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Mr. Pickthall: I beg the hon. Gentleman's pardon; it was the right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold). The hon. Gentleman in fact said:
- "The new education Bill will give schools greater freedom to select pupils by ability."--[Official Report, 29 October 1996; Vol. 284, c. 483, 502.]
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the whole nasty process has only two fundamental reasons for existence. The first is to destabilise and destroy local education authorities and their power to plan education in their areas. The Government should come out and say, as the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth surely would, that they want to destroy local education authorities and to centralise everything; that would at least be honest.
The second reason--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. Time is up. I call Mr. David Lidington.
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Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury):
The test of the Bill is whether and to what extent it succeeds in driving up education standards of achievement throughout the state sector. I am especially glad that the Government have decided to implement the recommendations of the Dearing review of education for 14 to 19-year-olds and merge the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority with the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, because that administrative change is part of a necessary drive by Government, local education authorities and the teaching profession to improve standards for that age group.
I disagree with much of what I have heard from Opposition Members in the debate, but I agree that the education system has provided a good standard of education for the academically gifted ever since the Education Act 1944, and perhaps before; that was achieved not only through the traditional grammar school sector, but--let us be honest with ourselves--through the better comprehensive schools. But however secondary education has been organised, we have failed as a nation to match the achievements of our European and other competitor nations in providing a high-quality education for children in their early to middle teens who are not best suited to traditional academic courses.
One of the great achievements of the Government's reforms of recent years is the introduction of the general national vocational qualification. When the new authority is established, it should do everything possible to strengthen both the rigour and the reputation of the GNVQ. It is nonsensical for us to be in the position to which Dearing drew attention, in which about 16,000 different qualifications are available for 16 to 19-year-old students, and universities and employers alike are faced with a blizzard of acronyms and certificates, the worth of which they do not understand.
In recent months, I have visited several schools in my constituency that have been introducing the GNVQ. In those schools, including one special school and three upper schools--they might traditionally have been described as secondary moderns, as Buckinghamshire has a selective system of secondary education--I was struck by the fact that students were motivated to tackle a course that seemed to them to be demanding, interesting and relevant to what they hoped to do after school. Their teachers were full of enthusiasm about what the new course could enable them to help their students to achieve.
The GNVQ is giving 16-year-olds at upper schools in Buckinghamshire an incentive to come back to school after GCSEs, not because they are unable to get jobs or to find anything better to do but because the course stimulates their ambitions and drives them on to achievements greater than those of which they had previously believed themselves capable.
That experience in Buckinghamshire gives the lie to some of what we heard from Labour Members today. I found most dismaying their crude and misleading caricature of selection by aptitude, which forms part of the Government's programme. From the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) on, we heard speeches resting on two misapprehensions. First, there was the apparently wilful disregard for the unfairness of selection by mortgage, which happens in an area where people rely entirely on the neighbourhood comprehensive.
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Secondly, unjustifiable support was given to the myth that only the traditional selective grammar schools can achieve great things for their pupils. I am an admirer of what grammar schools in my constituency and elsewhere in Buckinghamshire are achieving, but the upper schools are also staffed by dedicated professional teachers who are equally committed to educating their charges in the fullest sense and drawing out of them everything of which they are capable.
The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), will know that Holmer Green upper school in her constituency was singled out by the chief inspector of schools in his annual report as one of the 200 schools that deserved praise for outstanding achievement. In a selective system, that school admits pupils who are not the most academically gifted.
I hope that we can move towards a system incorporating the national curriculum and specialisms that vary from one school to another, with one school offering languages, another computer science and another the fine arts, in addition to the core curriculum prescribed by statute and by order.
Since 1944, secondary moderns have been seen as the dumping ground--schools that could never do well for their pupils. Instead of putting that right, we decided to break up the grammar school system that was achieving results for its pupils. We tackled the problem from the wrong end.
I hope that in future my hon. Friends on the Front Bench will push the experiment further. We need to look closely at the experiment with charter schools in the United States, to see whether it provides a precedent that we might usefully copy. I am also attracted by some of the ideas proposed in a characteristically stimulating and idiosyncratic way by my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Walden). Although the hon. Member for Brightside was keen to quote a couple of remarks by my hon. Friend out of context, he omitted to mention my hon. Friend's utter commitment to selection and the restoration of something equivalent to the old direct grant schools.
Mr. David Hinchliffe (Wakefield):
I shall pick up two concepts that underpin the Government's thinking on the Bill: choice and selection. I speak not as an expert on the education system, but as someone whose experience of it marred my outlook on education for life. I was an 11-plus failure.
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Before I come to selection, I should like to make one or two points about the concept of choice in education. We all believe that, as far as possible, people should be able to exercise choice in respect of their children's education. However, not everybody starts from the same standpoint. People have different abilities to exercise choice. I hope that the Government will reflect on that during future debates on the Bill.
Let me give the House some examples. People have different abilities to get their children to the school of their choice. Many of my constituents do not have access to cars or even public transport. We must also consider parents' ability to take their children to schools other than the neighbourhood school. That depends on a number of factors, including transport and the number of hours that someone is required to work. The Government desperately defend people being able to work for more than 48 hours a week, but those who work long hours sometimes find it difficult to take their children to school and to pick them up afterwards. People with disabilities also have problems getting their children to school, so the concept of choice needs to be seen in perspective.
In some respects, one person's positive choice is another person's limitation. As the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) said, there are winners and losers. That also applies to selection. I hope that we shall never return to the selective system with which I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I have a lasting memory of taking my 11-plus as an A-stream pupil who had come joint top of the class three years earlier. I was expected to pass with flying colours. I have a lasting memory of standing on the stage with my year at Lawefield Lane junior school, which is an excellent school in my constituency of Wakefield, when the head teacher read out the list of those who had passed and my name was not among them. Those who had passed were applauded off the stage while those who had failed just stood there. I went home ashamed of the fact that, from then on, I was a certified failure.
That had a major impact on me. I suspect that it is one of the reasons why I ended up here. It made me a socialist, questioning the circumstances that resulted in my being written off and sent to a secondary modern school. The only silver lining in that cloud was that the secondary modern school that I attended played rugby league. If I had gone to a grammar school, I would have played rugby union, so I am grateful for that. However, I make the serious point that the experience marred me and vast numbers of others.
Our perception of ourselves as failures and write-offs stayed with us for a long time. In some respects, that experience of failing the 11-plus affected our self-confidence for life.
I am concerned that the potential of a whole generation was written off. People who were far more academically able than me went to secondary modern schools and did not have the opportunity to take O-levels, A-levels and degrees. We had what was called a college of preceptors. Has anyone heard of them? The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) nods. What use were they when we attempted to obtain employment, as no one had heard of them?
There was also corporal punishment. The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth should bear this in mind when he moves his amendment on the issue. My form teacher of form 1J in the secondary modern school was the deputy
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The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth and others of the Jurassic Park tendency should not give us this nonsense. They may be scraping around for every vote that they can get because they are desperate to win the election, but the proposal is utter nonsense and they jolly well know it.
I have followed closely events at the Ridings school in Halifax. I am desperately concerned that we do not return to the system that I experienced as a youngster--that is what I consider to be the experience of the youngsters in Halifax, which is very near my constituency of Wakefield. I was interested in the comments last Thursday by the Ofsted director of inspection, Mike Tomlinson, when the report on that school came out. He was quoted in an article in the Yorkshire Post last Thursday, which said:
8.22 pm
"he described The Ridings as 'in a sense' a secondary modern school."
The reason for the problems that we have in Halifax is that Halifax's Conservative group, which was in control for years, retained the 11-plus--the old system under which I and millions of others suffered. The youngsters at the Ridings school perceive themselves as write-offs and as no-hopers. Is it any wonder that problems arise? They were told that they were failures.
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