Education and Inspections Bill

I am as depressed as ever by the Liberal Democrat vision of a grey, uniform mediocrity among schools, with no opportunity for diversity or innovation—or the spark of difference. Therefore, I start from a position of rather favouring the Government’s Bill as it stands, but I should be very interested in the reply that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, will give. Some of the points made in Amendments Nos. 14 and 15 might be tackled better by amending Section 14 of the 1996 Act, because it addresses these issues, but they are not well addressed by these amendments. Section 14 has not led, by and large, to a great diversity in the curriculum provision between schools. In fact, there has been a general drift to uniformity and some of the more interesting diversifications have tended to be snuffed out. That is partly due to the pressure of the examination system that we have adopted, but there seems to be a general slow move in that direction. I would be delighted to see some greater duty on local education authorities, biting on Section 14 in some other way, to have a sharper attack on the curriculum diversity offered by their schools. The odd state school offers the IB, international baccalaureate, for instance. That should be enormously encouraged. Diversity does exist in the state system and I do not share the depression expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, about our rural areas. My children were in the Winchester state school system, where there is considerable diversity of provision in terms of size of primary schools and the style of their management. When you go into Winchester itself, there is a school that is laid back, a school that is academic and a school that is disciplinarian. All of them do well and different schools have different strengths. What was noticeable about the Winchester system at the time that I used it was the obstruction by the local education authority of parents who wished to make any kind of choice other than the school that was allocated to them. You had no access to school transport over to the next school in Winchester. If you did not want to go to your allocated school, you had to drive the seven or eight miles in yourself—you could not take the bus seven miles in to your allocated school and then get a little ““hopper”” on to the next one half a mile away up the hill. The difficulties put by local education authorities in front of parents who wanted to exercise choice meant that it was fine for middle-class parents like me to exercise it easily, with perhaps some inconvenience, but a lot of people who were not so well off found that difficult. There is no such thing as a ““good school”” that is a good school for everyone. Yes, a school can be good, but different children thrive in different environments, with different curricula, with different attitudes to discipline, with different opportunities. No school can be perfect and wonderful at everything. Event the best schools that I spend my life looking at through the Good Schools Guide have many faults. Choosing the faults, attitude and style of the school is one of great reasons for offering choice to parents, particularly the parents of kids with any form of special educational needs. Although we might like to think that the provision in all state schools is wonderful and uniform, it is not. There are a lot of wonderful schools, but there are some real horrors. When you really care about a vulnerable child, you should give the parents a chance to make that sort of choice for their child, essentially by doing what this Bill will do—encouraging local authorities to make it more possible for parents to choose between what is there. Yes, if you live in the outer reaches of Cumbria, your choices are limited, but then you enjoy the beauties of Cumbria and you have to offset that against those limited choices. The basic principles that the Government are aiming for are entirely right and I very much hope that they will stand firm.