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Dr. Ladyman: The hon. Gentleman is nearly correct. I shall come on to the reason why Mr. Martin Frey and his colleagues have managed to get only 7,000 signatures. Acquiring that number of signatures took a huge effort and was almost a miracle. Reaching their target of 45,000 signatures is a practical impossibility, given the rules under which they have to work. I shall come on to those rules later in my oration.
I say to the hon. Gentleman that those people have not abandoned their petition; they have simply postponed it, and they will carry it into next year. The problem that I fear as much as any other is that we will have this discussion year after year, that they will always fail to get the required number of signatures because of the practical impossibility of doing so, and that we shall never have certainty in our local system. I want rules that allow the schools to have the ballot and to get the debate out in the open so that a decision can be made, and then we will all be able to live with what follows.
Dr. Phyllis Starkey (Milton Keynes, South-West): In view of the comment made by the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), my hon. Friend might be interested to know that a paper from Buckinghamshire county council shows that when the council had a consultation on grammar schools, it got a total of 3,644
responses. Perhaps my hon. Friend would like to reflect on the hon. Gentleman's use of the word "risible" for a total that was twice as high and was reached by a private individual, not a public body.
Dr. Ladyman: My hon. Friend makes her point extremely effectively.
I turn now to the background of the new clause. If any hon. Members think that the 11-plus, which Kent calls the Kent test, is an objective test suitable for judging people's ability at 11 and determining the rest of their life, I point out that the test was changed a few years ago because not enough boys were passing and local grammar schools could not fill their boys' places. The head teacher of one of those schools came to me to lobby for the Kent test to be made easier for boys. The test had to be changed--a non-verbal reasoning test was included--and more boys are passing now. However, if the test is now fair, it must have been unfair beforehand, and generations of boys were tossed on to the educational scrap heap. If that was not the case, the test must be unfair now.
Mr. Purchase: Kent's experience of the difficulty of deciding boys' and girls' whole future at age 11 is greatly reflected in inner-city areas, such as mine, with multicultural communities. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is almost impossible to devise an objective, rational test on a one-size-fits-all basis?
Dr. Ladyman: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. May I say how much I agreed with his comments in the previous debate. I had fellow feeling for him on many of the issues that he dealt with.
I shall expand a little on what my hon. Friend has just said. Not only was the Kent test changed a few years ago to make it easier for boys, but Dover was not getting enough children through the test to fill all its grammar schools, so it introduced the Dover test. I do not know why, but fortunately for Dover, enough of its children are passing the Kent test this year to fill the town's grammar schools. However, the children who passed the Dover test are also entitled to grammar school places, and they are taking them, so people who would previously have gone to grammar schools in Dover are now being displaced to grammar schools in my constituency.
Who suffers in the end? It is the people whom the Conservative party is always championing--those who live in rural villages and towns and are furthest away from the grammar schools and therefore last on the list of the schools' admission criteria when they are ticking off which pupils they will take. This week, my desk is covered with letters from people who live in small, rural towns and villages in my constituency, such as Wingham and Minster, and who are being told that their child does not have a grammar school place because of the nonsense of the selective system which is being foisted on the whole area.
Mr. Brady: Given that the hon. Gentleman has painted a picture of chaos in school applications in his constituency, why does he believe that no one can find 20 per cent. of parents who are prepared to trigger a ballot?
Dr. Ladyman: If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will deal with precisely that point in a moment because it is the thrust of the argument for considering change.
I turn now to an objective view of which system we should be following. We now have two sets of objective data about the relative merits of the comprehensive education system and the selective education system. York university identified intellectually equal cohorts of children based on their performance at age 14 in standard attainment tests and measured their progress as they went through grammar schools and comprehensive schools.
The researchers found that for the top 4 per cent. of children, there was no difference between grammar schools and comprehensives, but the remainder did better in comprehensive schools than in grammar schools. That would apply to over 80 per cent. of the children who attend grammar schools in my constituency at this moment. I can put my hand on my heart and say that none of those children would be worse off in a good comprehensive school, and 80 per cent. would get better results in a comprehensive.
If that was not enough, I have the evidence provided by the Secretary of State and by the Minister for Education and Employment in the other House, who in Lords Hansard on 15 March at column 1546 compared GCSE results for the top 24 per cent. of children in comprehensive schools with the top 24 per cent. in grammar schools, and found that the comprehensive pupils did significantly better. Objective data such as that need to be presented to parents so that they can compare selective education with the comprehensive system. We need to start that debate.
The hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) asked why we did not succeed in getting the 45,000 signatures needed to initiate such a debate in Kent. In saying that, I have almost answered his question. Kent is taken as a huge conglomerate, and we must find 45,000 signatures--20 per cent. of all the eligible parents. It might be easier if just a petition of 45,000 parents was involved and we were given a fair crack at being able to get the data, but we must approach each school separately for the list of parents so that we can contact them. We are not allowed to collect petitions on schools premises, so we have to visit parents' homes one by one. We have to provide multiple pieces of information for every name on the petition.
Those who are experienced at collecting the signatures tell me that it takes 10 minutes for someone to fill in the form correctly even when that person has already been convinced, is being co-operative and is willing to sign. Before getting that far, people have to go to parents' houses and sit with them for 10 minutes, and probably have a cup of tea and a chat. They then have to visit the next house. All that has to be done in an academic year, and enough time has to be left to hold the debate and ballot. That is simply a practical impossibility.
With the greatest of respect to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, I have to concede that there has been an error of judgment. I share the blame for that error because I voted for it when the original legislation was framed. I put my hand up and say that I made the mistake as well; I did not spot how difficult the petitions would be. However, the petitions are intended for areas in which there is one grammar school in an otherwise comprehensive education system. They were designed for much smaller scale activities than those in Kent, where they are simply a practical impossibility.
I shall put some suggestions to my right hon. Friend, who shares many of my concerns about the problems that we face in Kent. We could make the rules for collecting the names on petitions much simpler, which would not require primary legislation, and would allow us to move forward. We could create a mechanism to ensure that the campaigning organisation was provided with the names of all the parents from the various schools so that its representatives did not have to visit every school separately to get all those names. We could make the logistics of collecting the petition more simple, by allowing many more names to be provided on one petition form.
We could consider how Kent is divided to find out whether it would be possible to hold the ballot at certain locations in Kent rather than across the whole county. That is not beyond the wit of man because Kent avoided going comprehensive in the first place by saying that it was a group of diverse communities that had to be treated separately, that the legislation could not be applied en masse and that schools had to be broken down and dealt with on their individual merits. Kent could say that for a couple of decades to avoid the current legislation. Why cannot we divide Kent into its communities? Some may doubt whether that can be done, but it has been done in Dover, where the Dover test serves local grammar schools.
6.15 pm
We could make the ballot a practical possibility by reducing the threshold for the petition to 1 per cent. That is the only part of my proposals that would require primary legislation, which is why new clause 9 deals with that aspect only. I strongly urge my right hon. Friend seriously to consider accepting new clause 9, which would allow us to try to achieve that much more realistic threshold. That would at least make it a practical possibility for us to campaign, and to hold the debate and the ballot. I am not talking about a political dogfight or suggesting that we should all get into our bunkers and start to close our eyes to the merits of good schools, the difficulties faced by bad schools and all other the problems that Opposition Members will certainly mention.
The subject must be debated properly, after which the decision could be taken and we could then begin to live with it in Kent. I would at least know that there was a fighting chance that I could offer my daughter the sort of education that I believe that she and all my other constituents deserve. I want the educational apartheid that exists in Kent to end and a decent, progressive comprehensive education system to be put in place so that we can start delivering results and dealing with the iniquities that face my county.
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