Education and Inspections Bill

I rise on behalf of these Benches to raise some objections to the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. The amendment would do two things. First—and I will come back to this point—it would substantially remove the element of valid parental choice. Either we mean parental choice or we do not. If we decide to abolish the alternative option of a new community school, what we are effectively doing is determining the range of choice before a choice has even been made. Secondly, the amendment would remove the last barrier between the Bill and the possibility of an education Bill that would satisfy the Conservative wish to return to some form of selection. Therefore, this amendment is of the greatest significance and importance in determining the true purpose of the Bill. I, for one, look forward with very great interest to what the Minister has to say about it. The Conservative Party played a large and extremely constructive part in the creation of comprehensive schools. Even today, in many shire counties comprehensive schools work extremely well and have brought to a large number of children opportunities that they would not have had under a selective system. They have been issues of pride to the county councils and councils that administered and ran them, and have enabled literally thousands upon thousands of youngsters to access tertiary and higher education who never had the opportunity before. I believe that the comprehensive system in this country has been extremely badly served in its treatment by a very sophisticated public relations system which has given it nothing like the credit it deserves for the remarkable strides it has made and has concentrated on the failures of a very small number of schools. One of the things I remember, having been a Secretary of State, is that the proportion of failing schools in England and Wales is relatively small, probably about 200 to 300 schools, and that it is not a characteristic of one particular sort of school—the so-called community school. It is a characteristic of every single category of school. Regardless of whether we are discussing independent private schools, selective schools, secondary modern schools or comprehensive schools, there has always been an element of failure. One of the jobs I had when I was Secretary of State was to insist that failing private independent schools be closed. There was a proportion of failing private independent schools; there always will be. One of the wisest remarks ever made by a thinker on education—Michael Rutter, in his famous book—was that in every category there are failing schools and good schools. The key question is what makes a good school, not to assume that one category will define one school good and another bad. The community school is exactly what many parents would choose. We will come to later amendments concerning the centrality for my party of a fair choice being made by the parent—and, where it is appropriate in secondary schools, in consultation with the pupils. That should be the acid test of which schools should be allowed to go ahead. We do not seek to weight the choice; we would not remove a particular category of school from the list; in the last analysis, if we believe in parental choice, it must be valid and made genuine. With great respect, Amendments Nos. 77 and 55 would make that impossible. I said to the Minister—he took some exception to this, and I now better understand why—that I believe that the playing field in the Bill is not exactly level. He conceded that that was true of capital provision, because academies undoubtedly have some preference for capital buildings. Indeed, they have some preference for new and fine buildings. The average cost now is very high, above £20 million, well above what would be the case for a new community school. The Minister argued with great force that that did not apply to revenue. I should have explained earlier that when I referred to some—how can I put it?—bias in the playing field, I had in mind specialist schools rather than trust schools, where there is clearly a small but nevertheless relevant revenue element between specialist schools and community schools that are not specialised. But that was not all that I meant. I was not speaking purely about financial considerations; there are several others. The national curriculum will not apply to independent state schools, as I understand it. School pay and conditions will not be determined nationally and applied to the school, the school will have a greater degree of discretion on the matter. I am not clear whether SIPs will apply, but if they do, they will be set by the governing body and not by the local authority or, for that matter, the Secretary of State. In addition, the community school is uniquely saddled by having to seek the permission of the Secretary of State, with a very small number of exceptions—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has spelled out just how small that number will be. None of us want a poorly performing local authority to set up a new school. I hope that none of us would want to see poorly performing sponsors of an independent state school to set up a new school. We believe that the same provision should apply across the board, not to one section only. Then there is the issue of how far Ofsted inspections will apply rigorously within the independent state trust schools. I believe that there has been a very powerful public relations lobby against community schools and in favour of trust schools. One rather amusing example, which I find painful although amusing, appeared in the Times Educational Supplement on 6 June about ““a lavish dinner”” at which the heads of community schools were invited to apply for trust status by no less a figure than Sir Cyril Taylor. I cannot remember many lavish dinners being offered to heads of state schools not within the circle of those invited to move towards trust status. It goes far beyond that. There has been a consistent barrage of criticism of our comprehensive schools. That brings me to the second part of what I want to say. I will not go on for long; I know that there is time pressure on the Committee, so I will not repeat the speech, but I want to make this point. The Minister, who is a very fair-minded man, was kind enough to make available to us the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit study entitled, School Reform: a Survey of Recent International Experience. That is very fair of him and it is a very fair and objective report. The report throws very grave doubt on how far comprehensive schools have done less well than their selective alternatives. I went very carefully through that report. I also went through another report, called Education at a Glance, which covers a much wider range. It is published by the OECD and relates to the figures for 2005. It shows what I was trying to argue earlier; there are really good schools and really poor schools in each category—it does not depend on the category. Perhaps I may remark briefly on the matter. The OECD statistics go beyond the ones with which the Minister kindly provided me by including additional countries that are not covered by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. They show three things very clearly. First, among countries with selective systems, some of which go back a long way, the Netherlands does very well. It is not in the very top group, but it is very close to it, and it has had a selective system for very many years. Incidentally, it has a very diverse selective system, which includes faith schools, schools set up by parents, and many others, but it puts the emphasis on selection—it is a selective system. At the other end of the spectrum of selective systems— rather surprisingly, given what a powerful and rich country it is—is Germany, which comes out very close to the bottom on both literacy and numeracy, and comes out worst in relation to the impact of social group, occupation and income on educational achievements. Germany has been devoted for a very long time to the three-track system of Hochschule, Fachschule and Technische Schule in a way that has not changed for many years, and it is surprising that it has a very poor record, according to OECD indicators. Let me be equally fair. In the group that is called ““strongly parent-related””—that is, where parents are free to make choices—Denmark comes out as a basically comprehensive but very poor system, largely because it gives almost total freedom to parents to choose whatever sort of school they want, from independent to comprehensive, but it does not have the sort of rigorous inspection that we have in this country. Finally, we come to the comprehensive group. At one end is Norway, a country with little discipline and a great belief that it was doing well. It is wrong; it is not doing very well according to the OECD indicators of mathematical and literacy achievement. At the other end is Finland, a country that does the best in Europe over the whole spectrum and that has nothing but comprehensive schools and only a tiny percentage of about 2 per cent who opt out of the system. It is simply rubbish to pretend that a system determines the standards that children achieve. That is not true. What happens and what matters is whether schools have good heads, a good vision and a good sense of commitment, and, on behalf of many thousands of teachers and many hundreds of head teachers in this country, I resent the attempt to run down the major achievements of our comprehensive schools. I conclude by saying that, according to the OECD indicators in this thick book, which I shall put in the Library for anyone who is willing to see it, the United Kingdom actually comes out extraordinarily well. The Minister may want to take some credit for that, although the figures date back to 2000 when 85 per cent of our children were in comprehensive schools and before the system began to fragment into academies and all the rest. That 85 per cent of children in the comprehensive system achieved seventh position out of 41 countries tested by the OECD for literacy, and roughly the same for numeracy. Among the very highest placed industrialised large countries, we were exceeded by countries such as Korea, Finland, which I have already mentioned, and one or two others, sometimes but not always including the Netherlands. However, in our ability to include all our children and our capacity to rate highly according to these demanding OECD indicators, called PISA—the programme for international student assessment—the validity of which no one has questioned, the United Kingdom has come out surprising well. Instead of taking credit for that, we run down those very parents and teachers who have achieved that. Yes, we should achieve more, but we should not understate what we have done, and, above all, we should not fall into taking part in what is in essence a political football game on the field of education. I hope that the Government will reject this amendment. I hope that they will go further and assure us that they are completely objective in the way in which they conduct their competitions between schools and that one school is not weighed against another. In our view that implies that—I will come to this on a later amendment—ballots will be conducted in which parents can legitimately take part, and that the Government will respect parental ability to choose and to have a preference. At least publicly, they state over and again that they believe that. If they accept this kind of weighting, that belief will not add up to anything very much in real terms. I oppose the amendment.