House of Commons Hansard Debates for 20 Apr 1993

Mr. Fabricant : Will the hon. Lady please precis her speech?

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Mrs. Taylor : The hon. Gentleman may not like to hear me spell out the record of the Government, but he must learn to take it. Hopefully he will get a chance to speak in the debate. In the meantime, he must listen.

As I was saying, the Government were boasting last year that they were providing section 11 money to local authorities. That announcement and clear financial commitment enabled authorities to give contracts to teachers and language support workers. The money may not have been as much as those involved would have liked, but at least contracts were made and people thought they knew where they stood.

In November 1992, the Home Office issued a circular reneging on that agreement. That happened without warning or consultation, and despite the fact that contracts had been drawn up and teachers placed in schools-- [Interruption.] If Conservative Members are interested in improving the quality of education, they shoult take more interest in the vital support that is necessary for many school children. The shadow Home Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair), wrote to the Home Secretary on the subject, and at least he had the courtesy of a reply, and an acknowledgement that the Home Secretary valued

"the important work that has been, and continues to be, performed by teachers and others"

supported by section 11 grants. He went on to say that he remained "firmly committed to the need to tackle the causes of disadvantage"

and he mentioned the lack of English as a prime example of that. I wrote at the same time to the Secretary of State for Education asking for his opinion, not least because of the contradiction caused by his claim that more money was needed for reading recovery programmes. I was anxious to ask him then--so I ask him now--how much greater will be the need for reading recovery efforts if we do not have the maintenance of language support teachers in schools that need them. I did not receive a reply from the right hon. Gentleman, so I can only assume that he is not interested in the problems faced by those with English as their second language.

Mr. Pickles rose --

Mrs. Taylor : I will not give way again. I am nearing the end of my speech--[ Hon. Members :-- "Hear, hear."]--and that response from Conservative Members will convince the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) that his hon. Friends would not be pleased if I gave way to him.

There are other areas of instability that should concern us. We hear much these days about increasing levels of truancy, the increasing problem of exclusions from school and the difficulties and cuts facing the youth service. At a time when there is probably greater social disintegration than we ever imagined, the Secretary of State must explain what he is doing to protect the youth service. With youngsters having many pressures on them to conform to a culture of violence and to disregard everyone but themselves, an absolute need exists for more investment to counter such problems. Yet Ministers are not fighting on behalf of the youth service, which could provide an alternative culture and support.

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After 14 years of Conservative rule, too many children have far too many problems in their classrooms, and many of them are under-achieving, despite the claims of the Government. We are debating what happens in the classroom at a time when teachers have never been more alarmed about the implications of Government policies for the children they are teaching and for the hopes that parents have in the education system.

After 14 years of one experiment after another, there is a feeling of despair about whether the Conservatives will ever get anything right. The Secretary of State has announced a review. We hope that it will be used by the Government to make a fresh start. They must try to work with parents and teachers, and their first action should be to admit that their past policies have been wrong. We need the development of a new consensus for stability in education. The Labour party is willing to concentrate on that, because we believe in putting children first.

4.46 pm

The Secretary of State for Education (Mr. John Patten) : I beg to move, to leave out from House' to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof :

welcomes the commitment of Her Majesty's Government to the National Curriculum and its associated regular tests ; notes that the new independent inspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED), recently reported that the National Curriculum and regular tests were already helping to drive up standards in schools ; believes that the progress made in the implementation of the Government's education reforms is due to the hard work and dedication of professional teachers and welcomes the review established by the Secretary of State for Education into the National Curriculum and testing ; believes that a boycott of this summer's tests would disrupt children's education, cause unnecessary concern to parents and damage the professional standing of teachers ; and looks forward to a definitive statement from Her Majesty's Opposition as to whether or not it supports a boycott of this summer's tests.'.

I relish the opportunity to affirm to the House yet again the Government's commitment to the better education of all our children, our commitment to the national curriculum, our commitment to the regular testing of children and our commitment to the reporting of results to parents. There should be nothing to hide in our schools. I confirm our commitment to the publication of more and better information about how different schools are performing.

Those are the firm principles on which many of our education reforms are based. They are principles from which Her Majesty's Government will not be deflected. I believe that those principles are in tune with the aspirations of the vast majority of parents and most of the nation's hard-working professional teachers, to whom hon. Members in all parts of the House are grateful for implementing the reforms so far, since the process of reform began in 1989, following the landmark Education Reform Act 1988 introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker), who is in his place this afternoon.

They are certainly principles which set us a long way apart from the Labour party, as the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) demonstrated graphically today. She had the opportunity to make a positive and constructive contribution to the current debate about the implementation of education reforms, but she blew it. She rehearsed blowing it this morning on the "Today" programme when my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of

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State for Schools comprehensively demolished her arguments, getting us off to a good start over our breakfast eggs. The hon. Lady's rantings this afternoon showed that, despite 14 long years in opposition, the Labour party remains absolutely devoid of any credible alternative policy on education. That view is held by left-wing commentators in the New Statesman and Society and The Guardian as much as by my right hon. and hon. Friends. That is because the Labour party remains as out of touch as ever with the wishes of ordinary people for higher standards.

Mr. Bob Dunn (Dartford) : The Secretary of State will have noticed that the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) did not answer a single question today. She has not done so in the past. Does my right hon. Friend know that the hon. Lady is a member of the Socialist Education Association? Is he also aware that that association has advised parents that they should keep their children at home on testing days? Will my right hon. Friend therefore invite the hon. Lady to answer the question that was put to her earlier and will he give her time to do so? [Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Lady would do me the courtesy of listening, which she never does.

Mr. Patten : My hon. Friend is right. The hon. Lady is taking her orders from that organisation which is trying to stir up as much trouble as it can in the nation's classrooms. As she made clear in her answer to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Mr. Riddick), she, like her hon. Friend the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott), is in favour of strikes, of industrial action and certainly of boycotting, as she has made clear to the House this afternoon.

Mrs. Ann Taylor : I thank the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) for reminding me that I have not paid my subscription to the SEA for some time, but I shall do so forthwith. On the point that the Secretary of State has just made, I hope that he will withdraw the word "strike", because I do not know of any teacher who is suggesting strike action on the issue.

Mr. Patten : I was simply comparing the hon. Lady's approach--[ Hon. Members :-- "Withdraw."]--to the approach of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East, who supports strike action by the railways. There is nothing for me to withdraw. The hon. Lady has avoided the question yet again--wriggle, wriggle, wriggle. It is easy in the heat of the hon. Lady's earlier rantings to forget about the endemic feebleness of Labour. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for providing the opportunity for a serious debate at least in the second half of the afternoon because it is easy to lose sight of the background against which our reforms were introduced five years ago. First, let me make it absolutely clear that, despite our differences with the leaders of some of the teaching unions, we have nothing but admiration for the overwhelming majority of teachers. They are hard-working and dedicated professionals who have risen magnificently to the challenges posed by the introduction of some of the most fundamental and far-reaching education reforms ever seen in Europe.

Lady Olga Maitland : Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is a great insult for truly professional teachers to hear members at the conference of the National Union of Teachers making such statements as

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"This isn't the end of the campaign. It's the beginning--a springboard to fight the Tories on all the other issues." ? In other words, it is an attempt to politicise at the expense of children.

Mr. Patten : We all know that the agenda of bodies such as the National Union of Teachers is to use proper professional debate over curriculum and testing reform as an opportunity to begin an attack not only on issues which concern some teachers, but on the nature, rate and pace of education reform, because they do not like the way in which we have begun to expose the serious problems with educational standards in some schools in some parts of the country. I am determined not to hide that and I tell my hon. Friend that I will not hide it.

Mr. John Sykes (Scarborough) : Has my right hon. Friend seen an election leaflet which has been circulating in my constituency, produced by a teacher training college for three Opposition candidates? It contains six minor political points but also six major grammatical and spelling errors. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is usual in the English language to start a sentence with a capital letter? Does he agree that there are two Ps in "support" and only two Cs in "economic"? Does he agree that "advocate" has a D in it? Is not it right that "reasonably" has two As? Finally, is not it time that people like--

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris) : Order. Too long.

Mr. Patten : It may have been too long, but it was a jolly good question as far as it got. My answers to the first six questions are yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. I have seen the leaflet, circulated by the Liberal Democrat party in the Scarborough constituency and, mysteriously, printed by a teacher training college. That is an issue which I shall have to look into later.

Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham) rose--

Mr. Patten : Ah, the voice of the NUT on earth.

Mr. Steinberg : Will the Secretary of State spell for us the word "sincerely"? Apparently when he wrote to a school in Cleveland he failed to spell it correctly. Will he please spell it for us now?

Mr. Patten : S-i-n-c-e-r-e-l-y. I hope that that is the last spell check for this afternoon. I utterly refute any suggestion of spelling errors on the part of my Department at any stage.

If anyone is the parent of a bright child in this country, the chances are that that child will do well at school. Most bright children do. They always have done. We still need to do more to help the particularly gifted child, but at the upper end of the academic scale we have a record which is every bit as good, if not better, as any of the advanced industrial nations which are our competitors, whether in Europe, on the Pacific rim or in north America. It is a record of which schools, further education colleges and universities can rightly be proud. The new vocational qualifications that are being introduced are helping to give new opportunities to those in the middle ability range as well.

It is at the other end of the scale--the 30 per cent. of the less able-- that we do particularly badly. That tail of under-performance has been there for decades. The problem started back in the 1960s. It puts us at a distinct

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competitive disadvantage with our competitors. More importantly, it blights the prospects of many of our young people and it causes unnecessary unhappiness and a lack of personal fulfilment. It is to those children that our reforms will bring most benefit whereas the reforms of the 1960s and the 1970s only did harm and lasting damage to a generation of children. We cannot ignore reality.

Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South) rose --

Mr. Patten : I will give way in a moment because I know the hon. Gentleman was a teacher and I respect his views. We have to confront the problem and we have to tackle it. Our reforms can, and will, put a halt to the years since the 1960s of under-performance and under-achievement of the three and sometimes four out of 10 children who, after 11 years of being taught, still leave school grappling with the English language.

Mr. Spearing : In 13 years in the classroom I spent much time dealing with the very problems which the Secretary of State is describing. I believed in testing regularly and was an Ordinary level examiner. Can the Secretary of State tell me, because of his professional background, whether he believes in the efficacy of field work? If so, can he tell the House which secondary schools he has been to, where he has perhaps sat down for a couple of hours with the staff and talked about the efficacy of the mechanisms which he is imposing upon them? Can he also tell us what the teachers have said to him? Can he give us the name of such a school and say whether it was independent or private?

Mr. Patten : In our first 12 months at the Department for Education, my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools and I visited more than 110 schools in this country. The list of schools is recorded in Hansard -- as I answered a question on the subject just before Easter--to which the hon. Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing) should refer. My next visit to a school will take place tomorrow morning, when I am visiting a primary school in Chingford. I very much look forward to that visit. I am determined not to hide any of the problems in our schools as it does the Government no good at all to do so. For the sake of thousands of young people and the competitiveness of the economy, the reforms, which are vital to the national interest, will continue.

Let us consider the Labour party's view as set out by the hon. Member for Dewsbury in her speech. She made much of the need for stability and frequently used the "S" word. I shall translate from Labour speak into plain English the definition of stability. In Labour speak, stability equals complacency and inertia. In Opposition speak, stability is code for orderly management of decline and for abandoning the reforms in our schools. That is the hon. Lady's agenda ; she wishes to abandon our education reforms, as do the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers. Stability is a code for returning to the failed policies of the 1960s and 1970s, when high standards were subordinated, above all else, to the pursuit of equality, which did much harm to generations of children.

Mr. Derek Enright (Hemsworth) rose--

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Mr. Patten : I shall give way later to a deputy head teacher. Stability is code for returning the running of our schools to the producer interests and for putting up the shutters against the measurement and publication of a school's performance and letting parents and the local community know about it. Stability is code for denying parents choice and for concealing results.

Mr. Enright rose--

Mr. Patten : I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I hope that his intervention will be in English, not Latin like last time.

Mr. Enright : In view of the Secretary of State's comments about the NUT and the NAS/UWT, I merely wanted to ask what he thought of the decisions of the union to which I am proud to belong, the LTA-- [Interruption.] Sorry, the ATL-- [Laughter.]

Mr. Patten : The hon. Gentleman cannot even remember the name of his own union. What is the modern Labour party coming to? The deputy headmaster should go to the back of the class.

Mr. Patrick Thompson rose--

Mr. Patten : Here is an ex-head teacher.

Mr. Thompson : An ex-classroom teacher who is proud of that fact. I know that my right hon. Friend supports good classroom teaching. Many classroom teachers are opposed to a boycott as the best means of proceeding. What does my right hon. Friend say to the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) and her hon. Friends who are failing to support those moderate and responsible teachers who believe that a boycott is not the best way of obtaining change in the national curriculum?

Mr. Patten : The hon. Member for Dewsbury is a boycotter and is in favour of industrial action in our classrooms--as parents are beginning to realise more and more. I tell my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Thompson), who is a distinguished classroom teacher, that I have received many letters from individual teachers who take a completely different view about boycotting tests from that which the hon. Lady attempted to put to the House.

I have a letter dated 12 April from a woman teacher of 19 years' standing from Ilford-- [Interruption.] The Opposition should listen to and respect the views of a member of the teaching profession, not jeer at them. How dare Opposition Members jeer at a practising teacher--it shows the contempt that they have for teachers. The teacher wrote :

"I welcomed the advent of the national curriculum. None of us is infallible ; and it gave me the confidence to know I was not omitting anything vital in my planning. It also gave structure and continuity I am now discovering how my children have progressed and how ably they are acquitting themselves under test conditions. They have enjoyed their assessment tasks and the results have pinpointed strengths and weaknesses in each individual which may not necessarily have been picked up in less specific testing. The SATS workload is demanding However, the exercise is proving worthwhile.

I am aware that many teachers share my feeling."

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The views of that classroom teacher are much more typical of the comments that parents want to hear than are some of the scenes that we saw on our television screens over the Easter period.

The hon. Lady's speech was a clarion call to duck the issues and desert the nation's children. Today we have heard the authentic voice of Labour after 14 years in the Opposition wilderness. The Labour party is fleeing, with full speed, back to the past. It summons us back to toleration of mediocrity and a blissful unawareness of what is being achieved in our schools. The Labour party's message to parents, the community and the taxpayer is that as long as there is no sound and publicly available information about standards, and no information on rigorous and manageable tests, everything will be all right.

Mr. Anthony Coombs (Wyre Forest) : My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State mentioned the Labour party's record on mediocrity. May I remind the House of Labour's mediocre record on rewarding teachers and attracting them to the profession ? Under the Conservative Government, teachers' wages have risen almost two and a half times faster than they did under the last Labour Government and in the past three years the average classroom teacher has seen his wages increased from £15,000 to £20,000 a year--a record rise. This year, 32,000 people want to enter the teaching profession--the best record in the country for 30 years.

Mr. Patten : Since I have become Secretary of State, teaching has become an extremely appealing profession and people are entering it in record numbers. My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mr. Coombs) is right--since 1979, teachers have enjoyed an overall salary increase ahead of inflation of 46 per cent. I confirm what my hon. Friend said.

Mr. John McFall (Dumbarton) : The Secretary of State has been talking about mediocre records. I could refer to the mediocre record of his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker), on finding out the true state of the national curriculum. I consulted the book of Duncan Graham, the chief executive and chairman of the National Curriculum Council, which said in the second paragraph of page 21 that the right hon. Member for Mole Valley signed a letter that could have had fatal consequences for the national curriculum. The two had a furtive meeting in north Wales, where the right hon. Gentleman was running a half marathon. The right hon. Gentleman looked at the letter and asked Mr. Graham whether he had signed it because he could not believe it. Does not that show the incompetence of the previous Secretary of State? The neanderthals are not the parents and the teachers, but those running our education system, and that is why parents and teachers have no confidence in Education Ministers.

Mr. Patten : I think that educational historians and political historians will look back at the Education Reform Act 1988 of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley as a bench mark in national achievement. My right hon. Friend deserves the thanks of all parents and children for what he did.

I do not think that I, as Secretary of State, should ever duck an issue. I do not believe that education policy is best made by insulating myself from reality or information on what is happening in schools, which is why I have gone on

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so many school visits. That is why I also believe that the Labour party's complacency is entirely misplaced. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research recently found that, although we spend a greater proportion of gross domestic product on state education than do Germany and Japan, the standards achieved by those in the lower to middle ability range is considerably lower than in France, Germany and Japan. The problem seems to date back to the 1960s. That was the problem that led my right hon. Friends the Members for Mole Valley and for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold) and their hon. Friends to set about the process of reform.

It is not nice to be presented with a report, as I was a few months ago, showing that of those entering further education colleges last year after 11 years of state schooling about one third lacked an adequate command of English to make a good fist of their courses. That is the problem that we face. That is why the national curriculum and testing are so important.

It is not acceptable that, before the introduction of the national curriculum and its associated tests from 1989 onwards, parents should have had no solid information about pupils' progress until they reached O-level, as it was then, at the age of 16. They had no comparable information. It is only recently that the Government have introduced proper standardised written reports for all parents, which I, as a parent, value very much. Parents had no opportunity to judge the performance of their children against the performance of other children in other schools in other parts of the country.

Mr. Stephen Byers (Wallsend) : I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way to a non-classroom teacher. Will he depart briefly from his prepared speech and address the excellent suggestion made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) that he should ballot parents on whether their children should be tested this summer? The right hon. Gentleman is keen to talk about parental involvement. Will he put that rhetoric into reality and allow parents to be balloted on the crucial aspect of testing this summer?

Mr. Patten : I rather thought that we put our views to the electorate a year ago in a ballot where we won a splendid victory. The national curriculum and its associated testing regime were part of that.

Parents in our main competitor countries in Europe or the Pacific rim would be scandalised not to be given such information about educational performance. Yet that is what the Labour party want. It is in the pockets of the producer interest. It does not wish to see standards. As the hon. Member for Dewsbury herself declared, she has been in the pocket of the producer interest for many years as a trade union adviser.

Mrs. Ann Taylor : Will the Secretary of State please pause and think again about his decision with regard to encouraging schools to ballot parents? I said earlier that, as a parent, I wanted a say in the education of my children. I know, as a parent, the information that I want from schools and the kind of assessment that is appropriate for my children. I think that other parents share my views and would welcome an opportunity to be consulted about the appropriateness of the tests.

Mr. Patten : The hon. Lady wishes the introduction of the national curriculum to be brought to a halt. She has

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made it clear that she does not w their children and the performance of their schools compared with others in the vicinity and elsewhere in the country. The national curriculum is central to that.

Mr. Byers rose--

Mr. Patten : I have given way once to the hon. Gentleman, who described himself as not being a classroom teacher. He showed himself to be little more than a barrack-room lawyer. I shall not give way to him again.

The national curriculum, for the first time, establishes clear and challenging targets for pupils of all ages and abilities in the key subjects of the curriculum. Only last week I published proposals for the streamlining of those targets in English. My proposals reduce the number of requirements of the national curriculum, but give them much greater precision. They spell out the requirement that pupils must acquire a working knowledge of standard English, grammar and vocabulary. The contempt that poured from the Labour party last week about the need for children to speak standard English beggared belief.

The proposals ensure that pupils have a good knowledge of our literary heritage. Under them, pupils will no longer be able to leave school without a sound grasp of the basics. They will no longer be able to leave school without having their sights and spirits raised by our greatest writers.

Such reforms are fundamental in other countries. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, to which I have already referred, found that the common factor in the higher standards achieved in France, Germany and Japan was the national curriculum that those countries have had for many years. Now, thanks to this Government, we are challenging our pupils to fulfil their potential as well.

Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley) : The Secretary of State has just talked about new orders for the English curriculum, which were announced last week. Will the tests that are to take place, or may take place, in schools this term test the curriculum that he announced last week or the curriculum that has been taught for the past three years? If the latter, shall we have a new set of tests to test the curriculum that the right hon. Gentleman has announced for next year? If so, what is all the fuss about tests for one year that will cease to exist because he has changed the curriculum and so will have to change the tests again?

Mr. Patten : The hon. Lady should be putting that question to the hon. Member for Dewsbury. Each year the syllabuses for A-levels and GCSE change and each year the tests for them change. The hon. Lady is not neanderthal, she is positively paleolithic in her knowledge of the testing regime at GCSE. I cannot go back further. I must look at my prehistory.

It is an absurd idea that we should set in concrete a national curriculum and its tests and never alter them in the light of experience over the years as knowledge is pushed forwards. Ms Estelle Morris rose --

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Mr. Patten : No, I shall not give way to the hon. Lady again. It was a great mistake for me to give way the last time.

The national tests are an intrinsic part of the national curriculum. There is no point setting targets if pupils' progress is not measured against them. That is obvious to everyone except the Opposition. The national tests introduced by the Government, which happen on only four occasions during a pupil's 11-year school history, at seven, 11, 14 and 16, provide vital information for teachers about their pupils' strengths and weaknesses. They enable parents to hold schools to account for their children's progress. That is a right of every parent. They also enable the taxpayer--the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was on the Front Bench earlier--to make his judgment. They certainly enable me as Secretary of State for Education to see what is happening to education. How could I justify education expenditure to the Treasury in the forthcoming public expenditure round without evidence of improving standards? We cannot have it both ways. We cannot ask for the bill to be paid without demonstrating that it is worth paying. That is a message to which the education world should listen carefully.

Tests are the key to raising standards and they are already doing so. The inspectors of the independent inspectorate, Ofsted, have found in their first two years of operation that the tests for seven-year-olds have improved those pupils' attainments while showing--this is a cause for considerable concern--that one out of every three seven-year-olds have serious problems in dealing with the English language and simple arithmetical tasks. If that has all been put right in the past, as the hon. Member for Dewsbury was saying, why have the independent tests exposed that and why has the inspectorate said that the tests have raised teachers' expectations? I pay great tribute to primary school teachers in Britain who work hard, but the inspectorate has said that expectations have been raised.

There are striking gains and it is unreasonable for some in the teachers' unions now to seek to mount an attack on tests which have already taken place and which are already raising standards in Britain. It is typical of the hon. Member for Dewsbury that she should give comfort to that attack by the unions, to join in and encourage industrial action. Like it or not, that is what boycotting is. It is industrial action. We cannot mess around with words. The hon. Lady is aiding and abetting industrial action, just like her hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, East.

The tests were written by GCSE examiners and by experienced educationists and devised under the direction of the School Examinations and Assessment Council, which had six teachers and six lecturers among its membership. The subject groups were largely staffed by individual, working classroom teachers and head teachers.

Mr. Win Griffiths (Bridgend) : The Secretary of State mentioned working groups. Why, in the case of the English orders put out for consultation last week, did the right hon. Gentleman deliberately avoid the English working group and have the curriculum council itself produce the work?

Mr. Patten : Because I announced some time ago that to keep the national curriculum up to date, there would be a rolling, five-year review of all national curriculum subjects.

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Knowledge moves on. It was not written down in a book the last time that Labour held power. Knowledge and interpretation advance. There are changes all the time. [Interruption.] Does my hon. Friend want me to give way?

Mr. Harry Greenway : I accept my right hon. Friend's invitation. I was simply excited by his remarks about the sheer dynamism of education-- particularly in the way in which my right hon. Friend represents it. The Opposition should take this lesson : when education becomes static, standards collapse. That has always been Labour's problem in running schools or anything else.

Mr. Patten : My hon. Friend, who was a practising teacher, exposes the underlying fallacy in Labour's argument, which seems to be that a national curriculum should be written one day and remain exactly the same, not for years or decades, but for hundreds of years and never improved.

Mr. Pawsey : Written in tablets of stone.

Mr. Patten : My hon. Friend is right.

Last summer's science and maths tests for 14-year-olds were extremely successful. There was much debate and there were problems and concern about those tests--just as there were in respect of the tests for seven-year-olds when they were introduced in 1991. There were threats of boycotts then. Happily, they were withdrawn and the tests went ahead and were improved.

Exactly the same is true of last summer's mathematics and science tests. The inspectorate announced that it was extraordinary that not only were standards higher than it had expected, but that truancy levels plunged on the day that the tests were sat and children turned up in large numbers to take them. Ofsted's findings that the tests were well received and worked well are interesting. The fall in truancy shows that children enjoy being stretched--and it is a great mistake not to stretch and to challenge children.

Talk of boycotts is an absurd over-reaction to tests that have been much more carefully prepared over a longer period of time than the average GCSE new syllabus. It does no service to the reputation of the majority of hard- working teachers who have conscientiously implemented the national curriculum. I am glad to pay tribute again to their professionalism.

I do not believe that those committed and professional teachers will turn to their pupils this summer and say that a test required by law--and it is, under the Education Reform Act 1988--and for which a pupil aged 14 has been preparing for three years, should be torn up and tossed in the wastepaper bin. I do not believe either that those committed and professional teachers will look parents in the eye and tell them that they do not think that they will bother with the tests this year and will not give the evidence.

The hon. Member for Dewsbury wants that to happen. She made it clear that she is in favour of industrial action, boycott, and withdrawing co- operation. That is reinventing the 1970s. The hon. Lady's analysis is fundamentally flawed.

The sensible response to the genuine concerns of some teachers about the manageability of the existing curriculum and assessment arrangements--I say "some" because many other teachers have written to support our policy--is to feed those concerns into the review that I

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have asked Sir Ron Dearing, chairman- designate of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, to undertake.

That wide-ranging review will examine the curriculum and assessment framework in its totality--not just individual subjects. It will be taken forward urgently. Sir Ron has already spoken to head teachers, teachers and many organisations interested in education. Although head teachers, deputy head teachers and classroom teachers have a prime interest in education, so have many others. We are all concerned about state education--we are all shareholders in state education.

However, Sir Ron cannot make progress and identify ways of improving the current arrangements unless he has sound evidence. That involves this summer's tests going ahead--that is Sir Ron's opinion, not mine. I quote from the letter that Sir Ron wrote to me : I have to tell you that if I do not have information from tests this Summer, I am going to have difficulty in giving well-informed and convincing advice on what changes should be made to the testing arrangements."

Those are the words of someone of enormous distinction and a great independence of mind. In other words--in my words--a boycott would be self- defeating. It would damage children's education by depriving teachers, pupils and parents of important information about children's progress. A boycott would retard the evolution of the national curriculum and its testing arrangements and would undoubtedly rebound ultimately on public perception of the teachers themselves.

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