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9.15 pm
The hon. Member for Southend, East shakes his head, but I direct him to the statistics in the Library which show that I am correct. Both counties offer children about the same access to pre-school education, which is often taken as an important ingredient when considering later performance. Hampshire organises its secondary education through comprehensives while Kent has a mixture of grammar schools and schools which inevitably become secondary modern as the brightest children are creamed off along what the hon. Member for Southend, East described as an escape route to grammar schools.
As the Minister has said, both counties performed fairly well in the league tables--as they should, given their socio-economic intake--but the difference in outcome between the two counties is stark. Hampshire, with its comprehensive schools, only eight schools had 25 per cent. or fewer pupils gaining five GCSEs at grades A to C, taking that as the level below which we would not want to drop. In Kent, which has a mixture of grammar and secondary modern schools, 49 schools had 25 per cent. or fewer pupils gaining five GCSEs at grades A to C. The children come from similar backgrounds and the areas are similar, but in Kent a third of the schools perform badly while in Hampshire only 6.5 per cent. of the schools have a poor outcome. That cannot be explained by saying that Kent children are less able, nor can it be said that the teachers are less committed or competent. The only difference between the two counties is that Kent has grammar schools while Hampshire does not.
The story told by the league tables goes on. Six schools in Kent, two of which, interestingly enough, are grant maintained, have worse results than the Ridings school. Seven schools produce worse results than the worst school in Hackney, and 11 have results that are worse than the worst school in Islington. In 25 schools, the results are worse than the worst school in my constituency of Barking. The Government's own league tables show that selective education not only fails to improve standards, but may damage overall standards.
Mrs. Gillan:
Is the hon. Lady able to state the percentages of statemented children or those requiring special educational needs in those schools?
Ms Hodge:
During the Bill's Committee stage, the Minister of State quite properly said that children's backgrounds should not be relevant to their results at 16. Our goal should be for all children, whatever their background, to achieve certain levels. I agree with the Minister of State that we should not expect children from a particular background, who start with particular skills and qualifications, to achieve better results than others. We want all our children to achieve.
The hon. Member for Southend, East needs to appreciate that the character of one school will affect the character of other schools in an area. Very able pupils do well in both of the counties that I mentioned, but excluded students suffer where grammar schools exist. The impact of creaming off a few children to a few schools has an enormous impact on other schools.
We are not driven by dogma, we are driven by the facts provided by the Government. We ignore those facts at our peril. Selection closes doors. It does not open them, as
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Mr. Spearing:
Does my hon. Friend realise that many people who have taught in both grammar and comprehensive schools are acutely aware that, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, bad grammar schools concentrated only on the notionally top third of pupils and that the remaining pupils suffered and were effectively sacrificed? In comprehensive schools, however, staff attempt to fit the education that they can provide to all the needs of all the pupils. I think that my hon. Friend will agree that the Prime Minister would agree with that analysis and description.
Ms Hodge:
The Prime Minister might indeed agree with that analysis. My hon. Friend raises another important issue, which is that within schools people are assessed as failures or successes. Even within grammar schools--as those of us who attended them know--children at the bottom are written off. Let us think about that practice, because that is what new clause 9 is about. Let us think about what we would be doing to children at five if we started to classify them as failures because they did not pass a test to get them into the school of their choice. Is that a sensible way in which to make progress? Can we really select children at five according to their ability? Are we really going to write off little children at the very start of their statutory school career because they have failed to pass an initial test?
Mr. Gunnell:
Does my hon. Friend agree that we will be writing off children under the age of five years if we do not exclude baseline assessment--which is the purpose of the new clause? Unless we exclude baseline assessments, we will be writing off children when they are in nursery school, and a selection process will be introduced almost as children first encounter the educational system. The test is meant to be diagnostic and to indicate children's potential, perhaps their aptitude and something about them; it should certainly not be used to penalise them in later life. The new clause has been designed to remove that penalty.
Ms Hodge:
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, because I had planned to deal with just that point. As hon. Members may or may not know, I have taken a particular interest in early years education and in the development of the nursery voucher scheme. I have also been extremely critical of the desirable outcomes that were set as standards--which have become a curriculum, despite the original intention--and which children are expected to achieve by the time they finish their education under the voucher scheme.
Two school settings failed to meet the criteria for the pilot stage of the nursery voucher scheme. One was a Rudolf Steiner school. Rudolf Steiner schools do not teach words or mathematical concepts, and practise the philosophy that it is wrong to teach children numeracy or literacy skills before the age of six. I do not agree with that view, but those schools are perfectly entitled to it. Children who attend Rudolf Steiner schools often perform as well as other children later on.
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The children at the Rudolf Steiner school failed to produce the desirable outcome that the Government had set as a mechanism for assessing whether schools should be included in the nursery voucher scheme, so those children were deemed to have failed. That is absurd. In no way could that test judge whether the children had potential, were bright or were able to cope with a sophisticated curriculum and achieve better results than children from elsewhere, and it demonstrates the absurdity of any test at five to start selecting children and placing them in a selective primary grammar school. Let us be clear: that is what the Government mean when they talk about selection.
The Government have been eager to proclaim that all their reforms extend choice. Opposition Members have consistently said that the choice is for the school and not for the child. I remind the House of one fact that reinforces our thesis that the Government's reforms provide limited choice--the increased number of appeals. In 1989-90, there were 21,000 appeals by parents against the places that their children were given. By 1994-95, the figure had more than doubled to 54,400 because fewer parents were getting the choice that they wanted.
Standards in education are a central concern of all politicians and employers; they are an obsession for most of us who are parents of school-age children. We all worry. The notion that our child might gain access to better opportunities in a school that selects may seem superficially attractive, but never has an education debate been based on so much political prejudice and so little objective evidence.
Labour is right to focus on standards. We cannot run away from the challenge, and we cannot admit defeat before we have tried. Britain is wrong to have neglected standards for so long. We all want comprehensive primary and secondary schools that are so good that no parent would deny their child the privilege of attending them. The answer does not lie in bringing back selection, but in a single-minded determination to raise standards in all our schools for all our children.
Mr. Spearing:
Most teachers, whatever their political persuasion, would agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Ms Hodge) has just said, but I should like briefly to refer to the speech of the hon. Member for Southend, East (Sir T. Taylor).
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