Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 16: Page 2, line 14, at end insert ““, and ( ) ensuring that the education provided in schools in its area shall contribute to social inclusion and community cohesion in that area.”” The noble Baroness said: The amendment concerns social inclusion and community cohesion, which should be borne in mind in the decisions that affect the education provided in schools. I take the point that these are regarded by some Members of the Committee as of secondary concern. Let me, therefore, step back to the original concept behind the community school, which I still believe to be of great value in a society such as ours. We live in a society which is multiracial, multicultural and in many ways divided. The community school came out of a socially profoundly split society, and one in which four-fifths of children went to a secondary modern school and one-fifth went to a grammar school. The community school was invented and designed to overcome that profound social division, which in my view deprived a large proportion of our children of any opportunity to take their education further, or, indeed, to achieve their full educational potential. I believe it is still the case that in many quarters children do not have the opportunity even today to meet their full educational potential. My noble friend Lady Sharp spoke about her own strong belief in community schools. The Bill, as I understand it, goes beyond secondary schools and embraces primary schools as well. I find that a troubling development. The primary school was about educating a child to develop a sense of belonging to a community and the world of other children in that community. It was, and is, the concept of teaching children tolerance, inclusiveness and understanding. It is a very important part of what it is to be a young child. I shall start at that point. I am frightened—perhaps the Minister can reassure me—that the introduction of trust schools and other schools at the primary level will go a long way indeed to fragment our society, which is not so strongly cohesive that it can risk that kind of fragmentation. In secondary schools, the argument for some specialisation is strong, especially over the age of 14. However, many of us would want to see schools offering both vocational and academic courses, so that we begin to heal the ludicrous division between them, which has so distorted and deformed English education—though not Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish education in the same way. It is a rather specific feature of the English school. Taking the view that what matters more than anything else is parental opinion and parental choice, I find it so extraordinary that in the Bill, which has tried to bring together contradictory concepts in a desperate attempt to make a single entity out of them, there is no level playing field between the community school, the trust school, the foundation school and the academy. That is the central point. I shall not go on about this now because there are many later amendments, but throughout the Bill favours those schools that are alternative to the community school. It does so by providing them with much more money, by not obliging them to follow the national curriculum and by allowing them to go ahead without any form of ballot or parental preference being expressed. I find that objectionable. If someone wants to say that that comes back to social inclusion and community cohesion, I say that is an element in it, and that is why I waited to speak on this group of amendments rather than earlier. If there were a level playing field, parental choice would operate. It would operate between well-off parents and not well-off parents, southern parents and northern parents. But the Bill is not like that. It does not create that kind of basis of choice. One has to ask why. I do not accept, because it simply is not true, what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, about grey uniformity. From the beginning secondary schools in this country have been amazingly diverse—not just individual schools with an ethos often created by their heads and teams of school teachers. That has always been true. All of us know that there are brilliantly good schools in every single category, and some very bad schools. That is as true—dare I say?—of private schools as it is of academies, community schools or any other group of schools you care to name. If people do not believe me they can read the conflicting reports on academies, for example, where some are said to be near failing and others are doing brilliantly. Go and read the reports of individual schools from Ofsted inspectors about community schools. Some are excellent; some are poor. There is a general problem, as was rightly said by my noble friend Lady Sharp, with inner-city schools. Incidentally, that is a problem anywhere you go in the world. None of us has been able to solve it satisfactorily so far. If the academies can solve it, that is wonderful. The jury is still out and there is no final verdict on the issue. We speak of the Bill as being about parental choice. As I have said, it could be, but it is not an open and fair choice at present. We speak of it being about improving standards. All of us want to see that, but we also want to try to ensure that standards are improved in the light of the need to maintain social inclusion. It is a very difficult set of requirements to combine. We would be less than honest with ourselves if we did not admit that there are real problems. I like Amendment No. 18, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, because it puts the school right at the centre of the community and asks what it can do for that community. Parents are particularly hard pressed, overworked, overstressed and often have little opportunity to give careful thought to exactly which school their child will go to—because they do not have the time to learn enough about those schools—in exactly the areas he speaks about. Those parents are least able to exercise choice because their lifestyles make it difficult for them to do so. We all know that. For a while, I represented one of the poorer ends of Crosby, a very poor part of Liverpool, Seaforth and Waterloo. Parents constantly spoke of how difficult they found getting to parents meetings to discover exactly what was going on, and how scared they were of going to see the headmaster or headmistress to ask questions about their children. A great problem is that parents do not have equal power, articulacy or influence. Anyone serious about the education system must therefore see how that can be dealt with and compensated for. I approve of the Government setting up a system whereby people can advise on choice. But when all is said and done, if we are to raise the educational level of the children about whom many of us were speaking, there must be a general improvement in the educational system, not one specific to trust schools or particular academies. I refer to those children with special needs and to the 60 per cent in the middle, neither of whom have the financial advantage of being able to choose between every possible kind of school, and also to those are living in such cramped conditions that talking about parental choice is frankly a bad joke. That is why I am concerned about this Bill, and why we feel that there are contradictions at its very centre. I repeat: one of the great problems we will come to later in the Bill is that the parental choice playing field is in no sense level. I beg to move.