Education and Inspections Bill

I listened with interest to the speeches from the Government and Opposition Front Benchers, and noted in particular the supportive tone of the latter and of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who waxed eloquently about consensus. I should point out that I speak today more in a spirit of sorrow than of anger. Labour has, as many colleagues have said, a very good record on education. Huge extra resources have been pumped into improving buildings, classrooms and equipment, and into providing many more teachers, smaller classes and steadily rising educational standards. There are certainly aspects of the Bill that build on that foundation. For example, it contains a welcome emphasis on personalised learning, makes clear the Government’s impatience with coasting and failing schools, and demands proper rules of discipline. It is also concerned with improved nutritional standards and the restoration of vocational education. All that is clearly excellent and should be supported, but the Bill’s central thrust is based on a rather different philosophy: a competitive market model opened up to external sponsors and driven by parental choice. That model, which will give popular and successful schools their head as the engines of innovation and change in the locality, has clear and distinctive drawbacks and disadvantages that have been widely publicised ever since the far-reaching nature of these proposals was first divulged in the White Paper. It was not divulged beforehand, and certainly not in Labour’s election manifesto. However, it is fair to say that since objections to that model were extensively voiced in the Labour party and outside it, the Government have engaged in discussions to try to deal with some of them. In my view, they have done so. On admissions, they have now agreed to a ban on selection not only by ability but by interviews, which is clearly important. Schools will now be required to act in accordance with the admissions code, and not merely to have regard to it; however, we have not seen the content of the code to which they are obliged to have regard. The sheer length of the last admissions code—at the time of its withdrawal it was more than 70 pages long—illustrates some of the difficulties involved in trying to close all the loopholes that undermine a fair and balanced admissions policy within an open market system. In such a system, will the admissions forums be sufficiently robust and effective to counter pressure from high-performing schools against including a fair share of children from poorer and more difficult backgrounds? I, for one, have my doubts about that. On expansion, the White Paper envisaged popular schools being free to expand with little or no regulation, and with few if any limits on their size. It is now proposed that local authorities should be responsible for lifting standards in weak or failing schools—which is much better—and that they can take consideration, as they should, of the overall educational performance of all schools in the area. However, in an open-market system, it is all too likely that the capacity of local authorities to do so effectively will be undermined unless we write into the Bill criteria such as no damage to surrounding schools and no impairment of the local authority’s efficient use of resources. At the moment, the Bill does not include such criteria. When local authority intervention fails, a school that has been made unviable can be closed and replaced, but only at the expense of struggling with increasingly inadequate education over several years. I, for one, regard that as too high a price, both for teachers and for children. On governance, the founding of independent trust schools would represent an irreversible transfer of public assets to external sponsors, be they businesses, charities or faith groups, for which there would be little or no public accountability whatever policies they might pursue. The important point has been made that if there was evidence that coasting or failing schools, which are a major concern, would routinely and reliably be transformed by taking on trust status and, crucially, that the overall educational performance of all the schools in the surrounding area would also be lifted, the case for the change would be strong. However, there is no such evidence. The Education and Skills Committee, in a very good report, considered all the evidence and concluded:"““No causal link has been demonstrated between external partners and the success of a school””." The example of charter schools in the US seems to underlie many of the proposals in the White Paper and the Bill, but they have been shown to fail especially poorer and more vulnerable families. The problem is not that the Government have not listened. They have listened, but the amendments have been relatively marginal and the core proposals in the Bill remain untouched. I expect that all hon. Members want a fair, equitable and accountable education system that will drive up standards across the range of provision in all schools, but the reform model in the Bill is the wrong one to achieve that. As has been said—and it is relevant because the OECD evidence is widespread—Finland and other Scandinavian countries have the highest literacy and education standards in the world. Finland has a fully comprehensive system, based entirely on community schools. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) pointed to differences between this country and Finland, but that does not undermine the force of my point. We need a wholly different model, not one that tinkers with structures and private markets—and then has to be tinkered with again to ameliorate some of the worst effects—but a modernised public services model, with a relentless focus on high quality school leadership; the recruitment and professional development of highly qualified, highly valued and well paid teachers; high expectations of all pupils; close monitoring of each pupil’s progress with smaller classes, more effective communication between parents and schools; and a targeting of resources and time on pupils from the most challenging home backgrounds. With great sorrow, I have to say that I cannot support the Bill as it stands.