Queen’s Speech

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the gracious Speech and am proud to be a supporter of a Government in such good form. I have two suggestions for advantages that we might take from the disruption that we have all suffered through Covid.

First, we should keep and build on the online verification of the right to work. This has been a great success for the Home Office’s Covid response. It works well, there are no known systemic problems and it promises substantial advantages to the Home Office over time. It enables employers to professionalise online verification, locate it centrally, support their own skills development, and securely recognise unusual documents. Also, the potential to integrate with other information systems will further increase security performance. It has been a great success for the Home Office and for building back better. Employers can hire remote workers easily, which supports the move to working from home and makes lots more jobs available in unemployment black spots. The process is faster and more secure. There is no posting of passports around the UK, much less vulnerability to fraud, and costs are much lower. Employers reckon that there has been a 75% reduction in costs compared with the previous manual system.

What is the Home Office doing to build on this great success? It is terminating it, except with EU nationals who have the right to remain; they will now be much cheaper to employ than us Brits. This is a daft decision, to do so well and have nothing significant go wrong, to offer so much to the building back better agenda, and then to junk it because the department is frightened of its own shadow. Ministers in the Home Office and in the departments whose interests will be damaged need urgently to intervene. I have hope. The Home Office announced today that the turn-off will be postponed from next Monday until 21 June. There is now time for it to change its mind.

My second suggestion is that we should take advantage of the mess that the pandemic has made of exams and assessment, to build back better. The grading system we currently use has a broad inherent spectrum of error. The comparative outcomes application of that grading system to maths and English GCSE creates hurdles that must be leapt to qualify for further education and exciting employment. It demands in its structure that 40% of our children should be branded as failures.

We know how to do better. We can move away from grades to rank order, as used in Switzerland. We can adopt the comparative assessment strategy championed by Daisy Christodoulou, which is so well adapted to an online world. It has the great virtue of easily incorporating previous examinations and so lends itself to the maintenance of standards. Most of all, we can move to criterion-referenced assessments for whatever hurdles we feel the need for.

We already use this system on a large scale to verify that overseas candidates have sufficient command of English to benefit from their university courses and for such systems as the TEFL qualifications. In these applications, criterion referencing works very well. Iceland uses criterion-referenced termly reading-age tests to great acclaim from its teachers and unions. The trick to making criterion referencing work is to keep the assessment focused. If you try to use it on a broad front, it becomes impossibly complicated.

We need hurdles for maths and English because we want employers and educators to know that candidates have the basic level of skills they need. This is a criterion-referencing task. Let us establish what is needed to demonstrate the level of competence that we—that is, us and especially employers—want everyone to have to succeed in life. Let us make a short, simple specification of it and create criterion-referenced tests to examine it.

That would build into our system a drive for us to achieve a 95% success rate in equipping our young people for the world. That is absolutely what we should be aiming for. We should not, as we do now, have a system that requires us to accept that 40% of our children are failures. The pandemic has loosened the chains of precedent and caution. Let us not put them back on again until we first make sure that they fit.