Education and Inspections Bill

No, I must make some progress. When building on the Bill, we need to go beyond the idea of having a statutory admissions code. That is a building block for making the argument about a balanced intake. We then have to determine at local level how we should develop an approach that genuinely persuades parents that schools with a balanced intake are better for their children’s education. There are elements in the Bill that will be important in enabling us to do that. I would almost throw the whole Bill away if I could keep the powers that will enable us to intervene quickly on schools that are beginning to fail, but have not yet been condemned by Ofsted. Too many children have suffered in schools that have drifted for two, three, four or five years before anything was done about them. The ability to get in there quickly is important. There is not a lot about personalised education in the Bill, although the flavour of the concept is there. It involves the ability to give a guarantee to parents that their child will not disappear into the morass of a school that offers a lowest-common-denominator education. That is a key part of the strategy to develop schools with a balanced intake. For that reason as well, I believe that there is enough in the Bill to illustrate that we have made progress since the publication of the White Paper and that we should support it. I wish, however, that the Bill had gone further. It is not enough to aspire to co-operation between schools. One of the big dividing lines between Labour Members, certainly on the Back Benches, and the Conservatives is that the Conservatives celebrate the independence and irresponsible autonomy of individual schools. We, however, believe that it is essential that schools collaborate across an area and take responsibility for the achievements of all children. I wish that the Bill had gone further in regard to the powers to require schools to form federations and to take responsibility for working together. I hope that, in the course of the Bill’s passage through Parliament, we can diminish those deficiencies.