Education Bill

That highlights the point about having people running organisations whom we trust and who can make professional judgments, and about their weighing all the evidence and not being hidebound by particular formulae. In an earlier intervention, I mentioned that we will have much richer data than ever before in the schools system. That is not unique to this country, because a revolution is going on in the education world, as was reported a few weeks ago in a good article in The Economist. We know much more about schools and can therefore do much more predictive modelling than was possible before. In an intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) argued in favour of contextual value added. The Government will not use CVA—and thank God for that; I have yet to meet anyone who understands it. I have served on the Education Committee for 18 months and we are still waiting for our first teacher, head teacher, pupil, local authority officer or anyone else from the education establishment to talk voluntarily about CVA as a measure of school performance. Instead, we have what most people would understand as a value-added measure—progress from key stage 2 to key stage 4—which will do most of that job without the extra complexity and formulaic high jinks that the contextual bit introduces. Of course, it is only one of a large basket of measures and indicators that can be used. I am sure that it is not in the minds of Ministers or the leadership of Ofsted that any school should go a long time without inspection. I would be amazed if any head teacher wanted to go long without his school being inspected. Many of the indicators are what we might call ““digital indicators””, but Ofsted produces an analogue report with much richer evaluation and comment than some of those measures. I am sure that many parents will want to know that there is a relatively recent report informing them about some of the things that they cannot necessarily read in league tables, but I do not think that any of that calls necessarily for the formulaic approach of automatic triggers that Labour Members suggest. The next area I want to touch on is the anonymity of teachers. Reasonable questions have been asked about why schoolteachers should enjoy special treatment, and why those who work in further education colleges are treated differently. I accept that that is an anomaly, although it is hardly the first anomaly to arise between secondary schools and sixth-form colleges.