Education and Inspections Bill

Perhaps I can begin by taking this issue head-on because I think that it will feature more in our discussions in due course. The claim made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, was that these reforms and what we are seeking to achieve in the Bill are somehow driven by the situation in London. She seemed to have in her mind a picture, widely shared but entirely erroneous, that in England there are essentially two types of communities: London, which has a high concentration of population, large numbers of schools and higher levels of parental dissatisfaction; and non-London, which has lower population densities—the noble Baroness seemed to have a vision of communities being served by a single school for the most part outside London—higher levels of parental confidence and ““the good school””, the model of which she set out in the quotation that she gave from the document produced by CASE. I entirely accept the elements of the good school that she described. To be blunt, I think that they are motherhood and apple pie—no one would disagree with those elements. But it is a question of what schools do beyond that in terms of curriculum diversity and diversity of ethos and mission—the things that they do above and beyond providing as good an education as they can in all those fundamental areas, including their social responsibilities, to meet the needs of their pupils. On London versus non-London, I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me if I inject some statistics into the discussion, but I think that they may be useful for our future debates and they completely reply to the point that she made. The figures are that 41 per cent—nearly half—of households in England have five or more secondary schools within two miles, not only in London but in a large swathe of England, and 65 per cent have five or more within three miles. Three miles is a perfectly acceptable distance for parents to envisage taking their children to school. Only 14 per cent of households have just one secondary school within five miles. So, with great respect to the noble Baroness, I think that the position that she wanted to paint as the norm outside London is the exception, even outside London. The fact is that at the moment there is already a substantial degree of choice between schools in the system. Indeed, that will be the case in almost any country with a population density such as ours. I wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, sending the results of international research that we published this week on school reforms in other parts of the world. It included Scandinavia, which in general is going down the line that we are seeking to follow of giving incentives to schools to offer greater diversity and choice to meet the wider range of needs of parents. It is a system where we expect all pupils to succeed in school and not, as was so often the case in the past, where a large proportion of them dropout without succeeding or gaining academic qualifications. To my surprise, one of the findings of the research related to Finland. I had had a vision of Finland similar to that described by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, at Second Reading. I thought that perhaps it was a great haven of social cohesion and tranquillity which did not involve any competition between schools. I was all ready to argue, as was argued when Finland was mentioned in another place, that that country is highly exceptional andthat Finland and England do not have many characteristics in common. In fact, the statistics in that paper are very revealing. In Helsinki, which is the part of Finland most like our country, half of parents expressed preferences for secondary schools which were not the local schools that they were allocated by the local authority. I am planning to go to Finland in September and, on Report, I will report back more fully about it. I know Sweden very well and have looked at its education reforms, but I am always in the market for looking at experiences elsewhere and I have paid close attention to them. But I suspect that we will find that in the parts of Finland which most resemble the communities in which most people live in England, the pressures for parental choice and diversity will not be greatly different from those that apply here. If I may inject facts into the debate and invite the noble Baroness to reflect on them, we may achieve a greater consensus on these issues as the Bill proceeds through the House. Amendment No. 13 would qualify the duty on local authorities to exercise their functions in relation to the provision of primary and secondary education with a view to securing diversity in the provisionof schools only where appropriate. If ““where appropriate”” means weakening the duty, for all the reasons that I have just given and as was ably set out by my noble friend Lady Morgan, we do not agree with that. However, if by saying that local authorities should exercise their powers with a view to securing diversity in the provision of schools where appropriate the amendment simply means that they must act reasonably and within the limit of their powers, which makes perfect common sense, then of course I accept that, and that requirement is already set out in the Education Act 1996. The new duty to secure diversity in the provision of schools is framed in the context of local education authorities’ existing duties under Section 14 of the Education Act 1996 to secure schools which are sufficient in number, character and equipment to provide for all pupils the opportunity of appropriate education, and the section then goes on to define ““appropriate education””. Amendment No. 14 would require local authorities to exercise their powers in relation to the provision of primary and secondary education under Section 14 of the 1996 Act with a view to securing diversity in the provision of both schools and colleges. We are very sympathetic to the aims of the amendment. The Government are committed to increasing diversity of provision, with more specialist provision and increased opportunities for individual choice. We want that to extend to the further education sector as well as the school sector, and that theme ran through our further education White Paper this March. However, for technical reasons, the Bill would not be the place to promote that duty. The duty in Clause 2 to secure diversity bears on local authorities’ duties in Section 14 of the Education Act 1996, which relate only to securing the provision of primary and secondary education. Responsibility for securing the provision of education for learners above compulsory school age, including from further education colleges, rests with the Learning and Skills Council under the Learning and Skills Act 2000 and not with local authorities. The amendment would therefore place local authorities under a duty to secure diversity in the provision of colleges which it would be impossible for them to fulfil. But the objective of ensuring diversity in college provision is one that, in principle, we entirely share.