Clause 9
Education and Skills Bill
1:30 pm
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
Will the Minister explain to the Committee the purpose of the clause and why it is that we need the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to assign a number of guided hours to every qualification? Is it to fulfil the functions in clause 8 so that we know whether a particular qualification requires 280 hours of guided learning? Will it, therefore, apply to all existing QCA accredited qualifications, or will it apply just to new qualifications? The clause does not make that clear. It states:
“Any accreditation of a qualification under paragraph (g) of subsection (2) must assign to the qualification a number of notional hours”.
It is not clear to me whether that phrase requires the QCA to go through all several hundred qualifications, in which case could the Minister say how many qualifications are to be assigned those hours and what the cost to the QCA would be? If the exercise is being conducted solely because of clause 8, it is a very large commitment for the QCA to undertake simply to fulfil one part of a Bill. If it is just new qualifications that are to be assigned hours as part of the accreditation process, that begs the question of how clause 8 will be fulfilled. How can people use existing qualifications that do not have notional hours assigned to them? An explanation from the Minister will be very helpful.