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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Time is up. I call Lady Olga Maitland.

9 pm

Lady Olga Maitland (Sutton and Cheam): It is a bit rich for the hon. Member for Barking (Ms Hodge) to lecture us on standards in education. We recall her track record when, as leader of Islington council responsible for education, she turned the schools there into a rock-bottom disaster. The record still stands.

I welcome the Bill, which brings up to date a range of legislation that the Government have introduced over the years to improve our children's opportunities and life chances. It is ironic that our achievements may have been best assessed by an article that was published in The Guardian on 2 September. After all, The Guardian is no friend of the Conservatives. The article bore the headline

"Why the Tories have won over education".

It stated:

"Which parent can honestly say that this summer they ignored all the competitive criteria which have been imposed on education? Whether it's worrying about your child's exam results or your chosen school's SAT results, Tory educational values have entered our souls."

There you have it, Mr. Deputy Speaker: the mouthpiece of new Labour has confirmed that we lead on education. We have set the pace and it is unstoppable.

Although I addressed the issue of discipline in our schools at some length when I last spoke in the House on education 10 days ago, I did not dwell on the vexed topic of caning. That was deliberate. I was waiting to see whether amendments would be tabled in that regard. As they will be, and as I gather that there will be free votes for Members on the Back Benches, I feel that it is right to declare where I stand.

I shall not be joining my colleagues in the Lobby seeking corporal punishment. That will be entirely my choice, not a case of being obedient to the Whips because I am on the payroll. I find the notion of corporal punishment abhorrent in a civilised society such as that in which we live, where we declare that differences can be resolved by debate, persuasion or even arguments, but never by resort to violence. Yet it is advocated that, as a last resort, schools should have the right to use the cane.

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I do not believe that misbehaviour should ever be matched by deliberate violence on the part of the teacher. That reduces the teacher to the level of the miscreant. It demeans and degrades both. I doubt whether the pupil will learn much from the experience; he is more likely to gain bravado from his friends. Caning would not have restored order in the Ridings school--if anything, it may have made the pupils more violent. I discussed the issue with head teachers in my constituency and I found that they are dead set against caning. They would never use the cane, and I find it hard to believe that anyone other than a sadist would.

I believe that good, firm, fair and effective discipline is possible. I have seen wretched bin schools turned around, as occurred in a school in Sutton, where a boy was caught riding a motor bike through the school corridors. The secret of success is leadership and determination to give the pupils clear rules regarding acceptable behaviour and to impose punishment when those rules are breached.

I particularly welcome the new powers for head teachers allowing them to impose after-school detention without seeking parental permission, which is sometimes refused. Ideally, I would prefer the detention to take place on the same day as the misbehaviour occurred, thus giving the punishment a sense of immediacy and meaning. Delaying punishment by 24 hours to inform parents weakens its effect. It is perfectly possible to telephone parents and warn them that their child will be home late--although I accept that there may be some practical implications.

I regret the Labour party's negative approach to the assisted places scheme and to its extension to include primary schools. The assisted places scheme has proved extremely popular and is much appreciated by parents in my constituency. The Labour party's hostility is a sad reflection of old Labour: resenting one child's chance to better himself. I particularly regret the Opposition's decision to scrap the scheme on the ground that the £118 million saved would be used immediately to cut class sizes.

That decision would achieve that objective, but it would provide only one more teacher for every eight schools. In addition, places would have to be found for 34,000 pupils in schools, which negates any projected savings from the scheme at a stroke. Would the scheme be abolished overnight as the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) has called for, or would it be phased out gradually, as the Leader of the Opposition has suggested? It appears to be a source of unending confusion in the Labour party, with the Leader of the Opposition saying one thing and the party saying another.

The heart of the Bill, which reflects the ethos of Conservative thinking, is expanding choice and diversity. There is an enormous gulf between us and the Labour party in that regard. We have always believed that real freedom involves people having the right to choose rather than having decisions foisted upon them, as the Opposition favour. Hence, it is important to allow schools to develop specialties, with departments geared to a high level of expertise in languages, the arts, music, technology and sport.

It is common sense to allow parents to opt for a school that selects pupils on the basis of their aptitude and ability in a particular field, be it academic or vocational. Parents

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have a wider choice of schooling to suit their child and the schools are able to select students according to what they have to offer. It would be nonsense to force such schools to take pupils who do not have the talents that allow them to benefit from specialised learning. Such children would be better off attending a well-run, grant-maintained, non-selective school such as Cheam high school in my constituency, where children do well and are educated according to their needs. As a result, it has a thriving sixth form with 200 children taking A-levels and going on to university.

Grant-maintained schools have proved a resounding success. More than 1,100 schools now achieve well above average academic results, including three in my constituency which are oversubscribed. The clock cannot be turned back. The momentum is too great. We must set our children free to develop and achieve. That is why I welcome the Bill, for it does so much to maintain the momentum that we have started.

9.9 pm

Mr. Mike Hall (Warrington, South): As my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) said earlier, if we stay here long enough, the arguments start to revolve. I have read the debates of 1987 when the Education Reform Act was still a Bill. The then Secretary of State told the House that the education system needed urgent reform. He cited evidence drawn from international comparisons, reports of Her Majesty's inspectorate and levels of adult illiteracy. Unusually in that debate, he accepted responsibility for the failures of our education system. Such a gesture has been sadly lacking in education debates of late.

The right hon. Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) told the House that the proposed Bill would "create a new framework" that would raise standards, extend choice and produce a "better educated Britain". The right hon. Gentleman made the right analysis of the problems facing our schools at that time but, unfortunately, he prescribed the wrong solution. The hidden agenda of the wrongly titled Education Reform Act 1988 was to reintroduce selective grammar schools, and bring with them the obvious necessity for schools that would be non-selective. It is obvious that if some schools have selection, some pupils will fail. They are then deemed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe) said, to be non-achievers. That stigma stays with them for a long time. As someone who did not manage to pass the 11-plus, I can bear testimony to the feelings expressed by my hon. Friend.

It is surely wrong to try to determine a person's employment opportunities at the tender age of 11 years, but that was the hidden agenda of the 1988 legislation. The motivation behind the 1988 Act was to replace education consensus with political ideology, diktat and centralisation. That is apparent again today. After all, the Secretary of State has already rejected the Special Standing Committee that we, the Opposition, have requested should sit to take evidence. If we had adopted that approach, we would have been able to introduce again a consensual approach to education and to bring together everyone in that enterprise for the benefit of all pupils. It is sad that the Government, even at this late stage, are refusing to take that course.

The 1988 Act failed on two major counts. First, it failed because it did not raise standards for all our pupils. Indeed, the Act became a positive obstacle to raising

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standards. The standard assessment tasks were ham-fisted and time consuming. At times, they were irrelevant. They were constantly being revised. It was only through the intervention of the Dearing review that an uneasy peace in our classrooms was restored. It should be remembered that when the review took place, we were promised a five-year moratorium. We were told that there would be five years of consolidation. Yet here we are, debating yet another Education Bill. The second failure of the 1988 Act was that it did not address the discredited selection system which failed 95 per cent. of pupils at the age of 11.

The fact that the 1988 Act failed to achieve its objectives was confirmed by the Government when they introduced what became the Education Act 1993. The right hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten) told the House on 9 November 1992--he echoed what the right hon. Member for Mole Valley had said four years earlier--that the Government wanted to introduce a new framework for education. The same civil servant must have written both speeches. We were told that the new framework would endure into the next century. Yet, four years on, we are faced with another Education Bill. The Bill's existence proves that the 1993 Act did not reach the landmarks set for it.

The then Secretary of State told the House that he expected that there would be 1,500 grant-maintained schools by 1 April 1994. He said also that he would eat his hat "garnished" if there was not an avalanche of GM schools before the end of the Parliament. Here we are in November 1996 with only 1,100 GM schools. The target set by the then Secretary of State in 1994 has not been reached. We are talking about only 5 per cent. of schools in our education system. So much for the success of that Act. That is why the Education Bill is before us.

After 17 years of Tory rule and the most centralised system of education ever known in this country--[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey), from a sedentary position, talks about grant-maintained schools. He was graceful enough to admit in Standing Committee F, which considered the Nursery Education and Grant-Maintained Schools Bill, that applications for grant-maintained schools had dried up. He stays silent now, because he knows that what he said then was true.

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