Education and Inspections Bill

I see that I am going to have to repeat myself several times. That was pretty much the first thing that I said, when I explained that we all have to make a choice based on the whole Bill, just as the Conservatives have. They have made a choice on the whole Bill and said that although there are things that they disagree with they feel that it is worth giving it a Second Reading. We have looked at the whole Bill, and I am afraid that we feel that there are too many problems for us to be willing to give it a Second Reading. Let me return to the word ““choice””, which has come up rather a lot. The choice in the Bill, if there is any, is all about decisions at 11. I believe that choice should be a theme that should run throughout the education system. Even when choice is mentioned, I cannot help wondering whose choice it really is. If one lives in a rural area, much of the hubbub about choice in schools is irrelevant because there are not that many to choose from. For parents in urban or semi-urban areas, whether or not free transport is offered, the crisis at 11 is about surviving the stampede to get into one popular school and hoping that one’s child does not end up lumbered with any of the unpopular ones. That is not meaningful choice. The problem is that if we give schools the freedom to control their own admissions, we will take away what little choice they have and hand it to schools that will have the power to choose their pupils. All the evidence suggests that when schools do that, they choose the well-off and bright children, leaving the others to go to other schools. That is hardly surprising given the incentive to do so because of nationally publicised league tables. If we move further down this route we could completely undermine the comprehensive system.