Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I echo the concern expressed on behalf of the House by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth. He has the extraordinary characteristic of combining commitment, passion and a merry disposition. We all deeply regret his absence and hope for his rapid recovery and return to this House. I hope that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough will convey that message to his friend and colleague. I shall comment on two of the observations made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, but before doing so I shall address the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock. The values of education are decided by the nature of the society that we want to build. That is what education is based on. An excellent system of education can be based on the concept of cohesion and co-operation. The extraordinary quality of the Finnish educational system has been mentioned in another place. The OECD recognises it to be the best in Europe and, probably, the world. It is based on comprehensive education and the concepts of co-operation and co-ordination. A much improved system can be based on a hierarchy of schools. When he introduced the Bill, the Minister eloquently made points about the excellence of teachers, attempts to improve the quality of head teachers, the need for smaller classes and the emphasis on literacy and numeracy. They are all areas where I am prepared to pay considerable tribute to the Government. Those qualities could be found in a co-operative system or in a competitive one. They are about an excellent model, not the model itself. But make no mistake, if this Bill is passed as it stands, the Government will be crossing a Rubicon which brings us to a model of education based on competition, market values and the marketisation of education. For some of us that is a terribly high price to pay, given that one can get excellent standards, imagination and innovation in systems where the model is driven by a very different vision. My noble friend Lady Walmsley and the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, were both absolutely correct to say that what is so striking about this Bill is that it combines profoundly contradictory views about what education should be. It tries to harness these two horses together. There is on one side the concept of much closer collaboration within education, and on the other the concept of competition. I want to make two brief points on that. On collaboration I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that a great deal more could be done. He may be a little surprised to hear me say that federations of schools can overcome many of the problems he pointed to about faith schools, or for that matter specialist schools. I believe that the way forward will be to federate schools with different specialisms, commitments and objectives in a way that will benefit the great spectrum of potential of each individual child. However, there is only a limited extent to which one can drive that collaboration together with the competition that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, eloquently pointed out, is likely in these structures we now have of proposed trust schools, on top of academies, city colleges, specialist schools and so on, as the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, said. When schools compete, however many admissions codes we may have, they are bound in the end to try to find ways to select the brightest children. We may call it aptitude and, as my noble friend said, that is really not much different from ability. But we also know that in all kinds of ways—because of the necessity to survive, attract money, hold the loyalty of sponsors, and show that one is a good school according to the league tables—the temptation under this Bill for schools to get around the selection requirements is absolutely immense. I am surprised that in another place the admissions code was accepted as a way around that in the light of the fact that the Prime Minister at an earlier stage in the White Paper rejected banding, which, to put the issue bluntly, is the one absolutely certain way one can be sure to give a range of ability and aptitude over the whole spectrum of children’s capacities. If one rejects banding, and I understand reasons why one may, one has to recognise that an admissions code must be strengthened by the structure of education and not find itself, as this one is, in conflict with that proposed structure. Within five or six years, especially if there is a change of Government, the admissions code will not be worth the paper that it is written on. One aspect of this Bill which profoundly troubles me is that the playing field is not level between proposals for new community schools to compete with new trust schools and new academies, if there is to be a new school to replace a failing school or to meet population needs in certain parts of the country. Why could we not have had a level playing field? Why is it that we insist that every local authority, however good, must receive the Secretary of State’s permission before it can put forward a proposal for a new community school? What are we frightened of? We are frightened that the trust school may not become the dominant model in a new education system. Let me say a little more about that. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, in her very powerful speech argued that, in effect, parents did not want to see more community schools. If that is the case, why has Scotland decided to base its education system on community schools? Why is Wales pursuing new powers to enable it to support community schools? The evidence is very powerful that, where parents are asked, a great many of them want local community schools. That is one reason why we cannot have ballots—because the ballot might go the wrong way. That is a funny attitude to democracy. Generally speaking, democracy is about accepting the verdict of the people, whether one likes it or not. That is why we are not to have ballots for new community schools. I turn to two different points. One was the point fascinatingly raised by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, about post-14 education. As it happens, I have a good deal of sympathy with what he said, but the logic of it read straight through to Tomlinson—the combination of academic and vocational education so that some youngsters could combine them. There are more boys and girls who would like to combine them than our rigid system recognises. Going beyond that, there is the need for a much better structure of post-14 education, including work experience and vocational and academic education. I now step for a moment outside the attitudes of my own party and, I think, of any other party in the House. I deeply believe that we will not get good 14 to 19 education until we recognise the limitations of the traditional A-level. The A-level is now becoming an enemy of good education for all children. The time has come, in our globalised world, to move towards the baccalaureate as a much more effective and modern examination for young men and women. It is about time that some of us had the guts to say that. I very much welcome what the Government have to say about asking 14 to 19 year-olds about the non-formal educational provision made for them. It is high time that that was done. It is a tragedy, which shows up in every obese child that we see, that the previous Conservative Government sold off so many playing fields that most children do not even have a commitment to a minimum of four hours of sport every week. Heaven knows, most of them would benefit hugely from that. It is a tragedy that we wound up the youth service but, late in the day, we may be learning. Consulting young people about such alternative provision is of the greatest possible importance. Last, I have one warning word. The trust school concept puts even more weight on head teachers than our present, heavily dependent education system. On top of everything else, the head will now have to deal with sponsors, keep their loyalty, help them to raise money, bow to their needs, accept their demands and all the rest of it. Already, we cannot begin to fill vacancies for head teachers—above all, not in London, which has driven so much of this Bill, but not in much of the rest of the country either. An educational scheme that depends on so much weight being carried by head teachers, including the endless willingness of central Government to produce interventions by which they are supposed to abide, is now becoming self-defeating. One thing for which I will plead when we consider the Bill in Committee, as we will in great detail, is that we reconsider the burdens that heads carry and ask ourselves why so many able teachers are simply not prepared to accept the responsibilities that we are now loading on them.