Education and Inspections Bill

I broadly welcome the Bill. It is perhaps one of the most heartening Bills on which I have spoken since becoming a Member of Parliament, and I hope that it will begin a radical transformation in our education system of the kind that I would like to see. At the centre of the Bill are the proposals to devolve to schools new powers and responsibilities, to empower schools to acquire self-governing trust status, and to devolve power and responsibility away from remote educational experts. The Bill will begin the fragmentation of monolithic state provision, and that is a fragmentation in which we should welcome and rejoice. For more than a generation, we have seen the steady advance of an invidious leftist orthodoxy through our state educational institutions. State-enforced, one-size-fits-all education has held down a generation of young people, and it is time to overturn it. The Bill does not mark the end of one-size-fits-all, state-enforced education, but it marks the beginning of the end. That is why I have no difficulty in supporting it. I served on the Education and Skills Committee, but I was unable to support its rearguard action to fight against the measures outlined in the White Paper. The Committee’s critique of the White Paper conflicts with its decentralist rationale. If anything, the Government should be prepared to go much further than they have done in the Bill, but that can wait until another day. However, the Bill brings closer that other day, when we shall see a radical change to the status quo in our education system. The significance of the Bill is that even those on the centre left of British politics have lost faith in the state-enforced, one-size-fits-all system of education. They have lost faith in the notion that education can, or should, be run entirely from the centre. Having listened to the ideologues and the dinosaurs who oppose these measures, I believe that the only compelling critique of the Bill comes from those who say that it does not go far enough. Not all in the Bill is perfect—the poisoned pills placed in it by the Government on admissions, the unelected and unaccountable adjudicator, and the banning in clause 40 of interviews, for example—but I suspect that those measures will be less important than is supposed. One day, we will iron out those flaws and then we will go much further. In the meantime, the Bill warms the cockles of my localist heart. I will go through the Lobby tonight with many Labour Members, and with a spring in my step.