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Mr. Pawsey: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Hall: I absolutely will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. [Interruption.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order.

Mr. Hall: The hon. Gentleman needs a little bit of discipline.

Miss Lestor: Cane him!

Mr. Hall: Metaphorically speaking.

After 17 years of Tory rule and the most centralised system of education ever known in this country, we face another major Education Act--the seventh in the past four years. If Conservative Members believe that the Bill is about raising standards, that is an admission that previous education legislation has failed. We have had three Acts of Parliament designed specifically to promote grant-maintained schools. This will be the fourth.

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It is time that the Government got the message that the general public do not want more legislation aimed at the structures of education. We need to concentrate our attention on levering up standards for all our pupils. The Bill owes more to the past failures of education legislation and offers very little in terms of building an educational consensus for the future. It characterises the dishonesty at the heart of the Government.

The primary measure in the Bill is the extension of grant-maintained schools' ability to select up to 50 per cent. of their pupils. Such changes in school admissions policies will not be consulted upon, nor will they need the support of the local education authority or the approval of the Secretary of State for Education and Employment.

It is simply dishonest to claim that the reintroduction of selective grammar schools will extend parental choice. Selective grammar schools will leave schools choosing 5 per cent. of their pupils, condemning the remaining 95 per cent. as failures at the age of 11 to attend--whatever the Government want to call them--secondary modern schools.

It is simply dishonest to claim that a grammar school in every town will not turn the remaining schools in that town into secondary modern schools. Likewise, it is dishonest to claim that, by means of examination at the age of 11, one can determine the future career prospects of pupils. It is nonsense to believe that a pupil's education potential is set in stone at the age of 11, as the example of my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield and many other hon. Members can now proclaim.

The vast majority of people do not want to see a return to the discredited education apartheid achieved by selection. I quote from the editorial of The Sunday Times of 27 April 1992, which said:

"To pretend that the selective opted out structure emerging as Government policy has anything to do with parental choice is a deception."

Schools will choose pupils. Parents will offer only their preference as to which school they would like their children to attend. The removal of the consultative requirements and necessary Government approval for the reintroduction of selection is wrong because it removes the democratic rights of communities to express their views on selection and to plan education provision for their area. The removal of those requirements is yet another admission by the Government that their agenda is to reintroduce selection, but it is not by the back door any more. It is open. It is overt and it is on the front of the Bill, but it does not command popular support.

If the Government need any reaffirmation of that, they need only look at the results of the local government elections in the 1970s and 1980s, when Conservative authorities that refused to introduce comprehensive education were overturned by their electorates specifically because the communities in those areas wanted a comprehensive education system for all their children. If the Government believe that the proposed legislation will have popular appeal, they are sadly wrong.

It is dishonest for people at the heart of the Government to blame LEAs for the breakdown of discipline in certain schools. It is dishonest for the Government to deny any responsibility for that breakdown. Under the terms and conditions of the Education Reform Act 1988 and the Education Act 1993, the Government have taken over

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control of many of the day-to-day aspects of school life. They should recognise their responsibility, and own up to their failings.

It is also dishonest of certain members of the Government to claim that the reintroduction of corporal punishment will improve discipline. Requiring adults to brutalise children will serve only to make discipline worse, not better. The ritual abuse of pupils by teachers should have no place in a civilised education system.

It is also dishonest to believe that amendments to the Bill will have the authority to change the European Court ruling that outlawed assaults on schoolchildren, and that teachers want the return of corporal punishment in schools. It beggars belief that the Home Secretary is opposed to corporal punishment of convicted criminals, because he believes that it does not work, but he is in favour of adults beating children in schools, presumably because he believes that thrashing innocent pupils has a positive educational outcome.

The whole episode is made more bizarre by Ministers calling for a free vote on this issue. Those same Ministers are resisting a free vote on the private ownership of handguns. The hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Walden) was absolutely right when he said that the issue panders to all that is stupid, vulgar and retrograde in our society. That applies to the whole debate.

This is a classic example of the Government getting their priorities wrong. Now they are scampering around to reposition themselves in anticipation of a leadership election following the Tory party's demise at the next election.

It is dishonest for the chairman of the Tory party to claim that reducing class sizes for five to seven-year-olds to 30 or below is wrong and harmful for the country. Reducing class sizes would be the best thing that the Government could do, and I look forward to many positive measures being adopted in the education Bill of the next Labour Government.

9.21 pm

Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): I thank the hon. Member for Warrington, South (Mr. Hall) for shortening his speech to fit me in. None the less, I must say that almost everything he said was in the same vein as the comments that we have heard from the Opposition Benches all afternoon. In one speech after another, Labour Members said, "Let's have more of the country run the way in which Labour local education authorities run it."

I want to reply to a point that was made from a sedentary position. I intervened earlier to say that my area contained three successful grammar schools and a highly successful school that selects on the basis of technological aptitude. After I sat down, someone shouted out, "You didn't say anything about the other schools."

I shall tell the House about some of those other schools. One is an extremely successful Anglican comprehensive, another is an extremely successful Catholic school, and another is a high school that was selected by Brussels a few months ago to host the first ever EU-wide conference on the Internet. That is the type of diversity that Conservatives believe in. What would happen to those schools if we were one day to have a Labour Government?

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I missed the speech by the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster), but I remember hearing my Liberal opponent in 1992 deliver a diatribe about the evils of grant-maintained status, without once mentioning that he had worked for most of his life at a famous public school.

I firmly support the Bill: it is an excellent measure. I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State's proposals on discipline. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland) about the cane, but I do not want to dwell on that subject. It is important that we do not lose sight of the measures that are firmly in the Bill, which my right hon. Friend was right to introduce. It is wrong that our courts should be willing to hold that, when a school detains a pupil without parental permission, it is deemed to be illegally detaining that pupil. I have been unable to discover the origins of that ruling.

As a result of the Bill, it will now be possible for pupils with problem parents to be disciplined. A school has always been able to keep a child back for detention if the parents agree, but the difficulty is with a problem child with problem parents who say, "No, I am not willing to have my child disciplined, and I do not mind what my child is doing to the rest of the class." We are removing the right of parents to be bad parents and to allow their children to be bad pupils. The Bill is absolutely right on that.

I want to say a few words on the issue of spiritual and moral development. My right hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Alison) made such a good speech about that earlier that I feel almost embarrassed to follow him, but I feel that there is a little more to be said on the subject. I will gladly give way to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) if he would like to intervene--

Mr. Blunkett: I would not dream of stopping the hon. Gentleman now.

Mr. Brazier: It is right for hon. Members to take an interest in what schools teach in the way of spiritual and moral development. It is right that the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority committee was asked to look at that, but I also think that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby were right to say that its first report was a great disappointment.

I feel that there are three aspects of the matter: the spiritual side, the skills side--involving issues such as leadership and team spirit, as well as discipline itself--and the factual side. For there is a factual side. At least one school in my constituency is very proud of teaching children what are now rather scorned subjects, such as domestic science, which is extremely useful to the making of families.

Let us take the spiritual side first. Let me say without the slightest hesitation that, in my view, any attempt to teach morality without a religious basis is doomed to failure from the beginning. A recent speech that I heard on that subject was made by Lord Jakobovits--an excellent speech in the House of Lords. Let me, however, go back to an earlier century. Cardinal Newman summed it up when dealing with the issue of whether ethics could be taught without religion. He put it in a nutshell when he said:

"You can quarry a rock with razors or moor a vessel with a silken thread as readily as you can use mere logic to control the pride and passions of a man."

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He was addressing an audience of male students, but what he said could equally be applied to young people of both sexes in their last years at school.

There is utter confusion. If people try to teach ethics without a religious base, what do they actually teach? Do they teach, for example, that all people have rights? At least one major world religion, the Hindu religion--a number of my relations were brought up in India--teaches that a whole class of people have no rights. Should people teach, for example, that homosexuality is on a par with marriage? Different philosophers disagree with that. Should they teach, for example, that marriage is a good thing?

That moves me from the spiritual side to the factual side. I think it right for children to be taught that marriage is the most successful way in which to rear children. They should be told about the huge body of evidence--most effectively assembled by a socialist, Professor Norman Dennis--that marriage is indeed the best way in which to rear children. A classroom may well contain children whose parents are not married, or who come from violent homes; it may well contain children like one of my closest friends, who was brought up with a deeply violent alcoholic father. That, however, should not stop us from trying to persuade the rising generation to do better than their parents.

I think that the factual side should extend further. In sex education, children should be taught the medical risks of homosexuality. They should be told how much shorter is the life expectancy of a homosexual than that of a member of the heterosexual community. We should not be ashamed to teach pupils the facts of life.

Besides the spiritual side, and the factual side, there is also the skills side. Certain basic skills are essential to being a citizen in this country. I mentioned discipline earlier; the Bill rightly says a lot about discipline, but let us remember self-discipline as well as collective discipline. I also believe that leadership is a skill that can be taught. It is taught partly through team games in which pupils work together, but also through other team activities, such as running the school debating society and editing the school magazine. Those are all ways of helping to develop leadership and other interactive skills.

We owe it to the rising generation to try to impart to them the traditional Christian values on which this country was founded--to teach them the traditional wisdom on which it was based, and to teach them the basic skills needed to develop the character which are so important to citizenship. I believe that both my right hon. Friends were absolutely right to say that SCAA has failed to address those issues, but we must address them. I welcome the fact that some clauses in the Bill say a little about them, but I shall press for more in other ways.

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