House of Commons Hansard Debates for 20 Apr 1993

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State for Education and Science is that I did not open up the argument for extending the teaching day. If one could have one more lesson of 40 minutes a day in schools, all the pressures on the national curriculum could be eased, as could the pressures brought about by testing. I should have had open negotiations with the teacher unions again.

In schools in England and Wales, children are taught by someone standing in front of a class and teaching them for about 24 hours a week. In Scotland, the figure is 27 hours a week. In 1960 in England, the figure was 30 hours a week. In Japan, it is now more than 30 hours a week, and in France and Germany, it is between 27 and 28 hours a week. Those figures refer to teaching time. We must consider the structure of the school day and the use of teachers' time to ensure that there is more teaching in the classroom. That means reopening the settlement which I reached with the teachers in 1986. I now come to the current point of great concern. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, there does not seem to be much dispute now about the mathematics and science curriculum. I remember the passionate debates when we had to fashion the mathematics curriculum. I thought that there would be no debate on mathematics. However, there were debates about whether there should be calculators, whether calculus should be taught to children under 16, and how the teaching of number was approached. Passions raged. Passions also raged on science. Should there be two or three sciences? Should we teach the old three sciences, which we all learned, of chemistry, physics and biology?

I knew that the passions would be greatest in English, and that is why I set up two committees, first under Sir John Kingman, to try to define what English was. I appointed Sir John Kingman because he was not an English scholar, but a distinguished scientist and engineer. I did not want him to get involved in the whole linguistic debate, the phonics debate and all the rest of it. His report was not very satisfactory, so I asked Professor Cox to fashion the first national curriculum. That was better, and it has formed the basis of the English curriculum since then.

I did not disguise from the world in those days the fact that I wanted a return to basics in English. The most important thing that one has to give our children today is a mastery of our language. Our language is one of the great enduring assets of our country, and it needs to be taught properly. That is why we went to great pains to try to establish a curriculum, and why the then old-fashioned concepts of punctuation, grammar and spelling were so important. Those matters are not a subject of debate in France. French children are taught to discuss the nature of the Franch language and French grammar ; it is not so here.

I took the trouble to look at the document on English which came out only last week from the National Curriculum Council. It is a very good document, which is a development of the original English curriculum. It says sensible things about key stage 1 for children aged seven. It says :

"Communications. Pupils should be able to use accurate and simple vocabulary."

The document gives good examples on grammar. It says :

"Subject-verb agreement. We were late back from the trip' not We was late back from the trip.'"

Such documents help teachers, and I do not see why the teaching profession has anything against this document.

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The document also deals with literature, which is very dear to my heart. It says of key stages 3 and 4 :

"Response to literature. Discuss narrative techniques." This is for 14 and 15-year-old children. It says :

"Discuss narrative techniques, character development, conflict, tension, and atmosphere in a novel or a play, for example"-- it is not prescriptive- -

" A Tale of Two Cities' by Dickens or An Inspector Calls' by J. B. Priestley."

Studded throughout the document is a range of access to literature, which is sensible. The document says broadly that children should have read by the age of 16 or have had experience of--

Mr. Mike Hall (Warrington, South) : Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Baker : No ; I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me. The document says that children should have read or have had experience of by the age of 16 two plays by Shakespeare, of five poets, one before 1900, and of works of fiction, one before 1900. The document is not prescriptive. I have heard some teachers say that it is narrowing and restrictive, but I do not believe that.

We never try to tell teachers how they should teach in classrooms. The national curriculum provides the essential framework, and I hope that my right hon. Friend will proceed with it.

I am glad that he has appointed Sir Ron Dearing, a distinguished public servant. I first came across him when he was chairman of the Post Office and I was Minister for Information Technology. I appointed Sir Ron Dearing to be the chairman of the Polytechnics Funding Council where he did an outstanding job. I am sure that he will do a very good job of looking at the national curriculum. We never envisaged that the national curriculum should be set in tablets of stone for ever. As the hon. Member for Dewsbury said, it must be looked at from time to time and reviewed. That is sensible. Part and parcel of the national curriculum are attainment levels, and part and parcel of those are tests. There has been much discussion about tests. I tried to have simple tests. I wanted pencil and paper tests, but the advice I received was that they had to be more complicated, so we set up an elaborate system which has become too complicated.

Now we want it to be simpler. However, I suspect that, when it becomes simpler, quite a few teachers will say that it is too simple and that they do not want to go back to pencil and paper tests. There is an element of pencil and paper in all tests.

The boycott is utterly wrong. I do not believe that teachers should take industrial action in any circumstances. I speak as a Secretary of State who had to deal with a strike that had lasted for three years. A strike or industrial action, whatever the semantics, in the classroom is wrong, because it sets a bad example to children. Teachers are people to whom children should look up, so I beg the various teaching unions not to proceed with the boycott.

When I was Secretary of State, I had to face a boycott of the GCSE, which was far more important than a boycott of the tests for 14-year-olds. If the GCSE had been boycotted, there would have been no certificates for a whole year, and we could not have caught up on that. I

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shamed the National Union of Teachers into abandoning its boycott, and I hope that the teacher unions will be shamed into abandoning their present boycott.

In 1989, at the north of England conference to which all Secretaries of State go from time to time--

Mr. Hall : This one did not go.

Mr. Baker : I said, "from time to time". I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will go in the fulness of time. After the Education Reform Act 1988 was on the statute book, I said that the national curriculum should do five things :

"give a clear incentive for all schools to catch up with the best and the best will be challenged to do even better ; provide teachers with detailed and precise objectives ; provide parents with clear, accurate information ; ensure continuity and progression from one year to another, from one school to another ; help teachers concentrate on the task of getting the best possible results for each individual child."

That is the object of the national curriculum, and I believe that it has achieved it so far.

6.9 pm

Mr. Don Foster (Bath) : The Secretary of State for Education began his speech by listing a number of firm principles which his party supports. Perhaps I shall surprise him and other Conservative Members by saying that I entirely agree with the principles of a national curriculum, the testing and assessment of that national curriculum and the provision of information to parents on the strengths and weaknesses of their children. It is easy to speak in slogans and headlines. This debate should be about the details that underpin those principles--the type of national curriculum, the type of testing and the type of information that should be provided to parents about those pupils.

In the few minutes available to me, I shall address my concerns about the approach to those matters. The Government's approach is leading to a crisis in our education service. That crisis is of the Government's making. They have created strife where once there was harmony. For decades since the Education Act 1944, an education partnership has built up in the United Kingdom among parents, teachers, governors, local education authorities, the local community and central Government. The Government's actions undermine that partnership and bring instability to the education system. The Government's attacks on local education authorities and many within the education service, their abject failure to consult and their continuing lack of direction are leading to unprecedented and unnecessary chaos, division and strife, and a significant lowering of morale throughout the education service. They are interested only in forcing through their views- -views which are the cause of much of the strife in the education service. The real disgrace is that they mask that behind the pretence of choice. In reality, the only choice is that there can be an education system of any colour, as long as it is Tory blue.

During the passage of the Education Bill, I proposed an amendment that would have allowed grant-maintained schools to opt out of that status and return to local education authority control. The Government refused to accept it.

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Lady Olga Maitland : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Foster : If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I would prefer not to give way, because time is short.

The Government will accept the opportunity for people to vote only if they can be sure that the vote will go the way they want. That has been demonstrated today by their unwillingness to accede to the request of the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mrs. Taylor) and other hon. Members that there be an opportunity for parents to ballot on their thoughts about the current testing procedures.

The problem is the approach of the Secretary of State and his Ministers. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Department for Education, under this new Secretary of State, has moved into new premises which are aptly called Sanctuary buildings. When the Secretary of State is closeted in that sanctuary--as he frequently is--he is unwilling to listen to the vast majority of views of the people in the education service. He prefers to listen only to the views of those who share his views.

Occasionally, the Secretary of State emerges from the sanctuary bunker and sadly undermines, by the things he does and says, the education partnership. We have seen a number of examples--the rubbishing of last year's GCSE examination results, the debacle over the league tables, the way in which he called the views of some parents' organisations "neanderthal", and the constant and piecemeal changes to different aspects of the national curriculum and the associated assessment procedures.

We have now seen the disorder that has been caused by the proposed key stage 3 tests this summer. With all those statements, the Government still fail to get it right, and the nation sadly suffers as a result. It is no wonder that, only six months into the reign of the Secretary of State, a Conservative party document--referring to the Secretary of State--talked about too much fire and brimstone, ill-defined attacks on education experts and not enough attempts to raise morale in the education profession.

As the motion before the House says, there is an urgent need for stability in our schools. The Secretary of State is in a curious position. He is largely responsible for the malaise that we are in, but he is about the only person who is capable of treating it. He could treat the malaise today --although I suspect that he will not--by accepting the motion, especially the part that refers to the key stage 3 tests.

On the issue of testing, the right hon. Gentleman has built, ranged against him, a most amazingly powerful coalition of people interested in the future of education. He has managed to unite parents, governors, teachers, local education authorities, directors of education, Conservative party organisations and, indeed, many leading Conservative politicians in the belief that the current curriculum testing arrangements are unworkable, unmanageable and likely to harm the education of children.

Many people would agree that it was an absolutely singular triumph for the Secretary of State to unite the traditionally moderate Association of Teachers and Lecturers in their vote on the boycott of the tests. It has certainly been a singular triumph to have so many traditional Tory supporters opposed to the tests. Indeed, the list of those who claim that the whole process is like a juggernaut careering to disaster reads like a "Who's Who" of previous fans of the Tory party education reforms.

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The hon. Member for Crosby (Sir M. Thornton) and the right hon. Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson), who are in their places, have made highly critical comments. That traditional Tory party newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, suggested that the only way out of the Secretary of State's current dilemma was unilaterally to scrap this year's tests. Of course, there are many other people to whom the hon. Member for Dewsbury referred.

To the voices of those Conservatives must be added--as anyone who has looked through the press recently will know--the views of a vast number of parents who oppose the Secretary of State on the issue of testing. Many governors, local education authorities and chief education officers oppose it. Of course, a huge number of teachers oppose, from a professional view, the testing procedure proposed by the Secretary of State. Incidentally, I must congratulate the investigative talents of The Mail on Sunday which, this weekend, managed to dig up two teachers who support the Secretary of State. Apart from those two people, the Secretary of State stands almost alone, deserted even by his traditional allies. He cannot rely on the support of the independent school sector.

With so many voices ranged against him, one might have expected the Secretary of State to reflect on the advice offered by Oliver Cromwell to the Church of Scotland :

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

Sadly, the Secretary of State is mistaken about many things. Most importantly, he is mistaken in his claims that the vast majority of teachers are opposed to testing and assessment.

Those teachers are definitely not opposed to testing and assessment. Indeed, a teacher union leader said to me only yesterday that teachers do not need some Johnny-come-lately Secretary of State telling them about testing and assessment. The vast majority of teachers agree not only with testing and assessment but with the importance of some external moderation with national testing as part of the development of the education process.

The real anxiety of the vast majority of those in the education service is with the particular testing regime imposed by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State has told us today that it is vital that that testing procedure be continued as a way of developing the procedure. But no one who tests any product even begins the testing procedure with real people, especially pupils in our schools, when all the professionals say that it is flawed. Until there have been major reforms--

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris) : Order. I call Dame Angela Rumbold.

6.19 pm

Dame Angela Rumbold (Mitcham and Morden) : Little would have persuaded me to join in an education debate at this time, because I believe passionately that, when one has had time on a subject as I have had time on education, one should perhaps leave a decent interval before one returns to it, especially from the Back Benches. However, several reasons have made me decide to join in.

One of the most pointed reasons is that I have normally managed to shut up the clarion voices of people on radio and television who carry on at one stage or another about the introduction of the national curriculum, testing and all the other reforms introduced in the Education Reform Act 1988 of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley

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(Mr. Baker). This time, I found it more difficult. The voices invaded my kitchen via the radio, and even invaded my television during the Easter weekend. I found that unforgivable, so I decided that I would say something about it.

The second, and much more serious and important, reason is that I felt strongly that I should state the principle of testing, which is critical to the national curriculum, the inception and implementation of which my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley so eloquently described. The essence and success of the national curriculum depends on the principle of testing and its implementation throughout our schools.

The third reason was my sheer enjoyment of the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley. I greatly enjoyedin the country at large have asserted vigorously that they are, of course, in favour of testing. They say that they want to see children tested. Indeed, we are told by many teachers, who I believe are genuine, that they test their children regularly at every interval. However, that is not what we are talking about, and it is not what the national curriculum and the testing attached to it is about. Nor is the Education Reform Act 1988 about that.

Now, as in 1988, we are talking about the standardisation of tests at the ages of seven, 11, 14 and 16. We have not addressed that in the debate this afternoon. It is unfair to many good teachers throughout the country to pretend that testing by individual teachers of individual pupils at every point in their career in the classroom is the same thing as the standardisation of tests for seven, 11, 14 and 16-year-olds.

In our schools today, standard tests for seven-year-olds have been introduced. They were introduced over a period. I do not say that the early introduction of any of the testing was absolutely perfect. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State explained clearly that the system is one of evolution. The introduction and implementation of anything as large as the Education Reform Act 1988 cannot be arranged in two or three years.

The Education Reform Act was a 10, 12, 15 or perhaps 20-year programme to ensure that, throughout our schools, standards were raised, practices were introduced and education was inexorably lifted, so that teachers who came into a classroom knew what they were expected to teach and test on, and children knew what those tests involved. More importantly than ever before, parents receive the information that they want.

The ambition of parents when their children are tested at school is to know two things. The first is how their child is doing. They do not want to be told, "He is doing nicely. You will find that he is integrating well into the class." They want to know whether he is keeping up with the sums, whether he can spell and whether his essays and little offerings are as good as those of the other children in the class.

The second thing that parents want to know is whether their child's school is as good as the school down the road. They want to know whether their child's class is as good as the class at the other school. They want to know where their child stands. Not only middle-class parents who live in houses with pianos and books but all parents instinctively want to know that. Many parents who may

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not be able to articulate that desire want that information. To deny them that information and say that it is not possible to say exactly and precisely how the child is doing is fundamentally wrong. It is a serious matter for the country to consider. That is why the boycott is so dangerous.

The boycott undermines the principle, which has taken some five years to establish in the country and in schools, that testing is important. I remind the House that it is not so long ago that we introduced another reform in the education system. In the same Education Act, and in my time as Minister of State, we introduced local management of schools. I travelled around the country talking to primary and secondary school teachers. They told me that it was impossible to introduce LMS, that it would involve far too much administration, that they were not administrators, and that they were there not to manage anything so crude as money or consider budgets but to teach. They said that they did not want to be taken out of the classroom to administer the school's budget and that LMS would be a disaster. That was only three years ago.

I defy any Opposition Member, parent governor or anyone anywhere in the country to say that they would prefer that we took LMS away. The majority of schools are 100 per cent. in favour of it. I draw a parallel with the introduction of testing. I simply say to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that it may take longer for people to accept testing, but I know full well that his intention is right. It is entirely the rights of parents as well as children to have those tests introduced.

We are considering tests for 14-year-olds at present. My right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley described eloquently and directly those wonderful days when we began to introduce English as a subject and to set up what one should or should not ask teachers to consider teaching children at various ages. Of course it is a controversial subject, and of course people will argue, but eventually they will come back to the basics, as I believe that Sir Ron Dearing will quickly do after this year's experiment and testing. It is extremely important that the tests continue.

We shall see the programme evolve and develop. I remind the House that this is 1993. In 1994, we shall introduce tests for 11-year-olds. I can imagine the language that will be used. The phrases are resonant. I can hear it all. People will say that it is all about the 11-plus and selection of children. That is nonsense--it is old education-speak. We are going forward now. We shall take our children forward.

Many of the excellent teachers out there will be reluctant to boycott education practice in the way that has been suggested to them by some of the more militant unions. They will take education forward with the tests to ensure that their children--for they are parents, too--our children, my grandchildren and all the children of Britain can achieve the standards we need in our schools and universities for our ideas to materialise and continue to be as good as they always have been, so that Britain can export brilliance and success. If the boycotts go ahead, they will be a devastating blow to the introduction of many of the reforms which have succeeded, although with difficulty, so far. I wish this reform success, and I hope that the clarion voices will no longer be heard.

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6.29 pm

Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley) : It has been customary in this debate for hon. Members to declare their interest at the beginning of their speeches. I declare an interest as a consultant to the National Union of Teachers and as having spent 16 or 17 years teaching in an inner city multiracial school and community college. Those of us who have visited schools in the last year can be in no doubt that this term schools are in crisis. It is clear that teacher morale is at rock bottom, that schools are continuously and increasingly under-resourced and that, as a result, children's education is suffering. Anyone would think from the flurry of media interest in education in the last few weeks that this was something new, but those of us who are interested in education know that this crisis has been growing for some time and that this dissatisfaction with what is going on in education has been around for some years. There is a feeling among parents and teachers that those who currently exercise political control over what goes on in our schools are removed from the reality of classroom practice. I sometimes think that the utterances that come these days from Sanctuary buildings have more to do with the posturing of the Secretary of State than with raising standards of education for the children for whom we have a responsibility.

One of the Secretary of State's infamous predecessors was the "I know best ; I do not need to listen" type. It has been one of the saddest things in the past year that the present Secretary of State seems to rate her higher than he does some of his better predecessors. Nowhere can that be seen better than in the chaos of what has gone on in key stage 3 English testing in the last year. A year ago, schools were busy teaching the national curriculum key stage 3 English. As recently as last September, the Government commissioned its third attempt to get an acceptable form of testing English at that point. The pilots that were published last autumn were radically different from the two that had preceded them. When they had finished, the response was unanimous : the tests were bad. The teachers, the governors, all those who had looked at the tests were unanimous : the tests were ill prepared, they were prescriptive, they lowered expectations of our pupils and, most important of all, they were not based on the national curriculum that had been taught in schools for the previous three years.

How can the teachers have been teaching the books on which the children are to be tested when it is now only four months since the book list was published?

I listened carefully to what the right hon. Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) said. It was a sensitive speech and one that I enjoyed. He talked about a variety of literature. He talked with some feeling about books, choosing them and giving access to them to the whole range of children. That is not what is being said by the Secretary of State. He is saying "Thou shalt read this, that and the other book that I have chosen".

The right hon. Member for Mole Valley talked about Shakespeare and the other great writers of our history. The Secretary of State's testing will prevent children in the lower ability range from reading and learning about Shakespeare, when in many schools they have been doing that for the past decade. The right hon. Member for Mole Valley said that it was not for us to tell teachers how to teach, but the effect of the testing introduced by the

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Secretary of State is to forbid strategies that have enabled teachers to teach Shakespeare and other great writers successfully to children in a wide ability range.

What were the results of those pilot tests? No results were published, we never saw what the teacher response was, and the Secretary of State refused to enter into discussions with those who had been involved with the tests. Instead, he used the opportunity to demonstrate some sort of political strength, some sort of growing opposition to teacher unions, and what seemed at that time to be a total disregard for the work that teachers were doing in schools. Key stage 3 English testing is not about who runs schools, it is not about left and right, it is certainly not about whether children should be tested. What the key stage 3 English debate is about is whether Ministers want to work with teachers and parents to get the best for our children, or to carry on making changes in spite of the opinions of those important groups.

In the last few months the Secretary of State has turned an educational discussion into a political wrestling match. For that he cannot and must not be forgiven. Through December, January, February and into March, all we heard from him was that the tests were scrupulous and unflawed ; they were unparalleled in their distinction. He refused to publish the evaluation of the results and he refused to talk to people.

By April he was beginning to see the light. He called for a review ; he talked of genuine concern among teachers. His conversion on the road to Cardiff was exceptionally welcome to me, for one. But he still did not have the political courage to withdraw the tests. He seems to have spent the Easter recess looking for excuses not to accept the logic of his own statement to the conference in Cardiff. He went to Cardiff, Brighton, Bournemouth and back to Brighton looking for anything to distract our attention from the real issue. Any statement by any union leader that could be interpreted as a political attack on the Government was seized on by him as a way of not discussing the real issue, which was testing. When one union leader talked about a campaign against the Government, that was it ; gold had been struck. Baroness Blatch was dispatched to "Newsnight" and John Patten's picture appeared in every newspaper.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Geoffrey Lofthouse) : Order. I know that the hon. Lady is among the last batch of hon. Members to come here and has probably not got used to our procedures. She must refer to the right hon. Member as the Secretary of State, not by his name.

Ms Morris : I apologise Mr. Deputy Speaker.

The same picture of the Secretary of State appeared in all the newspapers the next day. He was more intent on renewing his battle with the unions than on talking about testing.

Despite this, he has now said that the tests must go ahead, because he will not know how to improve the tests next year unless the pilot scheme is allowed to run this year. It is clear that the tests will go ahead this summer, not to test the children, but to test the tests. The children are being used as guinea pigs. There are pilots to test the tests, but nothing to test the children, because, as the Secretary of State has admitted, those tests are flawed.

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The only people who seem to need the pilot tests to find out what is wrong with them are the Ministers on the Government Front Bench. Everybody else who has been involved in the tests knows what is wrong with them. Nobody needs to go through a pilot scheme this year to find out how they ought to be improved. We have an over- burdened curriculum and flawed tests piled on to an already creaking education system. For a decade now, financial cuts imposed on local authorities have meant that, as each academic year approaches and schools consider how to reorganise themselves, they tailor what goes on not to meet the needs of the pupils but to meet the demands of the Treasury.

We have seen special needs money siphoned off for other uses, fewer resources and larger classes. And piled on top of that is the greatest conflict and instability that has yet hit our schools--the balloting process over grant-maintained schools. It is a system designed to create conflict ; a one-off opportunity for everybody to cast a vote to decide whether a local education authority should be allowed to continue to exist.

What would be lost by losing that battle is so important that all sides will play it for all it is worth. We have seen it happen already : bitter battles about ballots going on all over the country. The consequence of losing the ballot is great, because under the type of democracy introduced by the Secretary of State there is a one-off vote and one does not get another chance.

There are many areas of our education system at the moment in which there is instability : an unstable curriculum, an unstable testing system, an unstable structure imposed on us by the Government. Teachers need a structure that enables them to do their job, which is being in classrooms, raising the standards of education of our children and having the highest expectations of them. Under this Government, with the proposals that we have seen, we as politicians have not given them that. Let us take this opportunity to give them what they deserve.

6.39 pm

Sir Rhodes Boyson (Brent, North) : I shall refer simply to the national curriculum and testing.

It is a mystery that people feel that we never had a national curriculum before, but we did. My first job was as head of English in a secondary modern school in Lancashire. When I was appointed I went to the headmaster and drew up a syllabus and we put it into operation. A week later I was visited by an HMI, and in those days HMIs were very wise. He gave me a book called, "Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers", which came out in June 1944. It was first published in 1890. It comprised 564 pages telling teachers what to do in every year with the bright, average and least bright pupils. In 1979, when I became a Minister in the Department of Education, no one knew that there had ever been a national curriculum. It had collapsed and disappeared.

There was also a book on primary education entitled,

"Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers and Others Concerned with the Work of Primary Schools".

It was last reprinted in 1963.

It was not that we never had a national curriculum. Until the cultural revolution of the 1960s we had a national curriculum and we also had testing. The testing was the dreaded 11-plus over which so many Labour

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Members committed suicide. If any of them wish to do so tonight, it would be preferable if they did not do it in the Chamber. Some 50 per cent. of children sat the 11-plus. [Interruption.] I failed mine ; the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Miller) probably passed his and that is why he joined the Labour party. Children took the 11-plus in English, mathematics and general knowledge, which was scripture, geography, history and civics. I had the most homework in the year when I sat my 11-plus. I failed it because of Blackburn Rovers. I left the examination early to see them playing a cup match and I did not finish the last half hour. Blackburn Rovers are doing very well now, although it took them a long time to get there. I failed the 11-plus and that was the only time my father ever hit me from one end of the room to the other, and I decided from then on that education was very important. I have believed in corporal punishment ever since.

Let me say a word about the English tests and the teaching of standard English. Children should be taught standard English, otherwise they will be handicapped for life. In the yard they will still speak their own language and it is no good having a teacher in the yard to tell them how to speak when they are playing games, but they must be taught standard English, otherwise they will be handicapped if they want mobility nationally or in their chosen work.

In the 1960s we had the cultural revolution ; the resurrection of Rousseau from France and Dewey from America by long distance telephone. It was said that every child should develop at his own pace. We had the Plowden report, which should be burnt in Trafalgar square as it did so much harm.

We all know that it is better to find out than to be taught, but how can children discover by accident at the local library the theorems of Euclid or Faraday's electromagnetic laws or even the French subjunctive without going on a day trip to Boulogne ? They cannot. It is the teachers' job to pass on the learning of the ages. If children could do it for themselves, we could save all the money we spend on education and put them in libraries and the teachers could go somewhere else and dig trenches or the potato crop. The national curriculum was destroyed as was the idea that teachers had a body of knowledge to pass on. Similarly, we had reading readiness or real books in primary schools. Very clever children will learn from those, but the others must have phonics and must be taught bit by bit. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) referred to illiteracy. He did so with his usual great wisdom. I am godfather to his son, so he is obviously a very wise man. Comprehensive schools were introduced at that time. The Labour party was looking for a programmme. It is looking for a programme again, if anyone has one to offer. The Labour party became the driver of the train of comprehensive schools. The Conservative party did not know what to do about it and became the brake man at the end of the train. The Labour party rushed towards it and the Conservative party tried to slow it down. Nobody knew what it was and what it was doing. It is interesting that no other country in Europe went that way, but we are still landed with it as against specialist schools. The Conservative party now has a national curriculum and testing, but we should think about the organisation of

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secondary schools. It is all very well having grant-maintained schools, but they cannot all go their own way, otherwise we shall have a strange patchwork quilt of education. There will have to be some guidance.

The Bennett report of 1976 contained some interesting findings about testing and checking. It was undoubtedly read by the then Prime Minister, Lord Callaghan, who referred to it in his Ruskin college speech which was destroyed by the then Shirley Williams, now a member of the other House. That speech was a benchmark and would have done great good for the Labour party had it been followed through at the time.

The destruction of the national curriculum and testing at that time led to a deterioration of standards. The Bennett report showed from a study of 700 infant schools in Lancashire in which there is the constituency of my distinguished hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) that testing in schools and the 11-plus produced higher standards in mathematics and English and that the children were more at ease because they knew what they had to do. That report influenced what the then Labour Prime Minister said at the time.

I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends agree that the testing of individual children helps to ensure that schools are doing their jobs. Good teachers carry out regular tests purely and simply to make sure that the school is living up to its standards.

Over the past 15 or 20 years, and certainly over the past 30 years, we have had some of the worst schools in Europe. Our good schools remain good and the average ones continue, but in the centre of our cities--I always taught in downtown areas--we have some of the worst schools in Europe. That is why we decided to introduce testing. Let me say something about the national curriculum. I am in favour of the tests, and I believe that they will raise education standards in Britain. However, the education establishments have made it all far too complicated. It has been said, rightly, that teachers are also responsible for that. They did not want simple pencil and paper tests ; they wanted assessment, but it takes up too much time. The national curriculum takes up some 85 per cent. of time in secondary schools and primary schools. I believe that it should take up no more than 50 per cent. of time in secondary schools and 75 per cent. in primary schools so that secondary schools could teach second and third languages and the classics as well as specialised subjects. I hope that Sir Ron Dinsey--I mean Sir Ron Dearing. I have a friend called Ron Dinsey who is also very distinguished and perhaps will be knighted. I shall leave the Secretary of State a note on the Board. The Secretary of State said that the committee of 15, under the chairmanship of Sir Ron Dearing, would have at least one head teacher and one teacher. I should like there to be a majority of head teachers and teachers as they recognise children in the classroom, instead of all those education theorists. If a child came into the Chamber, they would not recognise him : they would probably think it was a Manx cat or something. We should get down to the classroom teachers as they are the ones doing the jobs.

To sum up my rather rapid speech--I have not had time to write it totally in verse as is my usual way--I welcome entirely national tests. They will be a great advantage to parents, particularly in downtown areas, if they can

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