Education and Inspections Bill

I speak to Amendment No. 163A standing in my name. It is a constructive amendment, designed to strengthen support for parental preferences, which is the object of Clause 40. The philosophy behind it is simple—the more the system of centralised allocation shifts towards one of parental choice-based allocation, the more knowledge and information parents need to make their choices effectively, and the greater the responsibility of the Government to provide that information or make it accessible. The Government clearly understand their duty to provide a greater information base to support parental preferences but I am not sure that the choice advice machinery to be administered by choice advisers is quite the right one. It needs to be supplemented by something else. My criticism is that the advice is to be targeted on a small number of parents—at one time in one passage it is 6 per cent and in another passage it is perhaps 30 per cent. But only that group of parents is deemed to need it. The number of parents who could benefit from this information is much larger. More seriously, the government guidance refers to the information which the choice adviser will need to have, not to the information which parents will need to have. The information will be with the adviser, not the parents. It is almost as though the Government have a model of a GP/patient relationship. I am sure that that is not their intention, but it does unconsciously reflect their view of the nature of the target group. The assumption that all other parents have access to the information they need to make a choiceis wrong. Specifically, parents are likely to lack what they need most of all—information about comparative school performance in that locality. I have looked at a number of websites. Some have exam and key stage results and some do not, but none has local league tables. The best a school usually does is to publish its exam results and then compare them to average pass rates for England and Wales, which is not enough for a parent to see how good a school is in comparison with other local schools. Moreover, information on school websites is not provided in standardised form, which is necessary for easy comparison across schools to be made. In fact, I have to say that the websites of most schools in this country are primitive compared with those of American schools, which give much more information. Noble Lords who are interested in checking this out might compare the website of the Frederick Douglass Academy in New York with that of almost any maintained school website in the United Kingdom. It is argued that the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph and other high quality newspapers publish reliable league tables and that those reports are available online. However, many parents do not read those newspapers and many more do not have access to the internet. The conclusion I draw from all this is that information which parents need to make an informed choice is available to the persistent inquirer—and guess who that is likely to be—but in a scattered and non-standardised form. My idea is to concentrate this information in school information centres and to make it available to parents in a simple, readable and, above all, standardised form. I envisage there being such a centre—perhaps this is an idealised vision—in every town centre or high street into which parents can easily drop, receive information packs about the schools in their area, have their questions answered, and swap stories and information with other parents over a cup of tea or coffee. Above all, that information centre should be independent. It may be commissioned by the local education authority, but it should be independent of the local education authority and in a separate building. I am also strongly attracted by the idea of annual school fairs, which I first came across in one of the districts in Manhattan, at which schools display their wares once a year. They were extremely popular with parents in a very deprived area, who had been alienated from the school system, but who loved these fairs and, as a result of them, got much more involved with the schools. I accept that there are cost implications. Implementing my scheme will cost more than the £12 million over two years the Government propose to allocate to choice advice. I recognise that one or two districts already have parents’ advice centres. I notice from the guidance that this is done in Tower Hamlets. My impression is that these are targeted at disadvantaged and ethnic minority children rather than being a resource for all parents choosing a school at the end of primary schooling. Still, information is costly and I submit that the Government need to think hard about what information parents need to make, what the Minister often calls, ““an evidence-based choice””, and how best to supply it in a customer friendly way.