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Ms Hodge: I have listened carefully to the hon. Lady and there seems to be a contradiction in what she is saying. On the one hand, she welcomed the increased local management of schools that the White Paper heralds--something which the previous Government failed to implement when they had the opportunity to do so in the Education Act 1997. Giving additional local management to schools enables them to run themselves better. It does not centralise, but decentralises.

Does the hon. Lady understand that when one decentralises, which is what the White Paper intends to do, it is incumbent on the Government and local authorities to ensure that standards are maintained by monitoring, not running, those schools?

Mrs. Browning: The hon. Lady is right. I said that we welcome local management of schools because it gives schools more decision-making powers. The contradiction is in the White Paper. It is warm on the sort of words that make people think that there will be decentralisation, but it is riddled--I am coming to examples if the hon. Lady will bide her time--with yet more powers transferred to local education authorities and the Department.

County halls will find that they have more power and more responsibilities and they will need more resources to remain at the centre with them. The Minister outlined many things that LEAs will have to do. I will refer to resources in a moment, because, with changes of this sort, there is always a cost attached.

Labour education policy has always been statist and egalitarian. Nothing has changed there in this White Paper. Labour just does a better job of disguising it. As a result of the White Paper, the structures of education in England and Wales will become centralised and more bureaucratic.

First, the White Paper proposes to increase the power and role of LEAs. The Government are trying to reassure us by saying that intervention will be in inverse proportion to success--the Minister repeated that this morning. However, the Government then set out proposals to require every school to produce an annual plan for improving its performance, which would need LEA approval. That requirement would give LEAs massive scope for intervening in schools, overruling head teachers if they took their schools in a direction that did not accord with the LEA's ethos.

Mr. Byers: I thought that I had made it clear in my speech--in any case, I want to place it on the record--that if there is a disagreement between a school and the local education authority with regard to the setting of targets, the local education authority will not impose its will. The disagreement will be registered, and it will be for the Secretary of State, in approving the plan,

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to determine whether the school's or the local education authority's view of the target should prevail. However, the important principle is that the targets will be challenging for the local authority and the individual school.

Mrs. Browning: That is exactly my point. If the LEA does not decide, the state will. It is statist. It is like a communist five-year plan. If the LEA does not agree, the Secretary of State will take the powers himself. That bodes ill, especially for the 1,100 grant-maintained schools. The hon. Gentleman may contradict me if he intends to make an exemption for GM schools; I am saying that the plans and targets of GM schools will require LEA clearance and approval, which would mean that those schools would return to the yoke of the local bureaucrats from whom they thought that they had escaped by voting for GM status. The White Paper is the writing on the wall for GM schools. I hope that the Minister will be honest enough to admit that.

The proposals in the White Paper would create a ridiculous situation. I told the Minister that in a television discussion yesterday, but I shall repeat my argument because I do not believe that he got the point. Of course, even in a good school there may be room for improvement, but that was not my argument. I was arguing that a school such as the London Oratory, which is a favourite school of many senior members of the Labour party, a very good school--

Mr. Byers: But could do better.

Mrs. Browning: I would not disagree with that. But what an anomaly it would be for such a school to be obliged to submit its improvement plans to a comparatively poorly performing LEA. The Oratory gets 70 per cent. A to C grade passes at GCSE. Its LEA, which will now have to approve or disapprove what it does, is the Hammersmith and Fulham local education authority, which presides over a 30 per cent. A to C grade pass rate at GCSE. It would be better if the Hammersmith and Fulham LEA submitted its plans to the Oratory so that standards might be improved.

LEAs will also be given a role in implementing the Government's policies to improve standards. Back in the driving seat of education, their role will be clear. It will be

"to help schools set and meet their targets."

The Government also intend LEAs to co-ordinate and allocate nursery places, believing that the abolition of nursery vouchers means that, instinctively, LEAs are better placed to make decisions than parents are. The White Paper not only puts LEAs back in the driving state of education, but will lead to a massive increase in bureaucracy, paperwork and state plans, none of which have ever raised standards or improved efficiency.

It would be interesting to be told by the Minister how much of the education standard spending assessment for the coming financial year will be clawed back and retained in county halls so that the LEAs may perform all those tasks. He has already mentioned that the Chancellor of the Exchequer provided additional money in the Budget for education, to countrywide acclaim. Expectations are running high in every school in the land.

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The Minister cannot do the loaves and little fishes act. Either the money will be required by the LEA to perform the additional tasks or it will go to the sharp end--into the classroom. Which is it to be? In what proportion will that money find its way into the classroom and how much of it will be retained by LEAs, as is their wont, to provide services from the centre?

The Government's latest buzz word, again mentioned by the Minister this morning, is "partnership". It crops up frequently in the White Paper. Reference is made to "a partnership for change", to "work in partnership" and to

"a partnership between Government and the education service",

to

"effective partnerships at local level",

to

"partnership with local schools"

and to "school-parent partnerships". We have even been told that

"good discipline also depends on partnership".

When the Government talk about partnership, they mean more paper, another consultation exercise, more bureaucracy and the return of state planning. For anyone working in the education service, the Government's "partnership for change" will mean a great deal more time and effort, churning out paper and mastering the detail of the latest guidelines to be issued by the Department for Education and Employment, to meet the endless stream of plans that the Government have in store for the education service.

I have already mentioned that every school will need to introduce its own plan. Every LEA will need an education development plan. Schools that want to diversify and become specialist sports or language schools, for instance, will have to produce a three-year plan. Nursery education will be subject to early years development plans--parents could not possibly be trusted--and the Department will instruct LEAs to come up with action plans to cut class sizes.

The White Paper is a bureaucrats' dream. They will love it at county hall--their futures are secured--but it is the nightmare of parents and schools.

Another disturbing feature of the White Paper is the power that will be given not only to LEAs, but to the Department and the Secretary of State. A few moments ago, when I said that the LEAs would claw back power, the Minister leapt to his feet and said that, oh no, if there were a dispute the Secretary of State would decide--as though we should take comfort from that.

Power in the education service will be massively centralised. Locally, the LEAs will start to take control and, nationally, the Department for Education and Employment will start to do so. Two bodies have been--

Mr. Willis: I cannot control myself any longer. I presume that the hon. Lady worked in a different Department in the Conservatives' years in office, because I seem to recall that the previous Government produced at least one major Act of Parliament on education every year and that they took it upon themselves to centralise more powers than any Government in the history of education since 1870. How does she reconcile that with the comments that she is now making?

Mrs. Browning: Very easily, because we were the party that allowed more schools to have control, and which gave

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governing bodies and head teachers more control. We set up grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges. All those measures were opposed by the Opposition.

Mr. Willis: The Conservatives did that by diktat.

Mrs. Browning: No, not by diktat; by Divisions of the House, in which Labour Members and many of the hon. Gentleman's colleagues in the Liberal Democrat party trotted through the No Lobby. Now, suddenly, they tell us that they believed in those measures all the time.

I wish to discuss the two bodies that have been established since the general election, which will have national control of what goes on in our schools. On the face of it, the standards task force will meet and, drawing on a range of expertise, give advice to Ministers, but if it is to be instrumental in raising standards, it will need to overcome a great difficulty. It is obvious from the detail of the White Paper that it will have difficulty in balancing the need for raising standards and the drive for equality, which will act as a brake on raising standards.

Paragraph 12 on page 11 says:

"The demands for equality and increased opportunity in the 1950s and 1960s led to the introduction of comprehensive schools. All-in secondary schooling rightly became the normal pattern, but the search for equality of opportunity in some cases became a tendency to uniformity. The idea that all children had the same rights to develop their abilities led too easily to the doctrine that all had the same ability."

It is hardly surprising that the Government have ended up with uniformity, when their objective was equality. We shall watch closely to see how much diversity will emerge, and what they will do to ensure that children have the same rights to develop their abilities. Developing rights and equality is not quite the same as raising standards.

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