Education Bill

My Lords, I would also like to speak to this group of amendments. I support the amendments moved by my noble friend. I shall be brief. I think that the details of the amendments and how they would affect the legislation have been made quite clear. I would like to carry on where my noble friend left off in considering what underpins this. At first look, the system of the adjudicator and admissions forums might seem quite complicated. It clearly is a bureaucracy in the sense of the word and there are things going on there that seem to be relatively complex. However, I think that the Minister has to go back and look at why this arrangement was made. If those amendments improved the working of the adjudicator, I would not have a problem, but it is really quite clear that the powers of the adjudicator and the admissions forum are very much reduced by this. Three things underpinned the introduction of the adjudicator. When the Minister replies, will he be able to tell us how his Government are going to deal with these three problems if he removes the power of the adjudicator? The way that the last Government dealt with these three problems was through the system of admissions forums and the adjudicator. Take them away if you do not like them but it would be disastrous if nothing was put in their place, for three reasons. First, I go back to this great complexity of the system, when schools are their own admissions authorities, and indeed when the adjudicator system was brought in there were far fewer schools that were their own admissions authorities than is the case now. I was not in favour of any school being allowed to be its own admissions authority, save for faith schools. Indeed, I was not in favour of the move by my own Government to allow academies to be their own admissions authorities. As we now move towards having more schools in that category, it will get worse. I can recall a particular example of a London borough where parents could show that their children were no school’s first choice. They managed to miss all the admissions criteria of every school in the borough. They might not have been a boy for single sex schools, they were not of the faith for faith schools or they did not live close enough to those schools which chose proximity as a criterion, or they were not in the right catchment area. That may seem an exaggeration and I am not saying that it happened everywhere, but there were boroughs in London where the complexity of the admissions arrangements was so great that some children never met the criteria. This is going to be complicated, and the thought of parents having to manoeuvre their way through the system seems to me to be the worst way to start your child’s secondary education. It is not what should be motivating parents. Secondly, I will say quite forcefully that history shows that schools behave badly in this respect. They seek to improve their own chance of coming higher in the league tables or doing better in examination results. I can understand why, and along with all former Ministers I plead guilty to constructing a system that puts so much pressure on schools to do well in the performance tables that sometimes their behaviour runs counter to what they should be doing. When schools choose their admissions criteria, historically they have not been about taking the poorest, the least able, the most underperforming, the worst behaved and those from unsupportive families. They are the most difficult children to bring up to the key levels. I do not say for a moment that there are no schools and head teachers who are doing a really good job in this respect, but there is no history of schools setting up their admissions criteria in order to take on the most difficult children. Indeed, they set up criteria that will bring in those who have the best chance of succeeding. I have listened carefully to what the Government have said. Whether the pupil premium will change schools’ behaviour remains to be seen. But, to be honest, if it does not then it will be too late because the infrastructure that provided some protection will have been removed. I do not believe that the pupil premium will suddenly make schools change their admissions criteria so that they take on these children in order to get the money because I do not think a bit more money will make much difference. I just do not buy the idea that, all of a sudden, the historic behaviour pattern of schools arranging their admissions policies in order to take children that will put their school in a good light will change just because of the pupil premium. The third problem that the adjudicator was trying to solve is also the most important. I accept completely that the starting point for the Government is the wish to devolve powers to schools, and in many ways I think that some of these developments are good, timely and will serve us well. But I do not understand how being able to choose the children you teach is a freedom you deserve to have. It is not a freedom that should belong to schools, it should belong to parents. This will give schools the freedom to choose rather than parents the freedom to express a preference. I felt strongly as a teacher, and I feel strongly as a politician, that the job of teachers in schools is to teach the children they have. They must get their heads down and do their best by the kids that come through their doors. Any effort and energy put into changing the sort of children who come through your door and get on to your register is wasted. What you should be doing is working out how best to teach them. That is what being a teacher is all about; that is what being a school is about. I never brooked the idea that one way of raising standards is to change the admissions arrangements, but that is the way we have forced schools to behave in recent years. More important than that is that admissions is the only part of a school’s behaviour that can detrimentally affect the ability of a neighbouring school to improve, and that is what bothers me most. Even if you do not agree because you believe that a school should have the right to choose the children or have its own oversubscription criteria—which is essentially the same thing—and even if you think that is a freedom they need, you have to accept that that freedom sometimes makes it so difficult for neighbouring schools to raise standards because they get the children that are not in the over-subscription criteria after schools exercise the freedom. The whole of our education system is littered with schools that are really trying with some difficult children for whom life is made more difficult because of the admissions arrangements of a neighbouring school. That is the case whether you like it or want it or think it ought to be. My question to the Minister is: if you take away the last Government’s mechanism for solving the three problems what are you going to put in place? The problems are: first, the complexity of the system, even more so now that every school has responsibility for its own admissions arrangements; secondly, the behaviour of the schools, given that it has been proven that schools will endeavour to take the children that are easiest to teach; and, thirdly, the need to protect those schools whose chances of increasing or improving standards can be detrimentally affected by the admissions arrangements of a neighbouring school.