Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)

I do not have very much to add, everybody will be glad to hear, except to highlight the fact that assessment is not the same as getting to the end of the standards. We have a complex set of awarding bodies and some assessment standards which require an external qualification and some which do not. It would also be good to be confident that the department has worked through all the ramifications of this. I am conscious that I do not think I have and am going to go back and look through some of the original legislation, but I do not think the considerations are exactly the same as they are for standards. Because we have a rather strange system in this country, with a lot of formal qualifications and a lot of awarding bodies, it is very easy to get the qualifications wrong or suddenly find that you have a huge political fuss on your hands, as I am sure everyone in this Room will recognise from the current BTEC discussions. I just flag that it is not just the same as for standards. The complexity of many endpoint assessments and standards for which there are required external qualifications means that we need to be very careful that we have not inadvertently stored up some real problems for ourselves by just moving everything wholesale and saying, “But where necessary, the Secretary of State can cut through the bramble patch”.