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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): Order. The hon. Gentleman's time is up.
7.23 pm
Mr. Jacques Arnold (Gravesham): Kent has had selective schools for decades and I can tell the hon. Member for Wentworth (Mr. Hardy) that we have neither riotous behaviour nor sink schools. In addition, under the law, more money per child cannot be put into a grammar school than into any other. It is the quality of schooling that counts.
The Bill is about diversity, and in north-west Kent we know all about that. We have grammar, Church and high schools--both mixed and single sex--and a city technology college and children on the assisted places scheme. In my constituency, seven of the eight secondary schools are grant-maintained by the specific choice of the parents, and three primary schools have also become grant-maintained. Considerable damage would be caused if a Labour Government were returned next year.
We heard the hostility of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) to grammar schools. For his information, let me tell him that 25 per cent. of the youngsters in my constituency go on to grammar school and the other 75 per cent. go to good schools, not to sink schools. When the Labour-Liberal coalition took over Kent county council, its hostility to grammar schools, which was reflected in the speeches by the Labour and Liberal Democrat spokesmen in the debate, would have led it to close those schools, but it could not. The support of the parents was such that the two grammar schools in my constituency went grant-maintained. Under a Labour Government, those schools would be vulnerable and subject to the Opposition's tendency to abolish them.
I am also concerned about the threat that a Labour Government would pose to our secondary Church schools, which are also popular because parents expect certain standards from them. Labour is already undermining those schools because the policies of the Liberal-Labour county
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The Bill contains a proposal to monitor local education authorities. I should welcome a searching inspection of Kent local education authority. Over the past few years, the further education colleges have gone and 50 per cent. of Kent's secondary schools have become grant-maintained. The careers service in Kent county council has been closed, but administration in the local education authority has not reduced proportionately. There has been a sudden flurry of conferences and propaganda and other activities that result in considerable expense to the authority and waste an immense amount of time of its officers.
We all know about Parkinson's law filling the time that is available. As I said earlier, Kent county council is controlled by a Labour-Liberal coalition. One can believe either that the council has been led by the nose by officers who want to retain their jobs or that it is guilty of straight, crass incompetence. I should welcome an inspection if it led to a shrinkage of the bureaucracy at county hall and at Springfield. If the money thus saved were released, it could go to the sharp end in the schools and that would be a vast improvement.
What does that vast education bureaucracy provide? I shall relate an anecdote about what happened when St. George's Church of England comprehensive school in my constituency proposed to go grant-maintained. I rhetorically asked Rev. Joe King, the chairman of the governors, how he would manage without the expertise and specialist support of the local education authority. I would have expected him to value LEA support. After all, he is a Labour supporter and endorsed my Labour opponent at the last general election. However, that reverend gentleman scoffed. He said, "We can make much better use of the education funds." He led parents to vote for grant-maintained status and the school has gone from strength to strength.
I support in particular the clauses relating to school discipline. We expect teachers to maintain discipline in our schools, yet one of the most deplorable trends since the 1960s has been the decline in teachers' authority. We have progressively stripped them of sanctions and put in doubt the back-up that they should be able to expect from the authorities.
It is not surprising that a vast number of teachers have joined trade unions in search of protection in case they are taken to court or are subject to disciplinary procedures arising from complaints by children or parents. That joining of trade unions does not exactly enhance their professional status.
All that has gone hand in glove with the growth of rights, but the withering of duties, particularly the duty of children, and indeed of parents, to obey authority when
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An important provision is strengthening schools' right to be represented on appeal committees and for those committees to have regard for the interests of other pupils and of the staff at schools. In a school, nothing corrodes authority more than if a head teacher is overruled and the child returns to the school, where he metaphorically or even actually thumbs his nose at the head teacher. That child learns the wrong lessons.
I support the proposals to set up management committees to oversee the running of pupil referral units. It is vital that the units should properly educate and civilise excluded pupils. We need their time to be filled effectively and rigorously. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) has pointed out what happens when children are excluded and not properly supervised. They run riot and develop into gangs, with all the problems that that causes. I welcome in particular the opportunities that have been trailered for an amendment from my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey).
I remember serving on an education committee in 1982, when corporal punishment in schools was abolished. I asked the proponents of its abolition to define an alternative sanction that would be just as effective and that would be introduced. They failed to do so and I voted against the abolition. Significantly, however, I had the verbal support of representatives of various teachers' and head teachers' unions. They supported my argument, but trotted off and voted for the Labour party proposals. The teachers in our schools are lumbered with the consequences and we are reaping a bitter harvest.
Corporal punishment should be a sanction in a head teacher's armoury because it is a deterrent to most children and it provides swift and painful justice, if the head teacher considers that that penalty would be effective. Many people argue that the restoration would contravene the European Court of Human Rights ruling in the 1982 Campbell and Cosans case. That ruling gives parents a right to insist that corporal punishment should not be inflicted on their children at school. The home-school agreements give a magnificent opportunity to include specific parental acceptance of corporal punishment. That should meet the requirements of the European convention on human rights. If it does not, we should withdraw from that convention. In the Adjournment debate on 6 March, I gave chapter and verse on why we could and should withdraw from it.
Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock and Burntwood):
I had expected the Secretary of State for Education and Employment to have a little list of Labour Members that she would proceed to read to us and to be on that little list. On both counts, I was not disappointed. We had not
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The Minister of State, Department for Education and Employment (Mr. Eric Forth):
No we shall not.
Dr. Wright:
We shall have to wait and see.
I should like to talk less as a politician and slightly more as a parent, whose voice perhaps has not been heard much in the debate. If I may put it like this without being misunderstood, I should like to talk as a promiscuous parent--that is, a parent who has been through a variety of schools. A quick list would reveal voluntary aided schools, county schools, local education authority schools, grant-maintained schools, selective and non-selective schools, single-sex schools, co-education schools, schools that have balloted to stay within the LEA and schools that have balloted to leave it--and we probably have not finished yet.
I suspect that, in doing that, I simply reflect the experiences of a good number of parents in Britain who, unfortunately--or fortunately--do not live their lives according to the ideological exchanges that are visible and that are heard in debates such as this. They do it instead in terms of their children's interests and in the circumstances in which they happen to find themselves, which often are not chosen. I take it that that is what any responsible parent would and should do. The job of Government, both nationally and locally, is to ensure that the choices for parents are real and available.
As my experience has been raised twice by the Secretary of State, may I tell hon. Members a little more about it? It may help the debate. My wife and I chose to live in the city of Birmingham because of work. We did not have any children and did not worry about schools. We then discovered that the city had a system of grammar schools that took about 10 per cent. of the children.
In the city, the dinner table conversation among parents who worry about these things centred around what they would do when their children reached the age of 11. Many parents hoped that they would no longer be in the city at that time. They did not want to face a choice that they thought their generation had banished for good.
Ironically, some people moved to neighbouring authorities. Solihull, I remember, was a favourite because it had a developed a successful comprehensive school system. It happened also to be a solid Conservative borough in those days. What was interesting about Solihull was that, when some years ago the Conservative local authority had the idea of reintroducing selection and starting up grammar schools again, the people of Solihull rose up as a man and a woman and said, "Over our dead bodies you will do that because we have a successful comprehensive system here, to which all our children have access. We do not want any system that would deprive our children of such a system."
Consider what the choice was and what the choice was not. Not only I, but many other people were faced with that position. The choice that I really wanted was of a quality comprehensive system. That was the one choice that was not available. I had a choice between a system that creamed off 10 per cent. of children and a residual system, with poor results and poor performance.
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We had to ask ourselves only two questions. Would those grammar schools have a helpful or unhelpful effect on other schools in the authority? We had to consider the performance of those schools to find the answer, which was clear. A second useful question was: if I were a teacher, would I want to teach in a system that had removed the top 10 per cent. of the ability range from my classes? I would not. That told us something about the system. The choice that parents had was whether to remove their children from those little tables at which they sat in primary school with their friends, working in appropriate work groups and send them to this or that school. Should they go to the selective schools--not chosen, but enforced--or to other schools? We did not have the choice to continue the good-quality comprehensive primary schooling at secondary level.
It is odd that we have a system that works well at the primary level, through mixed-ability comprehensive schooling, but that that system then apparently poses a problem at the secondary level. If we can provide successful, differentiated education at the primary level, why cannot we do so at the secondary level? Why do we suddenly move from an orthodoxy at the primary level to regarding that as a problem at the secondary level? We get ourselves into all sorts of difficulties in talking about those matters.
Of course, selection is endemic in any school system. We select schools when we visit them, evaluate them and choose them. We select schools when we choose the areas in which we want to live. We select children--the curriculum word is "differentiation"--when we teach different children differently. That is appropriate selection.
I am fairly obsessive about education--not simply as a parent, but as someone who has been involved in education for many years. I want everybody to be obsessive about education. I am obsessive about it not just for my own children, but for everyone else's children. That is the real test of public policy. I am not impressed by league tables that show me that the schools that two of my children attended are at the top of the league tables, any more than I would be impressed by a system that allowed general practitioners to choose only healthy patients and then to produce tables showing which GPs had the healthiest patients. It would be absurd and would be seen to be absurd, yet we refuse to acknowledge the absurdity when it comes to schools.
The tragedy is that we have known for years and years--indeed, it is simple common sense--what makes effective schools. We know what sort of organisation produces them; we know the role of head teachers, of expectations and of resources. We know all the things that make effective schools. Surely, therefore, the public policy conclusion must be to ensure that everybody has the choice of an effective school in his area. We should not provide more exit routes for people to get out of one school and into another. That is ruinous for children and for society.
What I want for me and for others is a choice of good-quality schools that have all the ingredients going for them. I want the sort of school that Chris Woodhead, for whom I have a good deal of respect, visited in my constituency last week--Redhill primary school. It serves one of the most difficult areas in my constituency, which includes a deprived, demoralised estate with vast numbers of unemployed people and broken families. It is the sort
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"I've rarely enjoyed a school visit more. The energy and enthusiasm of the staff coupled with the positive attitudes displayed by the children impressed me enormously. It showed me, once again, what can be achieved through strong leadership. I'm sure you'll go from strength to strength".
If that can be done in that school, in principle it can be done in every school in the land--
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