House of Commons Hansard Debates for 11 Nov 1996 (pt 25)

8.4 pm

Mr. Michael Carttiss (Great Yarmouth): The hon. Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) said that she had heard all the arguments about selection 30 years ago. So have we all. The argument today, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State pointed out when introducing the Bill this afternoon, is not about dividing children in an 11-plus examination between grammar and secondary modern schools, as the hon. Members for Liverpool, West Derby (Mr. Wareing) and for Wentworth (Mr. Hardy) seem to imagine. It is about a genuine endeavour to relate schools to certain strengths and giving children the opportunity to develop their strengths to the full in the most favourable educational environment for the subjects for which they have special talents--be they languages, technology, music or science. I do not need to read the Bill again to know that, in establishing grammar schools, we are not talking about establishing secondary moderns. All the arguments from Opposition Members on that showed that old-fashioned socialism is still as strong as ever.

The ability to develop strengths in certain subjects and to specialise in them is one of the great advantages of the new grant-maintained system, which the Bill will enhance. One of the first schools in Norfolk to take advantage of the 1988 legislation that created

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grant-maintained status was the West Flegg middle school in Martham, in my constituency. That school has gone forward from success to success.

I would welcome a visit by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) and his Front-Bench colleagues to that school. They might like to make some vain efforts to help my local Labour candidate, who will need all the help that he can get from them. If they took time off to visit West Flegg school, which serves a district that is in no way affluent--quite the reverse--perhaps they would change their minds about abolishing the grant-maintained system. That supposes that they are susceptible to considering issues objectively in the interests of the children whom we are all here to represent rather than from the point of view of the socialist dogma that we hear all the time from them, despite new Labour.

There are six comprehensive high schools in my constituency. There are no grammar schools or special schools such as those that some of my hon. Friends representing larger areas have described. Five of those schools have grant-maintained status. If that proportion of grant-maintained schools to local authority schools were replicated in every constituency in England and Wales, our education system would be truly responsive to local community needs and to parents' requirements of choice and high standards.

I welcome the Bill's proposals on discipline. I listened to the interview of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on the Radio 4 "Today" programme, when she said that she was not against the use of the cane in schools. When pressed on the issue, she said that any amendments to the Bill would be looked at. I did not interpret that as meaning that the Government had changed their policy. I interpreted it as a Minister with an open mind being ready to look at other proposals made by my right hon. and hon. Friends in addition to those suggested by the Government. Only a weak Minister would refuse to consider any amendments put forward by her right hon. and hon. Friends.

I do not think that corporal punishment is the answer to the discipline problem. I went to a school in the 1950s where the cane was rarely used. I taught in a school in the 1960s where the cane was often used. I taught in another school where it was banned by the headmaster and was not available to the teachers. I cannot say that the standards of behaviour were significantly different in any of those schools. I do not think that the cane is a significant factor in discipline. Discipline needs the right sort of teachers and proper training. It is not about class size--we have heard that the Ridings school had a good teacher-pupil ratio--but about the quality of teachers. Nevertheless, it is wrong for politicians to tell schools that the cane is a sanction that they must not use. We should make it available to schools, but whether they want to use it is very much for them to determine. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) that it might be an alternative to suspension. If it were to prove effective in dealing with unacceptable behaviour, it would be an improvement on barring a child from school.

I welcome the fact that the Bill will strengthen the ability of schools to deal with pupils' bad behaviour and that it will place a duty on local education authorities--this is one of its most important aspects--to draw up and publish a plan setting out what forms of support they will provide for schools to deal with disruptive pupils. Far too

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often a school decides that certain pupils should not be there but there is nowhere suitable for those children to go. I again agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth that they are the very pupils for whom we should be providing places. If the cane will encourage some disruptive children to behave better, the facility should be available to schools.

I welcome the objective of promoting diversity among schools and choice for parents and of giving grant-maintained schools more power to develop their identity without central approval. However, I have one caveat with regard to central approval. It relates to the power to establish sixth forms at grant-maintained schools which do not already have them. I am happy that that power should exist but I sound a cautionary note--such sixth forms must be viable and capable of offering a wide range of choices for post-16 education.

If the five grant-maintained schools in my constituency all opted to have their own sixth forms, there could be major problems and we could end up with less choice of sixth form subjects, especially for pupils preparing for university, than is now provided by our sixth form college and our college of further education. Resources could be a problem, and we need assurances from the Secretary of State about where the money is to come from. It is all very well to give grant-maintained schools the power to set up their own sixth forms, but one has to have the money to provide the staff and other resources needed for post-16 education.

Other than that one reservation about removing from the Secretary of State the power to consider and approve or reject proposals for a school to set up a sixth form--I hope that the issue can be dealt with in Committee--I am happy to give the Bill my full support.

8.11 pm

Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire): I pick up on the remarks of the hon. Member for Croydon, North-East (Mr. Congdon), who said that a future of Secretary of State should inspect the role of Mr. Christopher Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools. I hope that, in doing so, the future Secretary of State will consider the cost of reinspecting primary teacher education undertaken when the results of the first inspection did not prove satisfactory to the Government. I hope that the Secretary of State will consider the motivation behind the choice of institution to be inspected, the decision to add others and the alteration of inspection reports by Mr. Woodhead and that, having done that, he will sack him.

The problem for local education authorities has always been to balance parental choice with adequate provision for all children in the right places. In other words, the task of the LEAs has been to create a system as close as possible to a universal service in which no child is disadvantaged or short-changed. The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) was right to point out the huge responsibilities of LEAs in this respect and right to say that it is not always the Government's fault when things go wrong. LEAs get it wrong sometimes, governors get it wrong sometimes and the Government get it wrong most of the time.

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Virtually every Tory education reform of the past 17 years has made the balance that LEAs should be trying to achieve less and less possible and made real choice for the majority of parents and children more and more difficult.

We are now in an era of admissions by appeals panel. Many local education authorities and secondary schools are already wrestling with the destructive consequences of raw league tables. Fluctuating results cause fluctuating intakes, which leads to loss of revenue and, in turn, to more difficulty in raising a school's position in the league table. That ratchet effect leads inexorably to the creation of what have this evening been called sink schools.

Some schools seek to avoid taking pupils with special educational needs or those with disabilities as they foresee damage to their league table position. Some schools even take extraordinary steps to get rid of pupils halfway through their secondary career--often at enormous expense to the local authorities involved--if they think that those pupils might damage their league table position.

Any school is likely to have a bad year, just as any school is likely to have a good year. The consequences of that are serious not only for the school itself but for neighbouring schools with which it has been forced to compete for numbers and, therefore, of course, for revenue. The creation of grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges has, in some areas, exacerbated the problem. Their extra funding and enhanced status has further destabilised the education system in those areas. The Bill will accelerate selection, which is not only massively unpopular with the population at large but exacerbates the ratchet effect on schools that are already less favoured.

The proposal to give the Funding Agency for Schools powers to initiate grant-maintained schools anywhere effectively gives the FAS the right to extend its own statutory powers where it can trigger the 10 per cent. requirement. The proposal in clause 3 to allow grant-maintained schools to expand by up to 50 per cent., and the proposal in clause 4 to allow them to select up to 50 per cent. in secondary schools and 20 per cent. in primaries, without the requirement to publish statutory proposals, is a further complication of any LEA's ability to plan provision sensibly.

This Conservative Government have always seemed to believe that schools operate in isolation and that if any school at any time has got it right and is content in itself--good luck to any school that is--that is the end of the story. However, schools do not exist in isolation--at least not many do so. In fact, they exist in competition with each other. What happens to them--how they change and fluctuate--affects all the others around them, hence the need for debates and inquiries. A detailed consultation is taking place in my own town of Ormskirk, where it is sensibly being proposed to amalgamate the grammar school--it is called a grammar school, but it is in fact a comprehensive--with another comprehensive.

The proposal to allow county and voluntary schools to select 20 per cent.--or 30 per cent. at special schools--without publishing statutory proposals goes even further in destabilising the system. Grant-maintained schools' new powers to create nursery classes and sixth forms will,

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as has been said, disrupt not only the planning of admissions by schools all around them but the planning of FE colleges in the neighbourhood, at least in respect of sixth forms. Schools that resist selection are close to being forced into accepting it by clause 2, which will initiate a compulsory annual review by governors of selection proposals.

What a school does in terms of selection or of increasing admissions has a profound effect on all surrounding schools; perfectly good schools can be destroyed through no fault of their own. At least the statutory publication of the intention to change allowed the knock-on effects to be analysed and debated, but of course such debate does not suit the Government's purpose, which is to introduce not a two-tier system--I agree with the Secretary of State on that--but a three-tier system, of grant-maintained schools, county and voluntary schools that select, and non-selective schools that will become a version of secondary moderns. In effect, the comprehensive system will be ended.