Schools White Paper

My Lords, I am new; I am happy to do whatever the House wishes. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said that it would be great if we had the opportunity to debate this matter. I am told that it is more than my life is worth to say that I can agree to that. The usual channels will need to consider the request. However, I would relish the opportunity to debate the proposals, and I believe that it would be good for us to debate at greater length a large number of the important issues raised by both noble Baronesses. In particular, it is important to overcome the idea that somehow we are engaging in structural reform at the expense of standards. Since 1997, we have sought to unite more effective structures with the standards that they are able to provide in schools. The whole of the first third of the Statement went through the achievements that we have secured since 1997—improving teaching in schools and improving the results achieved and doing so through a systematic enhancement in the quality of the teaching profession. I make it absolutely clear—the Government are in no doubt about this—that the single most important thing that will determine the success of our schools over time is the quality of our teaching profession. As we have seen, that quality has improved systematically since 1997, with a huge increase in the number of recruits; the success of organisations such as Teach First, which have brought a new cadre of highly qualified graduates into the profession; and the reports of Ofsted into the quality of teaching. Standards are important because, where they are right, they engage teachers, mobilising and organising them in a better way, and that enables higher achievement. So, we do not believe that there is a conflict between the structural reforms that we are promoting and standards. On the contrary, we believe that the structural changes will enhance standards. I was particularly surprised that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that we had no new ideas for primary education, and she asked what we were going to do about the 3Rs. It is widely accepted that one of the positive reforms that the Government carried through was the literacy and numeracy strategy, with the daily literacy hour and mathematics lesson in primary schools. That started in 1998 and grew out of pilot projects developed under the previous government, but we introduced it systematically. Through that strategy, we have sought to improve the training available to primary school teachers in every primary school in the country and rigorously to apply best practice in the teaching of literacy and numeracy. Indeed, just before the summer, we asked Jim Rose, a former senior HMI, to look at the specific issue of reading in primary schools. We asked him to consider how best practice that had been developed since we started the literacy strategy could be applied more systematically to improve the teaching of reading in schools and to tackle the stubborn 20 per cent who have reached the age of 11 in our primary schools but have still not attained the standard expected of their age. We have put huge resources into those primary initiatives. It is widely recognised that they have yielded good results, and we intend to stick at them. With regard to the many questions raised about the structural reforms, I say at the outset that, where we have support from the two parties opposite, we welcome it and will seek to work constructively with them and to engage that support as the Bill proceeds through the House. I hope that, on the areas where we are in agreement, we can at least park those agreements and not continue to argue about them. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asked whether we would be as good as our word. I can assure her that we will be and that the measures that I have announced today will lead to a robust education Bill. We look forward to the support that she will be able to give us in making this as cross-party an initiative as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that she sought to achieve a variety of locally based social markets and not a free market. We are not proposing a free market if, by ““free market””, she means an entirely unregulated market. I can assure her that no market in the world is more regulated than the school system that was developed in England in the decades after 1944. We are seeking to give a greater impetus to new promoters and to choice and diversity in a system that will remain regulated, as it needs to be, in appropriate areas to ensure, as the noble Baroness rightly said, local accountability and—I fear that this is an area of disagreement between us—fairness in admissions. However, there will be clear disagreement between the Labour and Conservative Parties on whether we allow selection to grow in the state system, in the way that the noble Baroness and her counterpart in the House of Commons were proposing, by allowing new schools to introduce selective admissions arrangements that, effectively, would reintroduce an 11-plus in those local communities. We are clear that that is not an acceptable policy. The academies referred to earlier are not allowed to select by ability. They must have all-ability admissions—a reform introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Baker.