Education and Inspections Bill

This is the sort of false distinction that we hear. If I remember rightly, what we used to hear in 1997 from the Prime Minister was ““Standards, not structures.”” The Bill reveals that he has come to recognise that one needs to change structures to help to get standards right. Of course, there are many other things that can be done to raise standards, including, as the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) rightly says, ensuring that there is good teaching. I was hoping to try to find some scope for agreement. I think that we agree on the need for reform to improve education standards further, and I suggest that we may even have some agreement on how to reform. Instead of the ideological debate that took place for so long about what form education reforms should take, we now have evidence coming in from other advanced western countries about how to deliver effective education reform to raise standards. The evidence from the school choice experiments in America and from Sweden clearly shows that one can raise standards by having more diversity of provision, more freedom for schools and more choice for parents. Those are the principles that we believe lie behind sensible education reform the world over that successfully raises standards.