Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, the measures in the Bill address three weaknesses which, entwined, have long been endemic in English education: glaring social-class disparities in educational attainment; a too-pervasive mediocrity of school standards, notwithstanding the excellence of so many teachers; and conspicuous inadequacies in technical and vocational education. There remains a grim correlation of GCSE results with social deprivation. The percentage of young people achieving five or more A* to C grades at GCSE in the top quartile is 72.5 per cent, and 38.3 per cent in the bottom quartile; the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, touched on this. Notwithstanding the efforts of every Government over the past 40 years, we still suffer from the legacy of the indifference of the state and the official neglect of education in this country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In France, Napoleon established a public educational system. The day after his victory at the Battle of Friedland in 1807, he dispatched a memorandum to Paris on the education of girls. In Prussia, universal state primary education was inaugurated in 1906. In England, there happily being no military state, unhappily it was not thought appropriate for Government to provide public education. From the 1830s, grants were made to voluntary providers, which were mainly the Churches. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham spoke with just pride at the contribution that the Churches made in the 19th century to the education of the poor. Not until 1870 did the British state bestir itself to begin to provide elementary education, but no network of borough and county councils was set up capable of administering it until 1888. Only in 1902 was there legislation to permit, although not to oblige, local authorities to establish state secondary schools. In the absence of a system of state education, the wealthy middle classes took educational provision into their own hands, sending their children to what ironically were called public schools. The consequences of this, although fading, are still corrosively with us in a peculiar English class consciousness and class division—the lack of serious political commitment to the improvement of state education on the part of the parents of the 7 per cent of the nation’s children who have opted their children out of the generality of the schools that the rest of the nation’s children attend, and in a lack of funding, hence pupil-teacher ratios, teachers’ salaries, and school resources and conditions, which have all been significantly inferior in state schools. It is unsurprising that standards have too extensively been inadequate and that the social-class gap in university admission has been so glaring. I believe that the Government’s policy of establishing through trusts new possibilities of collaboration and partnership between schools, and between schools, colleges and universities, may start a process of healing and integration in English education. The Government’s commitment to trusts, set out in the Bill, follows clear evidence of early success among academies. I am pleased to see among sponsors of academies the mercers, the haberdashers and Dulwich College—all of them with distinguished histories of a commitment to independent education. I very much hope that many independent schools will work with state-maintained schools in trusts. The Minister told us of a wonderful example of that, planned between an independent and a state special school in Dorset. Trusts are rightly intended to develop in the context of a strategy designed by the LEA as commissioner of education and champion of children. LEAs are indispensable as guardians of the educational interests of the community. Only they can plan its overall educational provision knowledgeably, sensitively and accountably—mindful of their obligations not just to the present generation of schoolchildren, but to the generations to come. This is the task that the Bill gives them, together with a duty to promote fair access under a strengthened school admissions code in accordance with which trust schools will be obliged to act. What is also excellent about the policy of the Bill is its holistic approach. I welcome the department’s authoritarianism; it is quite Prussian in banning junk food in schools. All schools will have to have regard to the local children and young people’s plan. The priority given in the Bill to looked-after children is admirable. Children fail from an early age because deprived parents unwittingly prepare their children to follow them in trans-generational deprivation. The nurturing of children, encouragement of the disadvantaged and the regeneration of schools need the whole community. I am glad to see the provisions on youth work, and I hope that the Government will provide a more explicit and detailed account of the youth services they expect local government to provide. Other specific policies in the Bill are designed to promote more equality of opportunity and social cohesion. As charities, trusts will have a duty to promote community cohesion. I too have anxieties about the promotion of more faith schools, while I understand that this duty is intended as a safeguard against the damaging consequences of them about which a number of noble Lords have warned. The extension of free school transport, the provision of advice on the choice of schools and firm steps to ban selection, overt or covert, mean that choice can be made a reality for less well-off and less confident parents, at least in urban areas. This is good because it will help them to develop a more engaged and aspirational approach. I am pleased that in Clause 49 the Government are making it easier for an LEA to introduce banding. If schools are to be truly comprehensive and agents of equal opportunity, we need to end the neighbourhood passport to educational privilege. If that limits choice for some, so be it. If LEAs have the nerve to insist on truly mixed intakes through banding, we could be on our way to bridging more of the grievous divides in our education system and social structure. Within schools, of course, every child must be supported to fulfil their educational potential. I look forward to the annual reports from LEAs on fair access chronicling such progress. A host of measures in the Bill, including on discipline and the duty of LEAs to respond to Ofsted reports and parental complaints, will make for a continuation of improvement in educational standards. When he published his last annual report on the state of education in England, the Chief Inspector of Schools, David Bell, had important words to say about mediocrity, often in schools in better-off areas:"““While on the surface all may appear to be well in these schools, if we dig deeper we find that achievement could be better in some subjects, or for some groups of pupils and that these schools are falling way behind in terms of providing the sort of education we find in our best schools . . . In short, they are underperforming or coasting schools. While not in a state of crisis, they are providing nothing better than mediocrity. Children have just one chance of their education and there can be no hiding places or excuses for schools which fail to provide high standards””." Poverty of aspiration is not confined to the schools that most obviously fail. Trusts themselves will make for higher standards. The statistics on educational value-added show that voluntary and foundation schools as well as specialist schools do better. Trusts will allow more scope for schools themselves to generate initiative and energy from within, more scope to innovate, including a right to apply to the Secretary of State for additional flexibilities, and more opportunities to draw ideas and stimulus from partners. The Bill should also contribute to better standards and improve the funding available to schools through trusts involving business sponsors, to whom we should be very grateful, and charitable foundations. The Government have achieved extraordinary improvements in the state funding of schools. They have boldly committed themselves to match levels of spending in private schools. If we can overcome our national hang-up about a mixed economy of funding for schools within the context of the strong safeguards and the interests of every child that the Bill provides, it can only be in the interests of education. It is right and proper too to extend the fiscal benefits of charitable status to trust schools. The importance and radicalism of the Government’s proposals in the 14 to 19 White Paper and Part 5 of the Bill for 14 new specialised vocational diplomas to be available for every young person can be judged again against the background of our history. Martin Wiener and Corelli Barnett have described how the Victorian conception of liberal education remained dominant in English education deep into the second half of the 20th century. Thomas Arnold, who established the values of the 19th-century public school system said: ““Rather than have it””—he referred to science—"““the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth . . . Surely the one thing needed for a Christian and Englishman to study is a Christian and moral and political philosophy””." Cardinal Newman, who established the English idea of a university in the mid-19th century, said:"““You see then, gentlemen, here are 2 methods of education; the one aspires to be philosophical, the other mechanical; the one rises towards ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and external””." Therefore:"““It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life—these are . . . the objects of a University””." There were those who argued otherwise. TH Huxley contended that the study of science would be just as formative intellectually as the study of classics. Herbert Spencer saw,"““the vice of our education system . . . It neglects the plant for the sake of the flower””." A series of royal commissions, Select Committees and official documents—from the Newcastle Commission of 1861 to the 1956 White Paper on technical education—pointed to the contrast between the effeteness of English education and the hard-headed deployment of education and training resources in the interests of economic competitiveness by Britain’s industrial rivals. But complacency and mistrust of theoretically based knowledge on the part of the practical men who were the heirs to the first Industrial Revolution, romantic idealism, preoccupation with religion in education, the British distrust of strong central Government, and the alibi of measuring national greatness in terms not of economic competitiveness but of extent of imperial possessions meant that our educational culture remained as defined by the Victorian liberal educationalists. The prestige of the classics, mathematics and, in due course, pure science remained supreme and the values of Arnold and Newman extensively penetrated the grammar schools, the new secondary schools and the civic universities. The Spens report of 1938 recommended a tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary schools. The technical schools provided for in the 1944 Act did not thrive in the following decades. Without a tradition of technical education, the teachers were not there, industry remained half-hearted and the prestige of the grammar schools ensured that there was no parity of esteem. Some of these difficulties beset technology when it was introduced in the national curriculum after 1988. The Roberts report of 2002 painted a dire picture of a dearth of qualified teachers of science and technical subjects, and a wholesale refusal on the part of young people to study physical sciences and even maths at A-level. So this Bill, in providing for a national structure of diplomas, rising to A-level standard, is seeking to do something very important that has eluded us so far in our national educational history. The diplomas are being developed with employers and the universities and at long last we can be confident that they will see the point. LEAs will carry a big responsibility in brokering and co-ordinating availability of the diplomas for all young people who want to take them. No other agency exists that can do that, and again it shows the wisdom of the Government’s recasting of the role of the LEA. This is a Bill that could stand in line of succession to the major reforming Acts of 1870, 1902, 1944 and 1988. We should scrutinise it in an appropriately positive and responsible spirit.