Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I must apologise for the fact that I will not be able to stay for the winding-up speeches. In my 16 years in the House, this is the first time that I have asked permission to leave early and I hope that the Front Benches will forgive me for doing so. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, that I started in a secondary modern—I refer to teaching, not studying; I am too old for that—and when the school became a comprehensive I taught under that system. I found that to be a total and utter disaster. Why was that? It was because we did not have supermen and superwomen who could manage the enormous schools that were created from perhaps two or three different schools. It was a complete shambles and, I am sorry to say, a failed experiment. If the term ““comprehensive”” means that we have an all-encompassing education—that is its meaning in the English language—then I say yes; but with the meaning that applied to schools at the time, the system did not work. I think we all realise that; that is why such schools have gone. When we talk about children we must remember that we are talking about the citizens of tomorrow—the people who will make the society of tomorrow. It is not just their time in school that matters; we must also remember that we are training the people who will be citizens of this nation. We should always look at education with that in mind and not just concentrate on the fact that being educated is a good time for children and involves a debate about what they should or should not have. We should consider the kind of adults that they will make. I was extremely pleased that the Minister emphasised that the three Rs—a very old-fashioned term—will be applied very strongly. There are an awful lot of illiterate adults in this country who have spent nine or 10 years in education. I cannot believe that 10 years of education can allow anyone to leave school with the reading and writing abilities of a five year-old. We constantly hear about how much power and how many responsibilities we will give to parents and about what they will be able to do. Fee-paying schools succeed in part because of what parents think they should be putting into a school. This is not about just taking out of a school or the fact that parents have the power to say that this or that should be done. Parents put in effort, money and time, and that is a very valuable resource that we should not forgo. We should emphasise the fact that parents have the responsibility of making the school that their child attends a good school. My noble friend Lord Baker said that parents should be interviewed; yes, they should be interviewed, not in order to make a judgment but so that the school gets to know the parents and so that parents get to know the head teacher and other teachers. It is very bad that they cannot have a proper interview at the school before the child goes to that school. Those are the issues that have come up in the debate but my main thrust—once again, my noble friend Lord Baker has already mentioned it, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Massey—concerns faith schools. The fact that we have Anglican, Catholic and Jewish schools is seen as a logical reason for allowing other faiths to have schools. However, we have Church schools because they provided the education in this country, and I do not understand why people forget that. They were the schools that educated the children who could not go to private schools. They are, if you like, an accident of history. We have to ask ourselves whether, if we were starting today, we would start at the same place. We do not know the answer, but Church schools exist. Many people prefer to send their children to Church schools because often they have a uniform, they have more discipline and, in many ways, they are more controlled. I have nothing against Anglican schools in particular, and, as has been said, more and more Catholic schools are opening their doors to other faiths, which is also very good. However, if we have Muslim schools and, as my noble friend Lord Baker said, even if we say that 30 per cent of their pupils must come from other faiths, who will send their children to those schools? Would any of your Lordships see their grandchildren go to a Muslim school? I think not. It would be extremely difficult for anyone of any faith other than Muslim to send their child to such a school. Those who want Muslim schools have said that they will want 10 per cent of pupils to come from other faiths, but I cannot see that happening. The whole structure of those schools would be geared around religion and the Muslim way of life, and I do not think that any of us would be able to cope with that. Much was said on this subject by my noble friend Lord Baker and I simply re-emphasise it. This country has had the experience of Northern Ireland and Glasgow, where two Christian sects have been at each other’s throats, and yet we still want to create more divisions in society. As I said at the start, we have to think about what kind of society and citizens we want to create. If the children do not get to know each other, how will the adults do so? We shall have little ghettos. Furthermore, I am not sure that we would be able to find an adequate number of teachers to teach in 125 Muslim schools at the level at which children in this country should be taught. We all know how illiberal Islamic countries are. This is a very liberal society and I am glad to live in it, and I do not want illiberalism to creep in through the school system. That would be a very negative step and a ticking time bomb that we would regret very soon—not in the long term but in the very short term—because it would not do society any good. I hope that this matter will be given a lot of thought. We should tell people clearly why Church schools exist. Government did not provide those schools, which, if I am not mistaken, until not long ago had to pay half their running costs. Later, they contributed 10 per cent and now they will not have to pay anything. We have to say that this is an Anglican country. It is a country with a national faith, but no one talks about that and that seems very strange to me. We may be allowed to do whatever we like but we have to accept that this country has a national faith. If that faith provides schools which welcome everyone, there is nothing wrong with that, but there is something very wrong with schools for a single group of people. All schools should provide religious education for their pupils if they want it. That, and not separate schools, is the way forward. I want to make one more point. We have been very ambivalent about sex education in this country. We top the league in developing countries, apart from the United States, in child and teenage pregnancies. It is time that we stopped being wishy-washy about this and ensured that, as an important part of the curriculum, appropriate sex education is provided according to the age of the children. Unless such education starts in schools, the problem will never end. We need to face this issue and not be prudish about it. We should not lag behind countries such as the Netherlands, which has the lowest rate of teenage and child pregnancies. The Netherlands has everything in the way of pornography and so on, and people go there for that, yet it has a high rate of marriage, a low rate of divorce and very few child and teenage pregnancies.