Schools White Paper

I am truly delighted that the hon. Gentleman has come here today to welcome the proposals in the White Paper. It might be only his fourth appearance at the Dispatch Box, but I think that it is a sign of his increasing political maturity that when there are well-thought-out proposals that will make a difference to our school system, he can stand there and welcome them, no matter what that might mean for his own political ambitions, or anything else relating to his side of the House. I hope that the support that the hon. Gentleman has offered us today will mean that his party—whoever leads it—will support the legislation that we will bring forward to enact the proposals that I have set out today. I look forward to his and his colleagues’ support in the Division Lobby. I was glad that the hon. Gentleman did not challenge the fact that there have been significant improvements in our school system over the past eight years and the fact that we have transformed the situation that we inherited in 1997. However, he should recognise that that has been achieved not only through reform—although reform there has been with the literacy hour, the numeracy hour and the other reforms that I mentioned—but because of the investment that we have been putting in. By 2007–08, Labour will have doubled per pupil spending since 1997. He might not have sat in the House for very long, but during that short time, he has voted against every single opportunity to put investment back into our schools where it is needed. He has also voted against innovation in our schools, modernising school governance and laying the foundation for work force remodelling. I am thus pleased to hear that he is changing his party’s political tune. However, today was his first big test, so I had rather hoped that he would have done his homework just a little better. The hon. Gentleman thinks that our new trust-school system will represent the re-creation of grant-maintained schools. There could be nothing more different from the new model that we are proposing for all schools than the failed grant-maintained system of the past. There are some similarities.—[Interruption.] Let us see what they are. Grant-maintained schools had classrooms, teachers and books. I have to admit that there are some similarities, but that is where they end. Grant-maintained schools could set whatever admissions arrangements they wanted, they could select the best pupils and were encouraged to opt out of the local family of schools. Indeed, they were bribed to do so, because they were given unfair funding that discriminated against other schools. They operated on the basis of unfair admissions that privileged elite schools by cream-skimming pupils from our state schools. Grant-maintained schools received the only capital funding on offer in the system. Anyone who remembers those days will recall the two-tier system that emerged. Indeed, grant-maintained schools defined themselves through opposition to other schools in the system. They did the best for their children, but not for others. We are not proposing the return of the grant-maintained school, because our schools rightly insist on fair funding, fair admissions and fair accountability. We want autonomous schools that drive improvement for their own pupils and others by sharing that expertise and success across the school system, as we have set out in the schools White Paper. The hon. Gentleman asked what school autonomy means in practice. Schools will have the opportunity to develop their own mission, purpose and ethos, and to work with an external partner if they think that that is in the interests of parents and pupils. They will be able to manage their own assets and employ their own staff. They will be able to control the funding distributed to them by local authorities and ring-fenced through the dedicated school grant. To argue that they should be free of accountability and should not have to participate in the self-evaluation scheme that head teachers themselves have requested from us is absurd. The way to drive improvement through the system is for one head teacher to learn what works from another so that they can apply it in their school to improve standards for their own pupils and others. The hon. Gentleman argued for autonomy on admissions but, once again, his proposals are not thought through. I read an article that he wrote in the Evening Standard last week in which he said that over time all schools should be able to determine their own admissions procedures and, if they wanted to do so, select pupils.