Education and Inspections Bill

I warm to the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. In my experience, they relate to the realities in too many of our deprived communities. I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I reflect for a moment that the first amendment I spoke to in this Committee was about putting the right of the child to education at the centre of the Bill. If the potential of our young is to be fulfilled, the ideal is to have teachers and the community pulling together. It is important for the school to be the focal point for the community. It should be a place in which parents feel at home and, ideally, a place in which they see things happening that are relevant to their fulfilment. I do not believe a school’s activities should be limited to what goes on with the children in the classroom. There is potential for activities for parents as well, particularly if a lot of capital resources are put into a school. What worries me is when I think of communities in disadvantaged west Cumbria—the county in which I live—where dedicated teachers put everything into preparing a parents’ evening and only two or three parents turn up. I referred to this at Second Reading. That is not the experience of many Members of the Committee. We operate in a different context. Therefore, when my noble friend Lord Gould says that we have moved on and that parents want the best possible education, I agree that that is true for a lot of parents. But I am concerned about children whose parents are so much at the bottom of the pile that they do not turn up to parents’ evenings, who take no interest and have no aspirations for their children. That is wrong in terms of social equity and social justice, but it is short-sighted because it may deprive us of some super people who could make a great contribution to the future of our society. From that standpoint, we need to hear more from the Minister and his colleagues about their commitment and drive to get resources effectively into the most deprived and disadvantaged communities in our midst. In the end, politics is about priorities. Among my noble friends, I hardly dare use the old word because it will identify me as belonging to a previous age, but in my political philosophy socialism is about priorities. We have to make choices and the priority is getting resources to the most deprived. Without being cynical on this or being regarded as irresponsible, there is a some evidence that the brightest children will always look after themselves if they have a reasonable social background and the rest will do well one way or another. Of course we want to maximise that opportunity, and I do not take that extreme position. What really matters is the need to concentrate our attention on what we are doing to free children from the poverty trap. On the coast of Cumbria the situation continues from one generation to the next; it becomes institutionalised. That is the depressing feature. We need to hear more about this. I make another broader point that relates to the issue. I am a governor of the London School of Economics, and have been for a number of years. One of the things I enjoy most as a governor is that I am able to serve on the committee on access, which is about extending access to the school to a wider cross-section of students. Today I spent nearly three hours at a summer school for children from inner London schools. The committee is also about enabling children to get better opportunities in higher education, whether or not it be at the LSE. In the committee on access, one of the things that we worry about and can get terribly concentrated on is where we stand on the balance between the private and the public sectors of education. It is something to worry about at the LSE because we are very attractive to the private sector. We ask, ““Are we getting enough people from the public sector?””. But then we say, ““Hang on a moment. When we look at our figures from the public sector, what are we talking about?Are we talking about advantaged middle-classpublic sector schools in advantaged middle-class communities, which might in all sorts of ways be schools in the private sector, or are we talking about how we really provide horizons for those trapped in something completely different?””. I must say that today I came away from one of the liveliest sessions that I have encountered refreshed, challenged and cheered by what I experienced with these young people. I was looking at them and I could not help thinking that this question was very relevant because there is an element of self-selection, however we try. Some will get to that summer school, but the ones that perhaps should most be there will not. The issue always is what the Government can do to ensure that we keep the most deprived, the most disadvantaged and the most entrapped central to our vision, and how we are trying to assist them.