Children, Schools and Families Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right. We have shared many such comments over the past 13 years. However, two wrongs do not make a right. From 1997 to 2005 I served on every education Bill, and there were at least two a year during that time. I have to be honest to the House and say that they made precious little difference to the life chances of our children. That is what saddens me. This Bill was supposed to be a flagship Bill. The hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), who has now left his place, has been a passionate defender of the poorest children living in his constituency—some of the poorest children in our society. The fact that, in the death throes of this Government, he has to say that these matters have not been dealt with, and that to lose the Bill would be a tragedy is—if I may say so to the Minister—a condemnation of the fact that some of the essential elements of our dealing with some of our poorest communities and how we bring them up and give them the sorts of life chances that they deserve have been a failure, perhaps by all of us, but certainly a failure to live up to that pledge by Tony Blair to put "education, education, education" at the heart of the Government's programme. That is enough of me remembering the past; we have a Bill in front of us. I am pleased that large sections of the Bill have been dropped—but not because I believe that some of the matters that it deals with do not need attention, particularly the sections dealing with the curriculum. The Rose committee made some quite remarkable suggestions on invigorating the primary curriculum, and I do not agree with the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and his party that we do not need to look rigorously at that. There is no doubt that unless we have a far greater sense of purpose and attainment in the primary years, we will not do the job that we need to do for the children mentioned by the hon. Member for Nottingham, North and others like them throughout the country, including children like those I taught in east Leeds, some of whom were among the poorest in the nation. That applies particularly to the work that Rose did in trying to ensure that mathematics was at the heart of the primary curriculum. Without good mathematics, many of those youngsters will have, frankly, no chance of accessing the modern post-recession economy, which will be vital in bringing them out of poverty and educational poverty. The link between education and the economy develops and drives everything—it is not magic—so I am sad that we have been unable to make progress. Frankly, we did not need clauses 1 to 6 in the first place. They would have heaped yet more bureaucracy on to bureaucracy. We must liberate those brilliant head teachers, such as Phil Willis at John Smeaton community high school, who was a maverick—I have admitted that. As my last Ofsted report remarked, charging the inspectors for car parking was innovative on the part of our youngsters. They had an idea and a drive to investigate how the economy works. As my noble Friend Baroness Walmsley remarked yesterday in the House of Lords, clauses 11 to 14 have rightly caused an awful lot of concern. Hon. Members on both sides of the House recognise the importance of PSHE and that introduction to economics. If I may say so, I find rather sad the excuse that the Minister has used—that the Bill draftsmen say that we cannot disentangle those measures—because there is clearly a problem with sex education. If we debated that for the next 100 years, there would still be a problem, because there are entrenched positions. My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) has been absolutely courageous in defending sex education and the right of children to get a balanced view. I strongly support the right of faiths to run schools in our society and to share with children in those schools the beliefs of those faiths—I cannot see anything wrong with that—but my hon. Friend is right to say that that should take place within a structure. Whether someone is running a Muslim, Roman Catholic or other faith school, they should be able to reflect their teaching according to those belief systems. However, it would be wrong to give those people the legalised opportunity to tell the children in their schools that the lifestyle of the person living next door is somehow immoral. That is what we are talking about. I hope that whoever comes in after the next general election will revisit the matter, because it is too important to leave hanging in the air. In that way, there was a cop-out last night. My last comment is on home education. There is a fundamental flaw in our thinking in this country—this was brought home in the debate with the home educators—that it is the state's job to educate our children. It is not; it is the parents' job. The Education Act 1944, and indeed Forster's great Act of 1870—an Act brought about by that great Bradford Member of Parliament—both state that it is the parents' duty to educate their children, and that the state acts as a convenient default mechanism when necessary, which most of us, myself included, have used. We have heard examples of home-educated children being abused, but they are in a tiny minority. In such cases the idea of home education is often used as a cover for abuse—but in reality, the vast majority of people who educate their children at home do so because they believe that that is in the best interests of their children. The state should work with them, not create more barriers for them. I would never home-educate my children because I believe that home-educated children miss out on so much, but I will defend to the death the right of parents to work with their children in a home setting to deliver an education. I am therefore pleased that clauses 26 and 27 have been dropped. All in all, as other hon. Members have said, this wash-up process is a rather sad and tawdry affair, and at the end of the day what is left of the Bill is probably not worth saving. However, if the Minister, being the man he is, assures me that it is, my party will not—