Education and Inspections Bill

I am completely with the noble Baroness in spirit. She referred to the ““assault””—perhaps I may put it that way—on bureaucracy for which the late Lady Blatch was renowned. The amendments that she moved in respect of the previous Education Bill became Section 38 of the Education Act 2002, which imposed on the Secretary of State a duty to have regard to the desirability of avoiding sending excessive materials and imposing excessive administrative burdens on schools. We are very mindful of that. A good deal of attention is given to the sending out of materials to schools. The Permanent Secretary is required to take a personal interest and there is a committee which all publications going to schools have to go through in the department before they are allowed to be issued. That has had the effect of reducing the number of pages. Some years ago we took a decision that we would move towards an electronic-based system of communication with schools. That is almost entirely complete and very little paper is sent to schools. I accept what the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said. Having it all coming electronically does not necessarily mean that it is less burdensome than when it appears in envelopes. But we are taking that seriously too. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, referred to one of the big changes that we have made recently. The new inspection framework will have the effect of reducing by nearly 50 per cent the inspection burden on schools. We undertook that review of inspection precisely to address what was perceived as being—in many cases it was—one of the most onerous burdens on schools; namely, the weight of inspection. We took the view that after two complete inspection rounds had been undertaken with the creation of Ofsted, there was no need to have the same extremely burdensome process of inspection in place. We moved instead to a system on which inspection is in inverse proportion to success. Most schools now get a very short inspection. It is only where the inspection of schools gives rise to serious concerns that there is a more elaborate process of inspection. We intend to begin a new programme of work in the autumn to tackle bureaucracy by focussing our efforts in those areas of regulation which our front line colleagues in schools and colleges tell us are the most burdensome. We will assess the costs, in time and money, of fulfilling the administrative obligations of the most burdensome regulations. We will set ourselves targets for reducing those costs. We will publish those targets and our progress against them in an annual simplification plan, which will also include details of all our initiatives to simplify the regulatory landscape and reduce the burden of bureaucracy on front line stakeholders. I hope that that will give some comfort to the noble Baroness. Finally, I looked at the 117 boxes. I would be happy to go through this with the noble Baroness, but each box relates clearly to the objectives of the early years foundation stage. Having looked at them with our professional staff, I could not honestly say that any of them were superfluous. I am happy to give them to the noble Baroness to look at. If she has any particular suggestions of those that she would like to drop, I will discuss that with her further.