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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

There seem to be two important aspects of the Bill which are addressed by the amendments and new clauses under discussion. The first gives me considerable cause for wonderment. I do not understand why it should be so unacceptable to the Government to want to see, in the context of both history and our competitors, how good our qualification and examination system is. I should have thought that anybody running a business, a charity or any organisation would want to know whether the process by which they measured their success was, first, constant in the sense that it was comparable with previous measurements, and secondly, whether it was comparable with the measurements used by other people. It seems very peculiar to refuse to do either thing, and I do not understand why the Government find it so difficult, unless they are too afraid that they might have to say sorry. Is it another example of the Government fearing that an objective measurement might mean that they would have to admit that all their statements about standards having not fallen turned out to be untrue? The Minister represents a normal, run-of-the-mill constituency, and I am sure that if she talked to people there she would find that a large number think that standards have fallen. There is no way of reassuring them, except through independent assessment. The Government have recognised that, so they have set up an organisation that, they claim, will be independent. However, they have then proceeded to give to that organisation a series of remits that limit to an unacceptable degree its ability to be independent. Both the Minister's responses to previous, Committee debates, which I have had the pleasure of reading, and her letters show that she has no intention whatever of enabling the body to set up an independent measurement of the success or failure of a particular means of testing and assessment. If we live in a society in which more and more employers say, "I take no notice of GCSE results and A-level results," it is a society that properly should address that worry. As an employer, I find it difficult to see any continuity of standards in the conduct of those examinations, so I beg the Minister to take seriously the amendments. They are intended neither to criticise the Government, nor to upset the conveniences of her Department; they are designed to ensure that people have confidence in the standards attained. She has admitted that people do not have such confidence, and one does not solve that problem unless one is prepared to enable people independently to measure our present system against what happens in the rest of Europe, with whom, after all, we compete, and to see how far it has changed over the past 20 years. I should be perfectly happy to make it a 20-year period, so that it covered the life of another Government, too, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) would agree. It is not a matter of getting at this Government. The hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), who speaks for the Liberals, raised an even more worrying point. If it is true that there is widespread concern about the standards of examination and the standards that young people are now expected to reach, there is even more widespread concern about Government interference in how the education system works. One cannot ignore that, and anybody with a constituency anywhere in the country knows perfectly well that people are worried. If the Department and the Minister want to do something about that concern, they must take seriously the amendments that the Liberal Democrats have put forward.