Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, it is pleasant to find an education Bill from this Government that I can at least partially welcome. In the interests of the consensus, and in tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, I shall mention some of the aspects of the Bill that I find attractive. I find them attractive because they represent good Conservative thinking. I welcome the increased commitment to choice for parents, the greater freedom for some schools and the clarification of disciplinary powers for teachers—the latter an aspect of education policy that has been sadly lacking in the past nine years of new Labour government. I am also pleased to see a clear delineation of what the role of local authorities will be, although there are many aspects of this part of the Bill that I shall want to explore in Committee. It is also good to see acceptance of the need to offer alternative opportunities to 14 to 19 year-olds, many of whom possess high intelligence and skill but who are less motivated and able to achieve in academic subjects. Such young people have an immensely important part to play in our economy and in wider society. No doubt they will be ““half our future””—to quote an old phrase. The new specialist diplomas are a move in the right direction to meet their needs. By the way, I suggest to the Minister that it might be helpful to drop the word ““vocational”” from their title, as British snobbery has always devalued vocational education, whereas ““specialist”” confers a certain cachet. From frustrating experience, I see great difficulty in making such school-based specialist provision a reality, even in partnership with local further education, but it is absolutely right to try, and I shall explore the issue—I hope helpfully—in later stages of the Bill. The Bill deals with the new expanded powers of HMCI and the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which will still be known as Ofsted. According to the Bill, it will now incorporate—along with its existing duties of school inspection, further education, prison education, child minders and nurseries—the new responsibilities of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, which reports on everything from independent school residential provision to old people’s homes; the Adult Learning Inspectorate; the local authority inspection function for services to children; the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service; the inspection of secure training centres; and the registration of children’s homes, residential family centres, fostering agencies, voluntary adoption agencies and adoption support agencies. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector is then required to develop a framework for inspection that embraces the entire huge range of very different organisational structures, each of which has its own legislative framework, its own compliance requirements, its own specialised problems—many of which are severe and harrowing as they deal with some of the most fraught and emotional aspects of human life—its own specialist staff, and wholly individual time frames and procedures for inspection, often answering to different government departments. I am always in favour of reducing bureaucracy and the number of quangos, but merging several quangos into one body should be done only where the new body makes some kind of coherent sense, and I simply do not think this meets that requirement. It is too large and unwieldy for one organisation, and too much for one chief executive to manage. Ofsted has had to deal only recently with some major reorganisation arising from the 2005 Act. I very much fear that the already large and important task of the effective inspection of schools and colleges will suffer from the additional administrative and management burden of this huge multi-merger. This could be a very long process indeed. Anyone who has ever been part of a merger in which different values and traditions have to find a way of working together can testify to the long slow process of integration that must be gone through and to the management distraction that such a process creates. I ask the Minister to reconsider the proposals for merging some of the huge range of different inspectorates. Inspection, attractively, sounds like the same word in all of them, but the practice is totally different. On the goal of increased freedom for schools, I find this a disappointing Bill and in many ways a lost opportunity, as other noble Lords have said. Much of what it proposes for trust schools is only a minor extension of the freedoms that were given to foundation schools earlier. There is not much to attract an existing foundation school to go through what will undoubtedly be a lengthy and time-consuming procedure in order to become a trust school or what in the Bill is a foundation school with a foundation. The only change is in the composition of the governing body, which is an important feature but not one that will inspire many schools, I fear, unless the sponsor or trust provides extra money. However, I am assured by officials in the Department for Education and Skills that the trust will not necessarily have to provide money. The extra foundation—the foundation with a foundation—may not provide any extra money at all. Of course, a strong governing body with increased powers is to be wholly welcomed, and partnership with an external body can be only for the best if such a body brings community interests and perspectives to the running of a school. As a long-serving trustee of Bacon’s College, a city technology college established by the Philip and Pauline Harris Charitable Trust and the Church of England, I welcome that. I know from that experience how powerful such external input can be, so I wish the trust school initiative well, but, for my part, I would like to see all schools becoming foundation schools and a larger number moving into partnerships as trust schools. Despite what the Minister said, there is still too much talk of changing structures without at the same time looking at what parents most care about—the standard of teaching, the ethos and style of the school, its specialist areas in the curriculum, the extra-curricular offerings and so on. I share the passion of many other noble Lords on these Benches for a diverse school system. Sadly, as we all know, the comprehensive schools have not delivered the promised educational and social benefits in which we all believed. I was one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors in the 1970s, and I remember the excitement we felt at the possibility of offering equal opportunities to all children, but it is clear from what the Minister has said that the lower social classes are still not performing as well as they should. They are still under-performing, both at GCSE and crucially at university-entrance time. The comprehensive schools have not delivered. I am not sure, however, that the range of school structures, such as community schools, faith schools, foundation schools, foundation schools with a foundation, city academies and so on, are really what parents care about. They do not care about the different names of schools, but about such things as their ethos and offerings. This, of course, leads me to expanded parental choice, on which I shall spend the last few minutes of the time available to me. There is much in the Bill to be welcomed on this issue. Choice has always been available to those with money or a good educational background of their own, but I want all parents to have choice, and in so far as there is a commitment to such choice in the Bill, I welcome it. The Government have recognised that the right to choose is limited all too often by travel costs for parents from low-income families. The proposal to offer limited additional help for such parents to opt for a school at a distance from their homes is a step in the right direction, but why is the choice limited to only three schools and provision of transport to be limited to a distance of two to four miles? In rural areas, four miles may be no choice at all, as the right reverend Prelate has said, while in urban areas, two miles without transport can be a dangerous and daunting prospect for any young child. Choice in the Bill is also limited by the banding requirement. How can a parent choose a school only to be told, ““I am very sorry, but the band in which your child falls is already full.””? If the local authority is to continue to have banding requirements in all schools and is required to keep these bands even, a lot of parents will be disappointed in their choice of school. I say again that the heart of real choice is not the title of the school but whether it feels right for your child, and whether what it offers meets the needs and expectations of the pupil and her or his family. How this can be achieved without a meeting of the parents and prospective pupil with senior teachers at the school, I cannot imagine. If choice is to be real, the parents must be free to get a feel of the school, meet the staff and other pupils, and make their informed choice on that basis. But if they are interviewing the school, is the school not also entitled to interview them on just the same basis? If every school is to be free to create its own special ethos, it must be able to admit pupils who will fit, maintain and develop that ethos. I deeply deplore the decision of the Government to write into the Bill a ban on interviews because it takes away the very principle on which the Bill should stand; that is, a diverse school system in which every school establishes its own peculiar nature and every child can find a place which matches their abilities and inclinations, a place that feels right and in which they can happily fit. The conundrum the Government have blindly ignored, despite their new admissions code, is that of an admissions policy to allow for the diverse system in which parents have real choice. A popular and successful school will always have more applicants than it has places. Some provisions in the Bill seek to deal with this issue in allowing schools to expand, albeit through complex and probably lengthy procedures, and in allowing the merging or ““takeover”” of weaker schools by popular ones. All that is good, but it takes time, is hedged about with bureaucracy and offers no guarantee that the new provision will meet the wishes of parents. I therefore ask the Minister one simple question: with a ban on selection, what reason will the head of an oversubscribed school give to those many parents who apply and then have to be turned down? I want every school to be able to select and every parent to be able to choose. The school should be able to select on the basis of its own specialism and ethos, and the parents on their understanding of those criteria. Some will be disappointed, just as some students applying to their choice of university are disappointed, but the system of application and selection must be transparent and clear. The conundrum of the oversubscribed school has not been solved. There are many parts of the Bill which we shall wish to pursue in Committee, but in the broadest terms I welcome it as a step in the right direction.