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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, might one of the benefits of such an international benchmark be to help us when policy perhaps inadvertently strays away from the best interests of our children? A recent Cambridge review of primary education, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, alluded, praised the Government for their investment in education in primary schools and for many of the innovations that they have introduced, but also commented critically—I am paraphrasing what it said—that the top-down culture of edicts in children’s education and the attempt to overly control what children learn at a particular time have been to the detriment of our children’s education. If we had a benchmark, we could see over a number of years, when we have put a lot of investment into children’s education, how they are performing against similar states with similar sorts of investment.