Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill
6:31 pm
Greg Watson: No, the thing I want to address is the public perception that we are somehow giving away a standard so that we can demonstrate in a way that gets public confidence that we are maintaining standards. I believe that we are maintaining standards and think that we go to extraordinary lengths to understand changes. For example, as the A-level is changing structure we are going to unprecedented lengths to understand the consequences of that change and some of the risk to which we and the people who take our qualifications might be exposed. That is why I want it there.
I will be honest and say that, with regard to vocational qualifications, which OCR is also involved in, I have concerns that varying degrees of rigour are applied to some qualifications by some bodies and think that it would be helpful to have a regulator who gave that more visibility. There are different sorts of risks. We have talked a lot about what might be thought of as higher profile qualifications, such as GCSEs and A-levels. In the area of vocational qualifications, where there are more different qualifications, where there often assessment arrangements that are dependent on a tutor in a college or a trainer in a training company making judgments about their own students, there are a range of additional challenges to making sure that those qualifications hold water. There is work to be done in that area, particularly with the current state of the economy and the drive to put the right skills back into the economy, some of those qualifications will become more important than ever. It has been an area that has been under-regulated to date. I should like to see a stronger regulator in that area.