Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I wish I could have made that speech myself. I did not disagree with a single word that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, said. If we ever have to choose our partners in a hung Parliament, I shall be in great difficulty: I shall want to be with the Labour Party on education and with the Liberal Democrat Party when it comes to the Home Office. It will be a very strange experience. It is nice to see a level of consensus on education. It would be a great thing for education if, over the next 20 or so years, we could have a relatively politics-free development. Most of us are facing in the same direction in focusing on the requirements of our children and their education, and how best to provide for them and for the future of the country. I am delighted by many aspects of the Bill, not least by the move of local education authorities away from the command and control model towards something much more supportive, innovative and parent-friendly. I look forward to the same medicine being applied to the DfES. That will be a welcome development. One area in which we might manage to generate some prospect of consensus in Committee is that of admissions. We are some way away at the moment; there have been some quite disparate speeches around the House, but if we recognise what parents want and focus on the good practice that is out there, we might see how a workable system might emerge. Parents want certainty. They hate systems which leave them not knowing which school their children can go to, leaving them in limbo and feeling that the schools, not they, are in control. Sorting out a school for your young ones is stressful and tiring. To feel that at the end there can be no certainty is painful; it is one of the great difficulties with those who stray from the rather restrictive boundaries in the current system. Parents also want to choose. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, said, the great engine of improvement in the system is the fact that it encourages innovation and change. Parents will respond to schools which offer them what they want by favouring them. The process does not inevitably result in the destruction of other schools; generally, the other schools catch up. That certainly happens in the independent sector. There is the odd failure but, by and large, the schools which have been falling behind get themselves a decent headmaster and some understanding of where they are going, and get shifting again. There is very little death in the independent sector. In the state system, we are faced with an almost totally socially selective system. The middle classes have learnt how to operate every kind of school admission process, even banding. That is not surprising—they are bright, mobile, and have the ability to deal with these things. That is gradually resulting in a pattern of ghettoisation—schools become so bad and so depopulated of any middle-class content that they have great difficulty making progress. I would like to see how we can change that, based on the sort of practice and patterns in, for example, the new Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College. A certain proportion of places goes to parents as of right, as it were, so that if you are in the catchment area, you can go there. Another proportion of places goes to other parents by way of ballot. There is no form of selection, just a ballot among those who put their names down for the school. It means that those who are not in the catchment area have a pretty good hope of getting into the school; they are not restricted by geographical limits that they find impossible to deal with, particularly if they are not rich and cannot move where they want. I was very encouraged by what both right reverend Prelates said, and hope that such a system would embrace an opening-up of the remaining closed religious schools. There are still religious schools, particularly Catholic, but notably some Anglican, which are not only religiously selective but seriously socially selective in their criteria. They require all sorts of community participation and involvement which only the middle class is really likely to take part in. I find that disreputable and I will back the Bishops’ Benches if they put forward an amendment to give themselves, as suggested, the power to deal with their schools which act in this way. I would like a system in which religious restriction was restricted to perhaps 50 per cent of the school. There seems to be general support around the House for doing something about religious selection. It is potentially divisive among communities, and I do not wish that to go further than it already has. Each school could have, say, 75 per cent of its pupils by right but would have to open up the rest of its places to ballot. Obviously you could not introduce that number of new places all at once, but that would be the objective. By using a co-ordinated admissions system and the current schools admissions process, and by adjusting catchment areas and sizes, schools would gradually move towards a position where, in general, two-thirds of their pupils would come from the local area or the local religious community and the other third would gain admission on a totally open ballot. That would be a very effective way of opening-up good but socially exclusive schools to anybody who had access to them. I will pursue that in Committee. Some of my noble friends have talked about schools having the right to set their own admissions policy. That only ever has one effect, which is that schools choose pupils. I am not in favour of that. I am a parent activist—I want parents to choose schools. There are a few other aspects of the Bill I shall wax voluble on in Committee but should like to mention now. I am with the Liberals on discipline. I have concerns about parenting orders, which will have some really ridiculous effects in practice. But I am very much in favour of the proposals to strengthen teachers’ ability to deal with serious violence and indiscipline in schools. Teachers I know in rough schools tell me that if a child assaults them, they just have to stand there. They dare not lay a hand on a child who is attacking them for fear of losing their career. At the very least, they will be subject to several days of investigation before they are allowed back into teaching. That seems daft. If teachers are allowed a greater ability to use physical methods to restrain pupils who are attacking them, which I thoroughly approve of, they will have to be trained properly. It is no good going back to the days of my youth, when a cuff round the ear or something a good deal harder and more painful would have been the immediate response to laying a hand on the teacher. There is a lot to be learnt from the way these things are handled in special schools. I will advocate the incorporation into this Bill of the behaviour audit, which was advocated by Steer. It is valuable in the case of discipline, because many discipline problems have their origins in actions taken by the school—consciously or unconsciously—and the school should understand what it is doing to cause the problem. That is important in the context of getting the right result for the pupil. I will urge the Government to tell the QCA that it must take steps to incorporate the IGCSE in the performance tables, and any other curriculum which comes up to scratch. It is one of the great hopes for improving standards in our education that we are now going through a patch of real liberalisation in the examinations available to our children. Yes, A-levels are still hard, but they have become desperately formulaic. If you learn particular patterns of words, particular ways of answering questions, and, even at A-level, particular facts, you will get an A. There is no real challenge left in some of these examinations and the way to deal with that is to allow some competition. Other examinations such as the IB, the IGCSE, the international A-level, which is being proposed by a group of independent schools in Cambridge, as well as other initiatives, should be available to our state schools. That will pretty quickly sort out the sheep from the goats and make sure that we have an examination system that is fit for purpose.