Children, Schools and Families Bill

I thank the Minister for the concessions that he has made, which will remove clauses that posed a direct threat to the professional autonomy of teachers and that would have heaped mounds of bureaucracy on to teachers and head teachers and threatened the rights of parents to withdraw their children from sex education and to educate their children at home. The first element of this bureaucratic Bill, which we are happy to oppose, is a series of excessively prescriptive pupil and parent guarantees. Scores of guarantees were set out in the appendix to the White Paper and in a consultation document, with 38 tick boxes for teachers and more time taken away from the classroom. For example, guarantee 2.2 states:""the curriculum is tailored to every child's needs so that every pupil receives the support they need to secure good literacy, numeracy and ICT skills, learn another language and about the humanities, science, technology and the arts."" But given that 16 per cent. of 11-year-olds do not reach level 4 in English and 9 per cent. of boys leave primary school without even reaching any grade in the English key stage 2 standard assessment tests, that leaves scope for huge amounts of litigation. The key to raising standards is not to pass a law guaranteeing things, but to understand the reasons for underperformance and to address them. If passing a law guaranteeing outcomes was the answer, we could cure world hunger and all known diseases this afternoon in the House. The key to raising standards in our schools is not through bureaucracy, but through greater freedom for professionals and by expanding the academy programme, with academy providers such as Absolute Return for Kids and the Harris Federation encouraged to establish more schools in some of the most deprived parts of the country. These clauses would have piled additional bureaucracy on to teachers and head teachers and exposed them to the threat of expensive and time-consuming legal action. John Dunford from the Association of School and College Leaders said that those guarantees""will take statute into realms it has never previously covered. Instead of the increasingly diverse system that the Government has often said that it wants to encourage, England will have one of the most centrally prescriptive systems in the world...School leaders are extremely concerned that these 'guarantees' will turn into a whingers' charter"." We wholeheartedly agree with ASCL's concerns and are therefore pleased that the Government have abandoned those clauses. On one-to-one tuition, which the Minister touched on, we also strongly believe that it is needed for children who are falling behind, and we support that approach—that is what good schools do—but best practice is not spread by passing a law prescribing a whole raft of centrally crafted guarantees that people would then seek to enforce. We need to get away from such micro-prescription and give professionals and schools the autonomy that they need to flourish as professionals. That is how to raise standards. The Secretary of State is keen on his dividing lines in politics—I do not blame the Minister—but we believe that education policy should not be designed to be used as a tool in party politics. Education policy is about ensuring that we have the right landscape to enable schools to provide the highest quality of education for our children. On home-school agreements, it is right to abandon clauses 4 and 5, which would have created bespoke, individualised home-school agreements, negotiated for each child and each parent in a school and rewritten annually. We believe in strengthening home-school agreements, but not in turning them into a bureaucratic nightmare for head teachers. The Government's proposals faced widespread opposition. For example, ASCL called the idea "unrealistic" and pointed out that""such a proposal will be wholly impractical in secondary schools, which may have over 1,000 pupils, and will consume a great deal of school resource."" Again, that is our view exactly, and we are pleased to see those clauses go. On areas of learning, the proposed changes to the primary curriculum—with the introduction of six highly prescriptive areas of learning, each with voluminous programmes of study, each of which has a multitude of objectives—is anything but flexible. The English programme of study alone has 84 objectives. Maths has 76. Clause 10 would have been a major misstep, and we are happy to see it fall as well. The proposed introduction of personal, social, health and economic education was one of the most controversial aspects of the Bill. We have always strongly supported parents' rights to withdraw their children from sex and relationships lessons, and we have refused to compromise in upholding those rights. No one should ride roughshod over the rights of parents to bring up their children in the way they see fit. Ultimately, however small a minority wish to withdraw their children from such lessons, it should be up to the parent, rather than the Secretary of State and the Minister, to decide whether they want their children under 16 to attend lessons on sex and relationships.