Children, Schools and Families Bill

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) on securing some really good changes to the Bill. It is rather late in the day, but he and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), the shadow Secretary of State, have spoken for so many people in this country who have written to Members of this House to express their concern about various aspects of the Bill, and most of those measures have been filleted out. The way in which my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton set out succinctly and clearly the dividing lines on education policy between the Government and the Conservative party will be really useful in the forthcoming weeks of the campaign. He says that we stand for less prescription and interference, and for giving more responsibility and freedom to parents and professionals. The decision to remove the ludicrous home education proposals exemplifies the difference between the Government's approach and our approach. Fortunately, the Government dreamt up most of these ridiculous proposals in their 12th year in office. Had they introduced them earlier, they could have got them on to the statute book, but they are not going to do so now. People will know that there is a big issue before them in the general election: if they vote for the Labour party, there is a risk that the proposals will be introduced again in future. All hon. Members have received much correspondence on the PSHE elements of the Bill, and I am very pleased that clauses 11, 12, 13 and 14 are now out of it. Voluntarism is working very well, and when things work well, why should the state interfere? My only quibble with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton concerns his implication that an incoming Conservative Government would reintroduce PSHE in a centralised curriculum. I believe that there is enough centralisation in the curriculum already. Given that schools are able to deliver PSHE perfectly well on the basis of acceptance of their own responsibility through governing bodies and parents, I hope that on reflection, an incoming Conservative Government will not meddle with PSHE, and will instead concentrate on our core requirements for better educated pupils who understand the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. I am delighted that the Bill has been filleted so expertly, but I regret the amount of parliamentary time that has been taken up by the Government's proposals when it was obvious that they would never get them through. Many of them were amendments to the Education Act 2002. If the Government had really wanted them, they could have been tabled at that stage. This has been simply a lot of gesture politics for the benefit of those who are not satisfied with the extent of the bureaucracy and regulation that already exist in education, and want more bureaucracy and more regulation. The Government were pandering to those interests. Today, however, we have a Bill that constitutes a snub to those who have campaigned for all that extra regulation, and I am delighted with the progress that my hon. Friend has secured.