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Mr. Kilfoyle: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): Order. I have been pretty tolerant of the hon. Member for Castle Point (Dr. Spink). He is straying from the subject of the debate. Will he please get back to the subject that we are debating?

Dr. Spink: I shall get straight back to the subject.

There is much to win and much to lose on education at the next election. Giving Labour a chance in power would be disastrous. It did not take Labour long to destroy the education system comprehensively when they had power some years ago. Labour destroyed our traditional teaching methods--whole class teaching, tables, spelling and reading methods. Labour introduced rampant political correctness into teaching and gave us mixed ability teaching, which holds back the able, fails the average and demoralises the weak, who cannot compete.

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Labour would destroy grant-maintained schools, specialist schools and selective schools. It would remove choice and diversity, replacing them with a monolithic uniformity and central control. All that would quickly turn around the improvements in standards that are now being secured by dedicated teachers and excellent headmasters and governing bodies. Labour would throw our system of education into chaos again.

There would be real danger for education, as for other areas, in a short sharp Labour shock. I hope, for the good of us all, that the people will avoid that.

12.18 pm

Mr. Don Foster (Bath): I begin with an apology to the House. Unfortunately, I shall have to leave the Chamber briefly soon after I finish speaking.

Were we to analyse the debates on education that we have had during the past year, we might be surprised by how many areas of agreement there are. There is considerable agreement on ends, although there may be disagreement about the means to those ends in some cases. Today's debate shows that there is all-party agreement on the importance of leadership for improving schools. Effective leadership is clearly vital. There has also been agreement on both sides on the important contribution that the relationship between home and school can make. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland) was right to say that we have, perhaps, for far too long discussed the rights of parents and children without discussing the other side of the coin, which is their responsibilities.

There is probably agreement on both sides that an effective school is one in which there is a clear ethos and in which there is a disciplined environment. The disagreement concerns some of the means that may be used to ensure that disciplined environment. For the record, I make it clear that I am fundamentally opposed to the reintroduction of corporal punishment, for two key reasons. First, there is no evidence that corporal punishment is an effective means of reducing indiscipline in schools. Secondly, I find it almost unbelievable that people think that it is possible to reduce violence in our society by using a violent form of punishment.

There is also clear agreement about the need for us to have high expectations of young people in our schools. As I said in a recent debate, I suspect that a number of schools are not expecting enough of our young people. There is agreement about the need to share good practice and about the need for benchmark testing.

There has been agreement about the need to make better use of our school facilities outside normal school hours. I am delighted to be a trustee of an organisation called Education Extra, which promotes the effective use of schools outside school teaching time to help young people develop a wider range of skills, abilities and interests.

There is also considerable agreement about the vital importance of the early years. There is now unanimity that high-quality early years education is vital. The disagreement, which has been well documented, is on the means of achieving that. Again, I make clear for the record my fundamental opposition to the development of

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nursery education through the use of the now discredited, highly complex, bureaucratic and cumbersome nursery voucher scheme.

Mr. Robin Squire: No.

Mr. Foster: The Minister says no. He was not, of course, present, as I was, at recent sittings of the Select Committee on Education when we took evidence from the various areas involved in the scheme. We listened to contributions from those who have had direct experience of the operation of the nursery voucher scheme in the four pilot areas.

Mr. Squire: Only this week, at a conference attended and addressed by both the Norfolk chief education officer and myself, the chief education officer made it clear on behalf of the largest of the phase 1 areas that the scheme was not bureaucratic, and that there were no significant administrative problems.

Mr. Foster: The Minister is normally keen to defend the importance of the private sector and the voluntary sector in nursery education. He now seems to want to ignore the very real concerns expressed to us in the Select Committee by the Pre-School Learning Alliance about its experiences in Norfolk. However, that is a subject for another debate. I merely wanted to place on record the vital importance of high-quality early years education as part of an effective improving schools programme.

As I said, there is much agreement in many areas. However, one area in which there is clear disagreement between the Government and the Opposition was outlined in the Minister's opening remarks. He said that this would not be a debate about resources. The implication is that improving the level of resources will do nothing to improve what happens in our schools. Frankly, that is nonsense.

I do not think that there can be a parent, a teacher, a governor or, indeed, anybody in the country who would not accept the basic premise that if we were, for example, to increase the amount of books and equipment in our schools it would have an impact on the quality of educational provision. I doubt that many people would disagree that raising levels of achievement for all must include children with special educational needs, or that increasing the resources available to help children with special educational needs would not help them.

There can be very few people now--not least after the various bits of research to which the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) referred and the recent research carried out by Nottingham university--who do not believe that making more resources available to ensure that we can reduce class sizes is going to raise levels of achievement in our schools. Those three areas--more books and equipment, more support for children with special educational needs and reducing class sizes--are all vital to improving levels of attainment in schools throughout the land.

The fourth area where additional resources are necessary--in this I am supported by Her Majesty's chief inspector of schools--is in improving the quality of school buildings. In the age of the information

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super-highway, it is a disgrace that far too many children are attending schools that still have outside loos, and far too many children are in schools that are crumbling, with the backlog of repairs and maintenance well in excess of £3 billion. We need to invest more resources to do something about that. As the chief inspector himself said, poor quality buildings inhibit the ability of teachers to do their jobs.

One separate means by which we could improve achievement in our schools, on which there is growing agreement on both sides of the House, is inspection. I have never criticised the idea of school inspection. My concern has increasingly been that, for rather a long time, we have seemed to treat inspection as an operation in its own right. For too long we have separated inspection on the one hand from advice and support on the other. I see little point in a procedure of inspection that identifies problems in a school--often problems that the school already knew about--if no advice and support are available to help the school solve those problems.

Due to cuts in local education authority funding, there has been a significant reduction in the availability of local advisers and inspectors. The few who remain often spend so much of their time bidding for Ofsted inspection work that they have very little opportunity to provide advice and help for their own schools. It is vital to find ways of linking advice and support. One thing that the improving schools programme, the Teacher Training Agency and others suggest--I entirely agree--is that schools should look at their own self-improvement programmes. The targeting approach to which the Minister referred needs to go very much further. Those developed targeting approaches need to be directly linked to the school's individual development plan and budget. All three need to be brought together under the supervision of the local advisory and support services.

Mr. Kilfoyle: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that part of the solution lies in a far more flexible inspection regime, because some schools require more frequent inspection and others, self-evidently, do not?

Mr. Foster: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Of course there is agreement across the Floor of the House on that. Most people would now accept that we need to move to, perhaps, a six or seven-year inspection cycle, with greater powers for inspectors to be called in by local authority advisers, governors or teachers themselves in cases of particular need. The critical thing is not to base a regime on a one-off inspection but to take account of what happens in the intervening period between one major Ofsted inspection and the next.

While I am on the issue of inspection, I raise a point to which I hope the Minister will respond. If inspection is important, it is also important that we have confidence in it. The inspection procedure for the nursery settings, during the trial period of nursery vouchers, gives some cause for concern. I have had confirmed information that Group 4 was given the contract to sort out the inspection arrangements and I am sure the procedures were fair and proper. However, I am concerned to discover that, in the award of the contracts for the inspection of the nursery voucher settings in phase 1, the three assessors from Group 4 who made those decisions had no educational experience whatever. None of them had been involved in the inspection process, although one had experience of being inspected.

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I am also concerned by other aspects of the awarding of contracts. I wonder why the British Association of Early Childhood Education, which has a wealth of experience in schools and of inspection, was awarded no contracts when Penzer Allen Ltd. of Sevenoaks and Child and Co. Ltd. from Wallingford in Oxfordshire received contracts. That is worrying, and I hope that the Minister will agree to carry out an investigation, not least into why Ofsted had so little input into the process.

Teachers are a vital element in improving what happens in our schools, and they need more support than they are getting. I quoted earlier from a recent speech by the head of the Teacher Training Agency and the Minister accused me of quoting selectively from her remarks. I can assure the House that I quoted only a few of her many concerns about the barrage of criticism that is being directed at the moment against teachers. She also said:

"But for those many teachers who are visibly striving to meet all the demands which society places on them, including raising the standards of pupil achievement, this approach is positively harmful."

She did not identify people by name, but she said that she was concerned about those

"who seem to think that improvement requires a three-course diet of criticism, criticism and more criticism."

We must give more support to our teachers, and we must quickly establish, as the hon. Member for Walton said, we a professional body for teachers--a general teaching council. We must give teachers the tools to do the job and we must treat them as professionals. Having done that, we must expect far more from them, but we must stop trying to tell teachers how to teach and how to organise their classes. That is something best left to the professionals.

Finally, one issue has not been mentioned in this debate and it needs urgently to be addressed. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam rightly referred to the desire on both sides of the House to devolve more power and responsibility for individual, day-to-day decision making to individual schools and to the governors of those schools. If we are to do that, the time has come to start addressing the question of the accountability of governors. If we are to give them, rightly, more power, we need to ask to whom the governors will be accountable. What are the means of accountability? It should not be only the annual governors' report to parents, which usually takes place on a wet Thursday evening to the three or four parents who turn up to sit on under-sized chairs. We have to develop the means of accountability.

The whole question of power, responsibility and accountability needs to be addressed more widely. If we consider the two schools in the news recently, it is extremely worrying that we have had so many people saying, "It's nothing to do with me, guv. It is somebody else's fault." We do not know who is responsible for what in our increasingly fractured education service, and to whom those people are accountable. If we are to improve our schools, we should turn our attention to that issue. People should know to whom they can turn for redress when they have a grievance, and whom they can praise, which I hope they will be able to do more often in the future.

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