Education and Inspections Bill

The Government have a great deal of which to be proud in their educational record. We should not allow the Opposition to get away with their dismissive claims of, ““Yes, there’s more money and far more teachers and exam results are better, but what did you ever do for schools?”” We have a good record of achievement and we need to build on it. We cannot yet claim that the Government have decisively broken the link between social class and educational performance. The row about that and how to achieve it is at the heart of the debate, and I am glad. When the White Paper was published, it was spun in many quarters as a measure that was solely for aspirational, middle-class parents. Through the work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, the debate has become about the group of pupils who have not benefited as much as others from what we have done so far. The analysis supports that interpretation of the debate, and that is good. The White Paper was controversial because it rested on two propositions about how to improve our schools: school autonomy and parental choice. I am not against either of those—there are merits in both—but the problem is that neither is sufficiently powerful to produce the improvements that we need throughout our school system. Both can produce good results in individual schools and improvements in individual areas. However, we need improvement across the board. Our actions so far in government have told us what makes a good school: strong leadership, well-supported staff, a balanced intake and parental support. Too many schools do not have all those elements, but autonomy and parental choice alone are not likely to deliver them. There is simply no evidence to show that the exercise of choice drives up standards. It is possible for choice, diversity and good schools to co-exist, as happens in Sweden. However, there is little evidence to show that parents choosing between different schools or schools competing for pupils drives up standards. There is evidence to show that choice increases social segregation. Some people respond to that by saying that we should stop choice. I must say to my colleagues who feel like that that it is a non-starter. Although many parents do not especially want to exercise choice, they undoubtedly wish to feel that they have a choice. It is a political dead end to believe that we can solve our school problems by removing choice from the equation. The challenge for us is to deliver a genuine choice of good schools. Choice itself does not ensure that schools are good. Successful schools will have a balanced intake. They are what we used to call ““comprehensives”” before that went out of fashion. The evidence suggests that comprehensives work. It is interesting that the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), when speaking about The Oratory—a school of which I had not heard previously—tried to defend it on the basis that it sought a comprehensive intake. One of the most distinctive things that has happened with academies is that schools that used to have an entirely disadvantaged intake now have a balanced one, and the Government say that they produce better results. I wish that we had been more prepared to argue that schools with balanced intakes were more successful for more pupils than any other model of education, and then set about finding the best strategies to achieve balanced intakes. As I said, I do not believe that one can do that by removing choice and saying, ““You’ve got to go to that school—end of story.”” That will not work. We must win the argument parent by parent and school by school throughout the country. In the Bill and the campaign since the White Paper was launched, we have made sufficient change to make the original market model, which some Conservative Members desperately want, pretty difficult to achieve. We have done enough so that in the areas where local authorities and others wish to do so, we can begin to devise local strategies for developing schools with balanced intakes. We will have information, monitoring and the admissions forums to take forward the campaign for a better sort of education. All of us, working together, have helped to achieve that in the past few months.