Education and Inspections Bill

The Government have a good story to tell about their education programme; about investment, which has never been matched by any other Government, the new building programmes, the record number of teachers and teaching assistants and rising standards across the board. But if we are honest, there is one thing we have not delivered: a rise in standards in areas of social deprivation. The question we face is how to address that issue. The areas of greatest deprivation can easily be identified. We should be building schools there for the pupils who live there. A pay structure for head teachers and classroom teachers should reflect the difficult and different nature of the job in those areas. We should have something that our public school comrades have always had—class sizes of about 1:12. If it is good enough for them, it must be good enough for us. The important point is that those changes should be carried out in the community itself, rather than bussing kids to other schools. Two communities suffer from that; bussing children out of one area deprives it of a school, while school sizes balloon in the other. The Bill is primarily about governance. I was a teacher for 17 fairly tumultuous years; it was a tough school, not a finishing school for the sons and daughters of gentlemen, and I rarely, if ever, thought about the nature of its governance or about its relationship with the local authority. We have to understand that the key determinant of education is not governance but the ability and class of the kids walking through the school gate and the ability of teachers to engage with them in education. I shall be voting against the Bill because it is about the primacy of the private over the public; it is about marketisation, competition and fragmentation. We have heard much about the direction of travel. I urge my hon. Friends to recall what the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said, because he brilliantly spelled out the direction of travel. It will be a disastrous direction both for education and for us as a Labour Government.