the rest of it was left to the examination boards to innovate with and to find bits of mathematics that would engage pupils—to find new ways of drawing them into the subject—rather than having to follow this tight and overburdened prescription that they have at the moment, we might get real innovation and success in mathematics education. To my mind the QCA is like a large, overgrown shrub taking up a corner of the garden. It is full of dead branches, decaying leaves and weak shoots. What needs to be done is to cut it to the base, to put on a good deal of blood and bone—whose blood and bones I leave it to the Minister to imagine—and then wait for the flowers to come next year. It is time we did something radical about the QCA.