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Ms Hodge: If that, indeed. Do we need good teachers to make good heads? Should we not look at the advanced skills teacher post as a way in which to keep good teachers in the classroom and, therefore, look at a wider range of skills when we recruit heads? People with other skills and other backgrounds could make excellent heads and managers of their schools. The skills required to run a school are not the same as the skills required to be an effective classroom teacher. I urge Ministers to explore options.
At present, the appraisal system for head teachers varies in its effectiveness and we need to revisit that point. It is odd that the chair of a governing body is not included in the appraisal system. The chair may be consulted and asked for information, but, outside GM schools, he or she plays no role in the appraisal system. If the chair of a governing body is to fulfil his or her job, he or she must be incorporated into the process.
I find it odd that a head teacher can cross off the list heads by whom they do not want to be appraised. Again, that denies the objectivity that we seek in the appraisal system. As we define the new role of the local education authority in the White Paper, we should define more closely the role of the LEA in appraising head teachers and taking the task more seriously. If the LEA is there to raise educational standards, it should play an active role in the appraisal of head teachers.
What do we do about poor head teachers? There are huge difficulties in removing head teachers who are not up to the job. It is difficult to remove them, yet it is easy to destroy the standards in a school if poor head teachers are not removed quickly. The removal of a head is more important than the removal of an individual teacher.
The only way in which a poor head teacher can be removed quickly is if everybody agrees--if the head agrees to go quietly and probably at great expense, if the chair of governors and the governing body agree that the head should go and if the LEA is willing to assist. If those three parties do not agree, it can take not just 18 months but years to remove a head teacher from a school where he or she is not providing excellent leadership. That undermines the school and damages the life choices of
a generation of children. I urge Ministers to review that procedure so that we can look, as we have with teachers, at a mechanism that is fair to teachers, but, most important, fair to children and ensures their rights.
The White Paper also deals with education in the early years. I very much welcome the speed with which Ministers have acted on nursery vouchers. I welcome the decision to phase them out and replace them with a nursery place for all four-year-olds. We all know that the nursery voucher scheme has been wasteful and bureaucratic, as we said it would be when we were in opposition. It has led to a cut in the number of places available to young children and to a decline in standards, partly because four-year-olds have been pushed into over-sized reception classes and partly because of the low expectations associated with the desirable outcomes.
I congratulate the Government on moving fast on a number of issues. About 50 to 60 LEAs have already established early years forums and brought in early years development plans. We have already issued guidance so that all LEAs will have an early years development plan for 1998-99, working with the voluntary and private sectors. Despite rumours to the contrary, there will be nursery places for all four-year-olds in 18 months, as promised in our manifesto.
I welcome the introduction of early excellence centres, because those will be the start of our bringing together child care and education, a move which is long overdue in education policy. It is important to do that because 50 per cent. of the intellectual development of a child takes place in those first crucial five years and because the nature of families is changing so fast.
However, if we are to achieve real progress in the early years, the Government need to take some action in the legislation that they will be developing in connection with the White Paper. I urge Ministers to further the integration of child care and education in the forthcoming Bill. We need to legislate to create a unified statutory framework for that integration.
At present, local authorities are required to produce two reports, one for the early years forum, which will give them an early years development plan, and one under the Children Act 1989 for the early years service--one for up to five-year-olds, and one for up to eight-year-olds. Those have different standards and different child-adult ratios, which is a recipe for confusion rather than integration. We need one framework and one Act that will contain a common framework for registration and for inspection, and common standards in terms of child-staff ratios, space, qualifications and other such issues. We must define that carefully to ensure that we maintain, as a social services function, a rigorous and effective framework for the protection of children at risk.
I urge Ministers to take on board the legacy that they have inherited in relation to four-year-olds in schools. Most of those four-year-olds are receiving an inappropriate education in an inappropriate environment, with an inappropriate curriculum.
This is an exciting time in education. It is a time for new thinking and a new approach. It is a time when no holds will be barred in the pursuit of excellence. It is a time for a new partnership to be constructed between parents, children, teachers, schools, LEAs and the
Government. It is a time when the nation's children can look forward to educational opportunity of a quality that every parent, employer and politician knows is right and important. I congratulate Ministers on publishing this important White Paper and look forward to the legislation that it will bring in the autumn, in the hope and confidence that it will facilitate in Britain's schools a better future for all our children.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
Several hon. Members are trying to catch my eye and if there is some restraint on the length of speeches, I hope that they may all have the opportunity to speak.
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham):
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for enabling me to contribute to this debate on the most important domestic issue that our country faces in the years ahead.
At the heart of Conservative education thinking was a recognition that giving schools freedom combined with responsibility would lead to improved standards, greater choice and extended accountability of the education service, both to the consumers of the product and to the wider community. In substantial measure, that philosophy worked. The outputs were favourable. The score sheet is positive. My fear is that the consequence of the present White Paper, whatever good intentions may underlie it, will be to drive the process backwards and to reverse the accomplishments of the past 18 years.
In the presence of the Under-Secretary of State, I shall begin on what I hope will be accepted by the House as a genuinely charitable note. In a limited number of important areas, the Labour party at national level has undergone an apostolic conversion. It has moved from hostility to the national curriculum to welcoming it. It opposed league tables, but now supports them. After ridiculing the notion that there was scope for improvement in literacy and numeracy standards, it now embraces the cause of improvement in that sphere. It had an absolutely derogatory attitude towards Ofsted, but now recognises the merits of that body and its important role in education. The Labour party had a palpable disregard for the appalling standards in many teacher training establishments, but it now recognises that the reform of teacher training has to be at the heart of educational advance.
Labour has travelled a long way, at least in terms of establishing a superior rhetoric and that is welcome. In so far as that can be followed through by practical initiatives, by attention to detail, by an understanding of the targets that need to be set and by an appreciation of the ways in which they will be met, the country will applaud the Government. In so far as they are not able to follow through, we shall see that they are exposed as believers only in the theory who cannot grasp the essentials of what is required in practice. At this stage, I acknowledge that there has been some change.
My overall concern about the White Paper spans many elements. There are several problems in the document, the first of which is that at its heart there is an innate contradiction. Ministers have said that they wish to raise standards and that they charge schools with the primary
responsibility for achieving that outcome. However, they afford to local education authorities a centrality in the process which many of us believe that the experience of recent years does not warrant. Many of us contend that, given the prevalence of Labour LEAs, the situation is not that they can provide a solution but that they are part of the problem of endemic low standards in many parts of our country. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will address that point as it worries not just Conservative Members but many parents and governors and others with a genuine and continuing interest in the quality of public sector education that we offer.
I have a vested interest in the subject. I cannot comment on the expense incurred in the education of the hon. Member for Barking (Ms Hodge) as it is not a subject on which I am an expert, but I say categorically that I have an interest in the quality of state schools because I went to one. I attended a relatively modest comprehensive school in the Finchley constituency of my noble Friend Baroness Thatcher, and I have consistently maintained that I got to university despite, and not because of, my attendance at that school. I had a few outstanding teachers, but there were serious problems in the state-funded service. I am therefore committed to the dramatic enhancement of the quality of the state service upon which, realistically, the vast majority of our children will depend. There is no doubt about my objectives in this matter.
My first concern relates to local education authorities, to which the White Paper proposes to grant more powers. Each school will be obliged to prepare a plan which will be submitted to and be subject to the approval of the LEA. The Minister of State, who is not in his place, took pains to assure us earlier in the debate that the capacity of an LEA to intervene would be limited. He said that there would be benign, harmless intervention, only when it was essential, but he did not persuade Conservative Members because he did not deny that LEAs will be able to challenge the views of schools in their local education plans and interfere in the contents of plans. That rings alarm bells in my head and in those of many other hon. Members. If Ministers are anxious to disprove that point, they must assuage our fears in their response to this debate.
It is simply not true that intervention, as is said in the White Paper, will be in inverse proportion to success. The point was eloquently made by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) at the outset of the debate, but it bears repetition: successful schools will be obliged to seek the approval of unsuccessful education authorities for the school plans that they have devised. The chronic illogicality of that is so apparent that only an exceptionally clever person could fail to see so simple a point.
12.58 pm
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