House of Commons Hansard Debates for 19 Nov 1991

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Educational standards could and should be higher. There is too great a variation in the performance of otherwise similar schools with similar teachers and similar resources serving similar areas and similar children. If standards in each school are to be raised, we need a better flow of information about the performance of schools, improved systems of inspection and better means by which action can swiftly be taken when a school is falling down on its job. The Secretary of State tried to make great play of the suggestion that we had caught up with him. I wish that he had bothered to prepare properly for the debate and had bothered at least to find out what the Labour party's policy was. At the moment, in order to attack us, he must invent our policy and our record. For the past three years, we have published documents about the need to improve standards of inspection and the monitoring of standards. In June this year, well before his conclusions were announced about the review of the inspectorate, we published a document called "Raising the Standard" on which we had worked and consulted for 18 months. That document--of which I know the Secretary of State has received a copy--states that, drawing on the experience of the Audit Commission, of which the Secretary of State approved in other respects, we would establish a tough and independent education standards commission which would take over the inspectorial work and staff of Her Majesty's inspectorate, and would lead and co-ordinate the work of local authority inspectors.

We have also read and digested the Audit Commission's report on the variability in the work of local inspectors, and we believe that it is too variable and must be reformed. HMI would be held more at arm's length from Ministers because we believe that its role as impartial monitor of the system is compromised by its other current role as private adviser to the same Ministers. Local authorities would have a clear duty to inspect and monitor schools in their areas and to publish comparative data on the performance of schools.

The Secretary of State drew attention to the curious wording of section 77 of the Education Act 1944, which deals with inspection by local authorities. In spite of the Government's claims to be concerned about inspection, they have not during the past 12 years--despite the opportunities provided by three major education Bills--bothered to try to change the current statutory basis of inspection until now.

Under our plans, local authority inspectors would be

constitutionally separate from other local authority functions. Local authorities themselves would be inspected by the education standards commission. The Bill contains no such proposal. Parents and governing bodies would get new rights of complaint to the education standards commission and, in certain circumstances, they could force action by the commission in relation to a local education authority and to a school governing body.

Under our proposals, schools would receive a full inspection at least once every five years, but regular monitoring by a team of properly qualified inspectors working in all schools in an area and under the supervision of the education standards commission would provide a flow of information on a consistent basis to schools, to teachers, to parents, to local authorities, to the Department of Education and Science and to Parliament.

Our proposals were carefully worked out over a three-year period and have been widely welcomed, not

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least by parents and by governors' associations, and by the Secondary Heads Association, which has excoriated the privatising of the schools inspectorate. In contrast, the near- universal condemnation of the plans of the Secretary of State has been overwhelming.

Under the Bill, the inspectorates at national and local level are to be privatised, but only the heads of the private commercial inspection firms will need to be registered with the rump of Her Majesty's inspectorate which remains. The requirement for training of the rest is lax and cannot be implemented unless the training itself is privatised. The only requirement in the Bill about the qualities needed for inspectors is that at least one in any team should be wholly ignorant of education and of schools. The only qualification laid down in the Bill is no qualification at all.

The system is untried and untested. None of the countries with which our education system is adversely compared--France, Germany, Japan and Korea-- has privatised its inspectorate or is even contemplating it.

Mr. Phillip Oppenheim (Amber Valley) : Japan?

Mr. Straw : Japan as well.

The scheme is irresponsible beyond belief. None of the claims of the Secretary of State for the new, privatised inspectorate stands up to examination. He says that the inspectorate will be strengthened and all- powerful ; in fact it will be severely weakened. He says that it will be independent of Government. It will not be ; it will be a creature of Government. He says that handing over school inspection to commercial inspectors will help to raise standards. In fact, it will make the establishment of any consistent standard of inspecting, with the consequent raising of standards, well nigh impossible.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke : Does the hon. Gentleman realise that of the countries with which he made comparison, Japan and Korea, which he appears to extol, do not have a system of inspection as far as I am aware, so can hardly be described as having the Government type of inspection which he proposes?

I remember the hon. Gentleman's old proposal about the standards commission. Is it not the case that, under his proposals, inspection would be carried out only by employees of the Government or of local government-- overwhelmingly by local government, which will manage the schools--and that Her Majesty's inspectorate, far from being made more powerful, would be placed under the control of a quango appointed by the hon. Gentleman?

Mr. Straw : The Secretary of State is wrong on the latter point and wholly misunderstands the former. The education standards commission would be nominated by the Secretary of State, but the nomination would be subject to the endorsement of the all-party Select Committee on Education, Science and Arts, and the commission itself would appoint the chief officer. If the Secretary of State is serious about guaranteeing the independence of the senior chief inspector, he should adopt that process rather than his proposal, under which he will, in practice, appoint the senior chief inspector.

The Secretary of State is wrong to suggest that only the local authority inspectors would inspect schools, but he is right to say that the inspectors would be public service employees. We do not believe that the inspection of school systems should be handed over to private companies, any more than we believe that the police, the armed forces or

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the national health service should be privatised. We believe that some things can be dealt with by the private sector, but that public services and the regulation of public services should be maintained within the public sector. Even this Secretary of State adopted that position in respect of the regulation of other public services for which he has been responsible.

Mr. Harry Greenway (Ealing, North) : The hon. Gentleman will recall that, during his time with the Inner London education authority, the authority appointed a number of people from outside teaching to be heads of schools, notably Margaret Miles. Those people did remarkably well. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that it is not feasible to appoint people from outside teaching or people who have not been associated with education to inspect schools, as the Secretary of State proposes?

Mr. Straw : With the inspection of classroom practice and what goes on in schools generally, it is not possible for outside observers who have no educational experience to do the job. I visit at least a school a week. The Secretary of State has managed to visit three primary schools in a year, so he will have picked up something of what I am about to say.

I try to develop as much expertise as I can about what is going on in schools, but I have never taught. It would not be sensible to have a lay person such as myself judging what goes on inside a school. One reason why Her Majesty's inspectorate is held in high esteem is that the inspectors have had experience of classroom practice. They are or have been good pedagogues and, as a head teacher said to me yesterday, when an HMI comes inside a school, one knows that one cannot pull the wool over his eyes. If a lay person came in, it would be easy to do so.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke : I am genuinely trying to clarify the principle on which the hon. Gentleman stands. No one is talking about privatising the education service, the health service, the police or the armed forces, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman concedes. To cut through his language, is the great principle on which he stands that those who inspect on behalf of the customers of the service should be employed by the people who provide the service for each and every case in the public services?

Mr. Straw : The Secretary of State has described the principle with which I disagree. I believe strongly, as I shall show, that the regulator of the services should be separate from the provider. One of the central objections to right hon. and learned Gentleman's plan is that the provider becomes a regulator.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Michael Fallon) : They will be employed by them

Mr. Straw : As is his wont, the Under-Secretary of State is muttering from a sedentary position. The inspectors will receive their pay cheques from the local authority, but, like environmental health officers, their statutory duties will place them at arm's length from the rest of the local authority. The Secretary of State cannot make a joke of that. The truth is that HMI will continue to be paid by the Crown. The judiciary are paid by the Crown, but that does not mean that they are creatures of politicians. What

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matters is the constitutional relationship between those individuals and the service that they regulate, not the source of their pay cheques.

Mr. Oppenheim : What about Japan?

Mr. Straw : My understanding, based on better briefing than that of the Secretary of State, is that there are inspectorates in Japan and in Korea. It is no good the Secretary of State looking to the Box for information. Both those countries have public service inspectorates. The claim by the Secretary of State to be strengthening the power of the inspectorate is laughable. The inspectorate is to be cut to one third of its present size. Many inspectors with years of experience are to be made redundant. Her Majesty's inspectorate will be reduced to a rump which is quite incapable of meeting the tasks imposed on it. That is not just my view, but the view of those who know a little more about the task of inspection--Her Majesty's inspectors themselves. Their association, the First Division Association, said that, far from HMI being made "more powerful and independent", it

"will be severely weakened and damaged".

We know that the secret review of HMI concluded not that 175 inspectors would be needed for the inspectorate's new role, but that at least 380 or 390 would be needed. The Secretary of State wriggled about those figures. He was desperate to avoid mentioning them, for fear that he would then have to produce the review. He knows that the review said that 380 to 390 inspectors were needed. To paraphrase the review, he also failed to explain the difference between the assumptions on which he based his policy and those made in the review.

We know that the 175 inspectors will not be able to do the job that is expected of them. A breakdown of the figures in documents sent to me shows that just 43 inspectors will be involved in the inspection of schools and of educational issues. Just 39 inspectors will be engaged in supervising the army of private commercial inspectors who will have to be registered, trained, monitored and assessed, and who will then have to log their reports. On those figures, there will be just one HMI to cover the 190 school inspections that will take place in any one year in the county of Kent.

It is ludicrous to expect anyone to believe that those 175 inspectors could conceivably monitor the system over which they are supposed to have control. The fact that the task will overwhelm those 175 inspectors is confirmed by schedule 1, paragraph 2 of which states that the senior chief inspector has powers to bring in private, outside, commercial consultants, called "additional inspectors". Scores of such private consultants will have to be brought in to do work currently carried out by Her Majesty's inspectorate if the Bill's scheme is to have the remotest chance of success. Yet the Secretary of State claims that he is not privatising the inspectorate.

The second claim made by the Secretary of State is that the new inspectorate will be more powerful than the one that it replaces. The independence of any institution depends partly on its explicit power and partly on the information and knowledge at its disposal. As an institution, Her Majesty's inspectorate is to be broken up. But its intellectual foundation is also to be demolished. The respect and authority of Her Majesty's inspectorate

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has been based upon the cohesion, dedication and skill of a single group of men and women and on their day-to-day contact with colleagues from the local authority inspectorate. All that is to go, to be replaced by a fragmented, privatised inspection system. Aside from its formal inspections, Her Majesty's inspectorate typically visits or inspects 6,000 schools in the course of the year. Local authority inspectors visit and inspect thousands more. Under the proposals of the Secretary of State, total inspection is likely to be less than it is today. Policy issues may not be studied at all and activities such as youth and community work seem to have been forgotten altogether.

At one moment, the Secretary of State showers the inspectorate with hollow compliments, but, when he departs from his script, his true feelings and contempt for the inspectorate become all too clear. This afternoon, he sneered at the way in which, given the ordinary cycle of inspections, it would take 200 years to get through all the schools in the country.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke : It is true.

Mr. Straw : We agree that the system ought to be reformed, but to suggest that that is all the work that Her Majesty's inspectorate does is to parody the position, and that was what the Secretary of State sought to imply. On "News at Ten" the Secretary of State sneered at unnamed teachers who felt that inspectors were people who could not teach. On 4 November, the right hon. and learned Gentleman told the House that his objection to the local authorities inspection service was that the inspectors were "ex- teachers".

The Secretary of State has no reason to feel warmly towards the inspectorate. It has damned the city technology colleges programme and criticised the Conservatives' education policy, pointing out that, after 12 years, one in three children gets a raw deal and that 20 per cent. have unsatisfactory reading teaching. It is incredible that the Secretary of State should now expect us to believe that he wants to make the inspectorate more powerful and independent so that it can be even more critical in its conclusions about Government policy. In any event, the Bill gives the lie to the Secretary of State's claim. Three key lines in the Bill make the senior chief inspector wholly subordinate to the Secretary of State and the Government of the day. Clause 2(5) states :

"In exercising his functions the Chief Inspector for England shall have regard to such aspects of government policy as the Secretary of State may direct."

The Secretary of State is a lawyer. He knows very well that, when an Act directs that someone shall have regard to something, that amounts to a clear direction of that individual.

Under our proposals, as I have already told the Secretary of State, the independence of the inspectorate will be guaranteed, membership of the education standards commission will be subject to endorsement by the Select Committee, and the commission, and the senior officer, will report to Parliament not to Ministers.

The independence and power of HMI will be undermined by the central proposal of the Bill that, in future, school governing bodies alone will pick, choose and pay their own inspectors. That proposal is based on a profound misconception of whom inspectors should be serving. Schools are public institutions, paid by the public

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to serve a public purpose. The public's responsibility is to the children in each school and their parents, but also to the wider community and the national interest.

The public interests of the consumers of the service are potentially in conflict with those of the providers of the service--the teachers, head teachers and governors of any school. Governors now play a significant role in determining a school's policy and administration. The head should rightly be the most influential member of the governing body and should enjoy the closest relationship with his or her chair of governors. The governors are in no sense at arm's length from the school ; in many circumstances they are the school.

In every other aspect of public life, without exception, the Government have recognised that public institutions must be regulated on behalf of the consumers, and that those regulators must be wholly at arm's length from the providers. If Ministers had come here to propose that British Telecom and Mercury could pick and choose their own regulators, there would have been a public outcry. If restaurants were suddenly allowed to pick and choose their own environmental health officers, public confidence in food inspection would plummet. If Ministers came to the House saying that they wished to encourage competition between one set of regulators and another, the country would rightly believe that they had taken leave of their senses. Yet that is exactly what is proposed in the Bill, which imports into school inspection the worst aspects of private auditing of public companies. It is the BCCI solution to the regulation of public bodies.

The Tory party claims to understand human nature, but the Bill shows remarkable ignorance of it. Allowing schools to pick and choose and pay their own inspectorate may gratuitously damage the good reputation of fine head teachers and allow underperforming heads to escape effective scrutiny. Under the Bill, schools must seek at least two tenders from different firms of private inspectors. In practice, the choice will most be influenced by the head and the chair of the governing body. On what basis will they select from those tenders? They will pick partly on price, but they will also pick the firm most sympathetic to their approach. A headmistress told me last week, "The moment that any private inspectors give us a bad report, they will not be reappointed the next time."

The ludicrous idea embodied in the Bill is, moreover, inconsistent with the stand that the Secretary of State has taken on the regulation of public services. Until the early 1980s, local authorities could pick, choose and pay for their own auditors. In 1982, a Bill was introduced to require that, in future, each local authority auditor was chosen not by the local authority but by the Audit Commission. In commending that to the House, the Secretary of State for the Environment said :

"It is the essence of the audit function that the auditor should be, and be seen to be, independent because local authorities appoint their own auditors, audit is not seen to be obviously independent of local government."--[ Official Report, 18 January 1982 ; Vol. 16, c. 53.]

What is the difference between the appointment by the Audit Commission of local authority auditors and the need for the educational auditors of schools to be externally appointed by bodies external to the schools ? The Secretary of State voted for that Bill.

Another example is the position of the NHS opt-out trust hospitals. Few institutions are now so detached from the public service. We have been told time and again how

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crucial is their autonomy. As Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. and learned Gentleman had the choice of allowing trust hospitals to pick and pay their own auditors or of ensuring that that choice was made for them. He chose the latter course. By his decision, it is not the trusts but the Audit Commission that appoints auditors to NHS trust hospitals because of the self-same need for auditors to be, and to be seen to be, independent. I simply do not understand how, having adopted that position in respect of the appointment of local authorities and trust hospitals, the Secretary of State should now be wriggling to suggest that schools should pick and choose their own regulators.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke : At times, the hon. Gentleman seems to come dangerously near to agreeing with my principles. The aim of looking after the customer, as compared with the provider, sounds very commendable, but I do not understand how any of that squares with the hon. Gentleman's proposal that local government should be the only inspector of the schools it runs. The hon. Gentleman is taking away all choice and saying that only local government should provide inspections.

Mr. Straw : The Secretary of State has already received one copy of "Raising the Standard". I shall send him another, which he can use as bedtime reading. He parodies our proposals. What we propose is the establishment of an independent commission, answerable to Parliament and with membership approved by Parliament, to run HMI and supervise the local authorities inspectorate, which itself runs at arm's length from the local authorities, by virtue of constitutional position and legislative power. Local authority inspectors and HMI, which are at arm's length from the schools these days, inspect the schools, but the local authorities are to be inspected by the education standards commission.

It does not lie well in the Secretary of State's mouth for him to complain about local authorities. His scheme for schools to pick and choose their own inspectors is so defective that in the body of the Bill he must make local authorities the inspectors of last resort. He acknowledges that, in the end, the responsibility may have to fall to the local authority when the privatised system fails.

The history of this is clear. Provided that the legislative framework is clear--as it is with social services inspectors and environmental health officers--there is no reason why local authorities should not be able to operate at arm's length. They are not inspecting themselves ; they are inspecting schools. In addition, the education standards commission would inspect the local authorities.

Mr. James Pawsey (Rugby and Kenilworth) : How can the hon. Gentleman square that ? Earlier he admitted that the inspectorate would be paid by the local authority that runs the schools. He who pays the piper calls the tune. That must be perfectly logical. It is not an arm's-length operation. The hon. Gentleman is saying that the inspectorate will inspect schools in which the heads and other staff are paid by the local education authority.

Mr. Straw : The chief constable receives his pay cheque from the local authority, but that does not make him the creature of the police committee or the local authority, because his powers are clearly laid down in statute to guarantee him his independence. The Lord Chief Justice receives his pay cheque from the same computer as the Secretary of State, but that does not make him the

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Secretary of State's creature. The structure and the powers for inspections are crucial. It is no good the Secretary of State trying to dodge our proposals. His proposals are fundamentally defective, because the schools that are being inspected will be allowed to pick, choose and pay their own inspectors from the ranks of private inspectors.

Dr. Keith Hampson (Leeds, North-West) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Straw : No, I will not, because the hon. Gentleman has just entered the Chamber.

One of Labour's criticisms of the present system is the inadequacy of follow-through action. Failing schools might be identified, but even when that happens, action to improve the situation has not always occurred. Labour's proposals deal directly with that problem by ensuring that each local inspectorate agrees in advance with the education standards commission management strategies for intervention so that there is a flow of information between inspections to provide early warning of failings.

The Bill will make follow-through and regular monitoring far more difficult, but the Secretary of State did not refer to that. Local inspectorates as we know them are to be destroyed. Local authority inspectorates that remain will operate as commercial undertakings. According to clause 15(4), the service must be entirely self-financing. The local authorities' general power to inspect is to be removed altogether.

When a school is found to be failing, who will intervene? If that failure is shown up in four-yearly inspections, the responsibility lies with the governors who must produce an action plan. That is an inappropriate task to load entirely onto the shoulders of governors. As the National Association of Governors and Managers has stressed, that ignores the nature of school governors as lay people with limited time and the fact that in most cases the failures identified will be those of the head and his or her senior management team whom amateurs on a governing body will find it extremely difficult to hold to account.

Problems in a school do not conveniently coincide with the one week in four years of a formal inspection. Nor may they be evident from the school's crude performance data. What if a head falls ill and major management problems develop as a consequence some months after the formal report?

Dr. Hampson : Will the hon. Gentleman give way now?

Mr. Straw : I will happily give way to any hon. Member who has taken part in this debate, but the hon. Gentleman has just walked into the Chamber.

Dr. Hampson : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman should retract that remark. In the past 15 minutes, I have listened to all he had to say about the local inspectorate and I simply wanted to make a relevant point about that. It is quite out of order for him to accuse me of not listening to him.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Paul Dean) : That is a matter for the hon. Gentleman who has the Floor.

Mr. Straw : As I was saying, who then is under a duty to monitor the school's performance and intervene to ensure that it returns to an even keel? According to the Government's scheme, the answer is, no one. The senior

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chief inspector will not, in general, know of such problems. Even when he does, he will not have the staff to intervene. The local authority's inspectorate will have no power to intervene off its own bat. There will instead be a great black hole. Standards of education will have been sacrificed in favour of the Bill's bizarre dogma.

Mr. Bob Dunn (Dartford) : The hon. Gentleman seems to be saying that he would appoint an education commission at the centre which would comprise members appointed by the Secretary of State. It would liaise with local education authority inspectors to discuss strategies for development and improvement. However, if the policy was introduced, the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) would be Secretary of State--something which will not happen and I gave up fantasies a long time ago--

Mr. Brian Sedgemore (Hackney, South and Shoreditch) : Why intervene, then?

Mr. Dunn : To put a sock in your mouth. Mind you, it would have to be a very big sock.

A Labour Secretary of State would appoint the membership of the commission which would deal with local authority inspectors appointed by Labour councils. I am not implying that all that is wrong : it may well be right. However, there may be collusion and conspiracy to cover up, as occurred over William Tyndall school 10 years ago, a case that has been vividly etched in my mind. Is there not a fundamental weakness in the hon. Gentleman's policy?

Mr. Straw : I will send the hon. Gentleman a signed copy of our document, and when he reads it he will be reassured. We accept that the current system for inspecting and monitoring schools must be reformed. We have been saying that for far longer than the Government have said it. I accept that local authority inspectors must be placed at arm's length from the rest of the local education authority. We are absolutely clear about that. Those inspectors must be supervised by an independent commission and that is what we are proposing. That is a great deal more coherent than the Secretary of State's proposal, but it is not too different from the proposal in the 10-minute Bill moved by the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn). There were other defects, but it proposed that the Audit Commission should run the inspectors, and that is more coherent than the Secretary of State's proposal today.

Mr. Cecil Franks (Barrow and Furness) : I want to move the hon. Gentleman away from the constitutional position of his proposals and from the Government's proposals. The prime weakness of the present inspection process is that while the HMI can inspect a school, it is completely powerless to act if it finds bad teaching practice. I have heard nothing in the Opposition's proposals which would remedy that problem.

Mr. Straw : I agree that that is one of the major defects of the current system. With respect to the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Franks), there is far more in our proposals than there is in the Secretary of State's, although perhaps the hon. Gentleman could not hear what I was saying because of the noise created by the hon. Member for Leeds, North- West (Dr. Hampson).

I explained that, under our proposals, each local education authority would have to agree and have validated by the education standards commission

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management systems for intervening when a school was found to be failing. There are two problems at the moment. First, there is no proper system of inspection. It is haphazard and varies from local authority to local authority. Some do it well, while others do not do it at all.

The second problem is that, where a school's problems are identified, action does not automatically follow to remedy them. We have thought about this matter a great deal. We have said that every local authority must have in place--not after the event, but before the event--strategies for intervention which will include putting people into a school or perhaps terminating people's employment. Those points must be agreed in advance with the education standards commission.

The problem with the Government's proposals is that, if problems are thrown up during the inspection, the governors must produce an action plan. I believe that it is wrong to put the duty to take action on the governors, because often the problem will be the head, the deputy or the senior management of the school. It is unreasonable to expect lay people to take action against them without any support. If problems occur at any other time than at the formal inspection, in the Secretary of State's system no one will have any duty--few will have power--properly to intervene.

There is another difference between the Secretary of State's system and ours. Under our system, the governing body or parents can, in certain circumstances, require the education standards commission to intervene over the heads of the local authority or school governing body. There is no proposal in the Bill to give parents real rights where they are willing to enter into such a situation to get effective intervention by the inspectorate.

Dr. Hampson : Will the hon. Gentleman give way ?

Mr. Straw : No, I shall not give way. I need to press on. Because of the restrictions that the Secretary of State seems intent on imposing on the information that local authorities and inspectors will be able to collect and disseminate to parents, the monitoring of schools will be inadequate. Although the Secretary of State spent 50 minutes talking about the issuing of information, the only clause about information in England is clause 16. It is a regulation-making clause devoid of a specific requirement, and we shall examine it in detail in Committee.

We in the Labour party have long had an overwhelming commitment to freedom of information, and our policy review and policy statements have made that clear year after year. Because of that, as a matter of open government and of parents' rights, the Labour party is committed to making available aggregate information about a school's examination results, provided that its reliability is clear. We have specific and serious objections, which used to be shared by Ministers, about the publication of test data school by school on seven-year-olds--another matter which we shall examine in Committee. The idea that the Secretary of State was peddling again this afternoon, that the effectiveness of schools can be judged solely on the basis of crude league tables, is simply ludicrous. It is as daft as choosing a motor car on the basis of its claimed maximum speed. The Secretary of State's position is inconsistent with that of his predecessor. If the Secretary of State bothered to read the debates in Standing Committee in January 1988, he would notice that our view is the same as we took

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then. In his own evidence to the schoolteachers' pay and review body, the Secretary of State issued a caution about the use to which crude league tables should be put. At paragraph 56, he said that league tables were

"admittedly rather elementary performance measures and they should not be the sole determinant of discretionary pay."

If those tables are unreliable even to judge such a discrete issue as heads' pay, how much less reliable are they to judge the overall performance of a school?

I do not understand what the Secretary of State is scared about in providing additional information to parents and governors, as we propose. It is not we who are patronising parents, it is the Secretary of State. If, after all this time, he has been converted to the issue of school effectiveness, I congratulate him. We now need to see some Government investment and leadership on how local authorities and school governing bodies can best provide information on and do research into the effectiveness of schools, into their creation of value added, so that that information can be given to parents and governors alongside the crude raw data.

Sir Nicholas Fairbairn (Perth and Kinross) : If comprehensive education has been such a success, as claimed by the Labour party, why do I receive day by day from senior and highly paid civil servants, doctors and teachers totally illiterate, misspelt and unpunctuated letters?

Mr. Straw : Almost all those letters would have been from privately educated people.

Few measures such as this Bill have been pulled together in such a disgraceful manner. The review--the secret review--was rushed through in two months. Public consultation on it has been a travesty. It did not begin until 2 October, after firm proposals were announced by the Secretary of State, and did not end until 15 November, after the Bill had been published.

This evening, I shall move that the Bill be referred to a Special Standing Committee. That procedure enables there to be a Select Committee hearing to examine the consequences of a Bill before its line-by-line examination. That procedure was used by the Government in respect of the Education Act 1980, which implemented the Warnock committee's report on special needs. It is the only chance of ensuring that the full consequences of the privatisation of the inspectorate are made known before the Bill is railroaded through the House and its damage becomes irreparable.

Underlying the specific gratuitous harm that is done by the Bill's proposals is the profoundly flawed, one-dimensional doctrine of the right wing of the Tory party which has turned competition into a totem. It is an approach which means, as Cardinal Hulme so tellingly put it, that

"some schools will benefit at the expense of others, some pupils favoured while others are neglected."

Like the cardinal and, indeed, Archbishop Carey, we believe in a different ethic. We believe in an education system in which every child is stretched to fulfil his or her potential, but in which he or she is taught that the happiness and success of society and its institutions depend not on self- destructive competition but on co-operation and community.

The Bill is based upon the Government's so-called parents charter, but what parents want and need are real rights for themselves and for their children. They want the

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right to form home-school associations in every school. They want good information about the effectiveness of their children's schools. They want the certainty of a tough and truly independent national and local school inspection. They want the right to call in the inspectors when they are needed, not once in four years. Parents want the right to a free education for their children and an end to the millions that they are forced to shell out in donations to pay for basic essentials.

Parents want the right to have their children educated in schools with roofs that do not leak and walls that have recently been painted. Above all, they want their children taught by teachers who are qualified in the subjects that they are teaching and who are valued and held in high esteem by the rest of society. They want all that, but they have had none of it from the Government. Parents want an end to the failures of the past 12 years. They want an end to contemptuous gimmicks such as those in the Bill. Parents want an end to this Government. They want a Labour Government who are committed to the education service and are ready to invest in it. We shall oppose the Bill.

5.26 pm

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