Education and Inspections Bill

I speak to Amendment No. 18. It is a great pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. A major strand of the Government’s thinking is diversity, choice and enabling parents to make choices in the best interests of their children’s education on the basis of good information, which will lead to more children going to good schools. A second theme is the objective of making all schools into good schools: where a school is unsatisfactory or failing, to provide for decisive and swift action to remedy the faults which stand in the way of it being a good school. To some extent, a principal advantage of letting market forces work is to exert pressure on underperforming schools to lift their game. I shall argue a point brought out by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. We must have some regard to a school within a community framework, particularly where the community is socially and economically disadvantaged. As schools increasingly become places for the extended school day—where there are recreational facilities for the community, increased participation and a focus for lifelong learning—I see them becoming valued and important centres of community life. That is especially true in poorer communities, where people do not go outside their community much. They can be housing deserts, with little to bring them together to develop a sense of community; estates where young rascals—if I may so describe them—get up to damaging mischief because they have nothing better to do and no sense of belonging or responsibility to the community. Amendment No. 18 may not be well worded, but we must take the needs of these communities into account. Another of the Government’s themes is, rightly, parental involvement. The more you can involve a parent in a child’s education, the better it is for the child. There is lots of evidence on that. However, if a child is moving into a comparatively middle-class area, can we see parents who are not well educated and who live in social disadvantage feeling articulate or confident enough to go to a parents’ meeting and stand up and fight for their child and class interests in such an arena? I have my doubts. Some of these young people, particularly the boys, are not doing well at school. Because the school in their community has failed, they must move to a school in a better class area further away. It may be within two miles, but those are two miles in which they are more likely to truant and become a nuisance to themselves. They are possibly well into truancy already, but the more difficult it is to get access and keep a finger on them, the greater the risk. These are supporting arguments for caring for communities which have nothing much going for them. I argue that local authorities—and, in another amendment, admissions forums—should take the value of a school in a community like that into account. If it fails, they should replace it with a new school on the same site or in the community, to keep the community alive rather than educationally abandoning it. They should exert a moderating effect on death by attrition through loss of numbers while the process of regeneration and re-establishing a school takes place. It is the kind of consideration we can all understand. It is a question of how we can give effect to what I have in mind.