Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, it has been an extraordinary privilege to share a debate in this House with the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock. I did not agree with everything that he said today, but there is much that we will always agree on. For me, who started working for the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, in 1985, he will always be one of my heroes. As with many of my generation, my politics were defined in large part by education. Both my parents were teachers who were extremely strongly committed to the public service ethos. They had the highest possible hopes for my educational progress. Sadly, they were miserably let down. It is not just that I failed the 11-plus—I am not alone in my party in that—but I only got one O-level, and it was geography. I think that they started to lose confidence a little bit at that point. I learnt little academically. There is only so much metalwork you can take in a week, and I did two full days of it. The worst debate here is better than that. But I did learn about people, or rather children. I came to understand that the waste of potential in that educational system was enormous. I was the first child from that school to go to university, which was preposterous, because there were so many kids at that school more able and more intelligent than me. An absolute foundation of my politics is that selecting children into different schools on the basis of an examination is wrong. I have never changed my view on that. I came to see the blocking of opportunity for so many of our children as the elitism of the right in those days. I also learnt something else at that school. I learnt that the opinions of the kids of that school, and of their parents, were valid and should be listened to with respect. It was clear, even then, that the voice of working families was changing, and that aspiration—choosing what was best for themselves and their families, a desire to get on and make a better life—was rendering uniform collective provision increasingly redundant. Even then, it was clear to me that a prevalent view in progressive politics—I think that my noble friend Lord Kinnock will recognise this—was that it was somehow not acceptable for working people to have the same amount of choice and control over their lives as many in the middle class of the time simply took for granted. I called this the elitism of the left. From this, I emerged absolutely committed to state schools, totally opposed to academic selection and completely supportive of the right of all parents of all children, not just successful and affluent parents, to have the right to choose the school that their children attend. In all the years that followed, I have never weakened in my commitment to any of these principles. I still support state schools and my children attend them. In fact, my youngest is now asking me why I am sending her to Camden and not to one of the real inner-city schools; I just live with that. I still oppose selection, unto the death. I still support empowering parents and giving them choice. For me, the issue of choice in public services is simple: not to restrict it, but to expand it so that everyone, no matter what their background or life chances, has the same opportunities to exercise control and power over all aspects of their lives that others more fortunate and privileged take absolutely for granted. There is a whole category of people who have choice and a whole category of people who do not. That is not acceptable. Choice is not about selection or privatisation or commercialisation. It is about giving working families the power over their lives that they deserve and are entitled to. But if we are to ensure that this choice is fair, we must invest in it. Prime Minster Persson of Sweden—where ““free schools”” are both normal and successful—has said:"““The British Government can do it, but if they are also prepared to finance it””." That is why the Government’s continuing commitment to investment is so important and why investment will continue to be a fundamental fault line in British politics. This Bill is about balance. I know from my years as a school governor—almost all the time my kids have been at school—how schools rely so completely on the incredible hard work, dedication and commitment to public services of all those who work as teachers, helpers and governors. That has not been recognised enough. I know as a parent, and as someone who gets a bit of public opinion, how the uniformity of provision that may have worked in the past will no longer work now. People have moved on. They want the kind of choice and control for themselves that others have enjoyed for generations. We live in a new world of new expectations and new demands, and we must understand and respect this. Our task in this debate and with this Bill is to get the balance right between empowering individuals and building strong and cohesive communities. Getting the balance right is not easy. Get it right and our public services will flourish and prosper in the future; get it wrong and our public services will wither on the vine. We cannot wait. My kids went to inner-city London schools and had good educations. Educational standards and new buildings are rising all over Britain. Anyone who has a kid at a state school will know how much better schools now are. That is remarkable, but we need to do more and we need to do it quickly. I want all parents, not just the few, to be able to choose which schools their children attend. I want strong schools in cohesive communities. I want no return—ever—to selection. In short, I want the journey started 40 years ago to be finally completed, to bring together flexibility, diversity, choice and freedom with fairness and social cohesion. That is what this Bill is striving towards. It is not perfect, but it has the potential to be a giant step forward for education in our nation. That is why I urge this House to come behind it and support it.