Sarah
McCarthy-Fry: I do not want to repeat the debate on
amendment 451, but the idea is for Ofqual to manage revisions in an
orderly way, and that is how the
arrangements are intended to work. In reply to the hon.
Gentleman’s concerns, one safeguard is that Ofqual will have a
general duty to have regard to the needs of learners, and the other is
its general public law duty to act reasonably. Given the way that we
have set up Ofqual, how it manages that will be up to it, and it is
accountable to
Parliament.
Mr.
Laws: I had hoped to intervene on the Minister, but her
speech was rather shorter than I expected. She did not reassure me; I
am unclear under what circumstances Ofqual would decide not to make the
saving or transitional provision in relation to accreditation. We need
to know under what circumstances Ofqual would decide not to grant the
provision, given the concerns clearly expressed by Cambridge Assessment
and some of the other awarding
bodies. 1.30
pm
Sarah
McCarthy-Fry: I want to reassure the hon. Gentleman that
the only reason that I can think of that Ofqual would not make such a
saving or transitional provision is if it was in the interests of the
learners not to do so, because that is its
duty.
Mr.
Laws: I am still not convinced that the Government have
got this right. I think that this ought to be a duty. To make such
important changes that could be destabilising to learners on such
courses as well as to the accrediting bodies is unfair, and for that
reason I want to divide the
Committee. Question
put, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the
Bill. The
Committee divided: Ayes 10, Noes
2.
Division
No.
30] Question
accordingly agreed to.
Clause
137, as amended, ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
The
Minister for Schools and Learners (Jim Knight): On a point
of order, Mrs. Humble. Is it in order for a member of the
Committee to be talking on the telephone while
voting?
The
Chairman: The Minister has anticipated a point that I was
going to make from the Chair. I remind all Members, but especially the
hon. Member for Leominster, that they should not use mobile phones in
the Committee and certainly not during a Division. [ Hon.
Members: “He is not here.”] I am sure that
the message will get to him.
Clause
138Power
of secretary of state to determine minimum
requirements
Mr.
Laws: I beg to move amendment 532, in clause 138,
page 78, line 12, after ‘may’,
insert ‘in exceptional
circumstances’.
The
Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the
following:
Amendment
533, in
clause 138, page 78, line 22, leave
out from ‘must’ to end of line 23 and insert
‘agree with Ofqual the circumstances in which he can
use the power conferred by subsection (1), and publish the terms of
this
agreement.’. Government
amendments 453 and
454. Amendment
233, in
clause 138, page 78, line 23, at
end insert— ‘(4A) Ofqual
shall include it its annual report a copy of the publication in
subsection (4) and how it responded to the
determination.’. Government
amendments 455 and
456 Amendment
141, in
clause 138, page 78, line 27, at
end add— ‘(5A) Ofqual must
set a minimum requirement in respect of an academic qualification
relating to the knowledge a person must demonstrate in order to obtain
the qualification or qualifications in
question.’. Government
amendment
458. Amendment
5, in
clause 138, page 78, line 31, at
end insert— ‘(7) The
Secretary of State must not make a determination under subsection (1)
relating to the grading or assessment of
qualifications.’.
Mr.
Laws: It is good to have such active participation from
Ministers in the debate and to see so many Labour Members present now.
Clearly, they are at their best after the lunch break. We now move on
to an extremely important clause. If you will allow me, Mrs.
Humble, I will start with a quiz for those Committee members who are
here. I should like them to tell me—they should feel free to
intervene if they wish—the significance of the following
volumes. I would particularly expect the Minister for Schools and
Learners to know the answer. The volumes are Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five adventures, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine detective
stories, “The Wind in the Willows”, “Swallows and
Amazons” by Arthur Ransome and, finally, a book called
“Keeping Pet Chickens”.
Mr.
Walker: Could it be that those books have been banned from
the reading list? Am I
warm?
Mr.
Laws: Not only have those books not been banned from the
reading list, but they are the favourite books of the Secretary of
State for Children, Schools and Families; he picked them out in a
recent selection. He has apparently been reading one of those titles to
children in schools, so I hope that it is not banned.
I refer to
those books because, under clause 138, they could find their way into
every English examination in the land. They could be a compulsory part
of the GCSE English examinations that every child in the country must
sit. Under the clause, the Secretary of State is taking extraordinary
powers—new powers, as has been confirmed in a letter to my hon.
Friend the
Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole—that will allow the
Government to dictate to examination boards what precise books they
will examine youngsters on and what parts of history must be included
in history examinations. The clause
has drawn a lot of attention from the educational media and the wider
media. The books that I mentioned at the beginning of my comments were
drawn to my attention by a leader article in no less than The
Times, which published an editorial on the subject on 20 March. The
feature was titled “Set texts”, with the subtitle:
“It is not the Government’s job to hand out reading
lists”. It was not only The Times that covered the
matter. As well as the The Daily Telegraph, there was a leader
article in no less a paper than the Daily Express under the
headline “Brainwashing won’t work”, which
concluded that only the slowest of learners will fail to appreciate
that the Secretary of State’s control freakery and belief in
centralised planning are the mark of a crackpot and not a statesman.
Those are not my words but those of the Daily Express.
The
significance of the clause is set out not only in the exchanges that we
had in the evidence sessions a couple of weeks ago, but in the
explanatory notes. It is worth reminding ourselves what those
explanatory notes say about the clause. I assume, Mrs.
Humble, that because my general criticisms of the clause are embedded
in the amendments, you will not allow a separate stand part debate on
the clause. The explanatory notes
say: “This
clause allows the Secretary of State to determine the minimum
requirements in respect of skills, knowledge, or understanding that
someone must be able to demonstrate to gain a particular qualification
or type of
qualification.” It
goes on, very helpfully, to give an
example: “For
example, it could be used to ensure that the content of GCSEs properly
reflects the... Key State 4 Programmes of Study, such as
specifying which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone
to gain a GCSE in
English.” It
goes on to
say: “The
Government intends that this power would be used only in exceptional
circumstances.” However,
none of the guarantees in relation to that, or to intervention on
grading or assessment, are embedded in the
Bill.
Mr.
Stuart: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that more and
more legislation is couched in the terms that powers given to various
Secretaries of State will be used “only in exceptional
circumstances”. Those who find themselves on the receiving end
of the use of such powers—whether those who are spied on by
local authorities, or Members of Parliament in their
offices—know only too well that exceptional powers tend to be
used by those who are granted
them.
Mr.
Laws: The hon. Gentleman is right. When those exceptional
circumstances are not even contained in the Bill, we have to ask
whether such assurances are really worth anything. Such concerns have
clearly not only been expressed in the media and Parliament; they are
also concerns that Ofqual has shared at some point in time. A section
of the notes that Kathleen Tattersall, the chair of Ofqual, sent to
members of the Committee before our evidence session touched on the
clause. It said that her officials have had detailed discussions with
DCSF—one always knows when one hears the phrase “detailed
discussion” that a concern lies at the root of
the issue—about the Secretary of State’s power to
determine minimum requirements in relation to certain qualifications,
as set out in clause 138, and that Ofqual must be sure therefore that
the Secretary of State’s powers do not undermine its ability to
act independently, either in reality or in the perception of the public
and other
stakeholders. Ofqual
has been concerned about the issue, and it has discussed it not only
with members of the Committee, but with the Secretary of State himself.
There was an exchange of letters between Kathleen Tattersall and the
Secretary of State on 10 February. When such concerns require a public
exchange of correspondence, there clearly are serious concerns. Our
concern is that they have not yet been
resolved. We
also had some exchanges on the issue in our evidence session on 10
March. The Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families,
the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North was cross-questioned on the
matter. She cited Shakespeare as an example of the type of direction
that the Secretary of State might give on what should be contained in
an English examination. Although she said that in relation to history,
I assume that she meant that Shakespeare was important in our history,
but that he should be embedded in the English examination.
I wonder
whether the Minister would care to let us know in her comments later
whether she can think of any other examples in the English and, perhaps
as interestingly, in the history examinations where the Government
think that particular authors or events in history are so important
that they should be an obligation for qualifications that cover those
subjects.
We also had
some uncertainty from Ministers over the significance of the powers in
the clause. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole
asked the Minister whether the powers in the Bill were new. With great
frankness, she
admitted: “We
do not know and we are going to find
out.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships,
Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 10 March 2009;
c. 171,
Q405.] It did
not take long before she was true to her word, and she did find out.
She wrote a letter to my hon. Friend, dated 14 March 2009, confirming
that there is currently no explicit statutory power to determine such
matters and that such powers may exist in some way through the back
door. The letter cheekily suggests in paragraph 4 that the
effect of clause 138 is to limit, in practice, the powers of
intervention that Ministers have. How it can do that while giving the
Secretary of State an extensive power that he does not possess at the
moment is an interesting question, to which we shall no doubt hear a
response from the Minister in a
minute. I
suppose that I could save until later my response to what I expect the
Minister to say, but it may be better to add to my comments at this
stage by anticipating some of the arguments that she is likely to
deploy. She will undoubtedly talk about getting the balance right
between public policy and interfering with examinations and give us
many assurances about the circumstances in which the powers will be
used. We need to remind her that the Government already have a great
deal of power to influence what is taught in
schools.
The national
curriculum is an inordinately long document with a great deal of
specificity, particularly by comparison with the expectations in the
past 100 years about the degree to which Governments would try to
meddle in what is taught in our schools. There will also be the
Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, which we will debate
under part 8, the funding regime and the Joint Advisory Committee for
Qualifications Approval, which we will also talk about later and which
advises the Secretary of State and allows him to withhold the funding
of particular
qualifications. 1.45
pm Our
view, therefore, is that the power would be needed only if the
Secretary of State was determined to promote his own pet subjects in
the history curriculum or his own pet reading list in the English
curriculum, for example. We question whether it is right to give
politicians the power to prescribe in such detail what should be taught
in our schools and what should be part of the qualifications that every
young person may need to
have. There
is a risk that we will give excessive powers to “Here today,
gone tomorrow” politicians to put all sorts of nonsense on
reading lists and decide that bits of history are in fashion and then
out of fashion. There is also a risk that Secretaries of State and
other Education Ministers will feel obliged to react to the latest
newspaper headlines, or, perhaps more likely, to garner newspaper
headlines by introducing new obligations through the examinations
system, many of which might be counter-productive in terms of allowing
schools and colleges to do their job and respond to the needs of their
pupils. It also opens up the potential for much lobbying from all sorts
of groups familiar to many hon. Members to have their own pet subjects
put into the national curriculum or the qualifications that many or all
youngsters have to have. The split between subject and design criteria
is not nearly as simple as many Ministers and the Secretary of State
may think. For example, by promoting particular subject criteria, we
directly affect the design criteria and vice versa.
We therefore
may want to divide the Committee on whether the clause should be in the
Bill at all. We have tabled a number of amendments—532, 533 and
5—which I am going to speak to now. Amendment 532 came from our
discussions with Cambridge Assessment, one of the accrediting bodies.
It does not change the Government’s intentions but clarifies the
restrictions on the role of the Secretary of State by including in the
Bill the undertaking about the power being used “only in
exceptional circumstances” that is in the explanatory
notes. Amendment
533 does not change what the Government appear to want to have in the
Bill. It clarifies the restrictions on the role of the Secretary of
State in relation to having
to “agree
with Ofqual the circumstances in which he can use the power conferred
by subsection
(1)”. Finally,
amendment 5 does not seek to clarify what the Government claim are
their intentions in the Bill through the explanatory notes. It
clarifies the restrictions on the role of the Secretary of State by
making it clear
that “The
Secretary of State must not make a determination under subsection (1)
relating to the grading or assessment of
qualifications.”
An awful lot
has been put in the Bill that is of low importance and that probably
should not be there. I gave an example the other day of the obligations
that were being placed on Ofqual to review the structure of its
committees every few years—a degree of prescription that seems
completely unnecessary. If such obligations and details are in the
Bill, the safeguards contained in the explanatory notes must at least
be included to make clear the safeguards that the Government recognise.
That would deal with some of our concerns, although whether the powers
given in clause 138 have any place in the Bill or in a country where we
would not expect elected politicians to dictate to such an extent to
our schools and pupils is quite another
matter.
| 
