I have been accused of coasting. We shall come to that later. Either I am doing something very right or I am doing something very wrong; it is hard to work out which. Perhaps the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate is right. But, like the Schools Minister, I am still here after all these years. “Still Crazy After All These Years” was, I think, a song by Paul Simon. Anyway, we are still here, the two of us, facing each other across the Dispatch Box.
Let me pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). I am glad to see that another former shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), is sitting next to him: it is a wonderful reunion. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central has decided to take a sabbatical from Front-Bench politics, I really enjoyed working with him. I wish him well, and thank him for the hard work and passion that he brought to his role. I look forward to reading the book which I am sure will form one of the fruits of his new-found free time. If it is any sort of political memoir, I do not care what it says as long as I am in it.
New clause 1 deals with
“Schools where pupils do not fulfil potential”,
and should be read in conjunction with amendment 1, which proposes to leave out clause 1. The new clause replaces clause 1, which is entitled “Coasting schools”. The House will recall that when the original clause 1 was drafted, the Government were unable to provide a definition of “coasting schools”, even on Second Reading. In Committee, we were given some draft regulations which made it clear that what the Government had in mind was a purely data-driven exercise.
We believe there is a need to do something about schools that are doing well superficially but are failing to fulfil the potential of their pupils, hence our new clause. In government—my memory is long enough for me to remember what we did in government, as is clear from what I said earlier—we wanted local authorities to identify coasting schools whose intake did not fulfil earlier promise, and whose pupils lost momentum and failed to make progress. That often applies to pupils with special educational needs, or children who get left behind and may become disengaged from their education, but it is equally applicable to able pupils who are not stretched or challenged enough. We wanted coasting
schools to benefit from the support of other schools and leaders forming trusts and federations to formalise the benefits of collaborative learning.