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Gregory Barker: On my hon. Friend's point about clarity and honesty, is it not bizarre that in clause 40, on the prohibition of interviews, subsection (3) states that that
"does not prevent the arrangements from requiring or authorising any audition or other oral or practical test to be carried out in relation to an applicant solely for the purpose of ascertaining the applicant's aptitude"?
What is that, if not selection?
Mr. Willetts:
My hon. Friend is right. For specialist schools, there is selection by aptitude for 10 per cent. of
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pupils. It is extremely difficult for anyone to discern the difference between selection by aptitude and selection by ability. As the chief schools adjudicator put it so well,
"Finding a difference between the meaning of two such words is the sort of exercise lexicographers get up to when they haven't enough to do."
The fact that the difference between aptitude and ability appears to be a fundamental distinction on which the Government's education policy rests reveals what a fragile structure it is.
Mr. Bellingham: My hon. Friend is making a superb speech. Clause 40 states that schools may not interview potential pupils and their parents. What happens if parents go to the school and want to interview the head?
Mr. Willetts: Indeed. The regulations are extraordinary. As I understand it, the purpose of such an interview is for the parents to learn about the school, but the school is not supposed to learn about the parents.
Mr. Willetts: I should like to make progress, as I want to consider two crucial concerns about the Bill. The first, which has been mentioned already, is what we might call the fragmentation concern—that the proposals in the Bill will lead to fragmentation and diversity, which will lead to inequity. That is a genuine concern, and I recognise that Labour Members express it with sincerity and conviction. If I honestly believed that the agenda of opening up more freedom for schools and giving them greater diversity would create even wider gaps in our society than exist at present, that would be a powerful objection to the proposals.
However, I have to ask hon. Members who believe that argument, and who believe that we should return to the classic comprehensive model with every child going to their local secondary school, whether that model is as fair and equitable in practice as it is supposed to be in theory. In today's Britain, the main route for getting one's child to a good school is to get one's local priest to sign a chit or to be willing to pay the higher price to get a good house in a catchment area close to a good school—a higher price of £50,000 on average and in some cases possibly £200,000.
I do not believe that a system of allocation of school places by the power of the local clergyman or the parents' ability to pay high house prices is any basis for a 21st century education system. In a modern, diverse, socially mobile country there is no way we can tie people down to their local catchment area and their local school. They are used to having a range of options and choosing between them. They will search the internet for information about how different schools are doing, and there is no basis on which any of us, on either side of the House, should try to pass laws and regulations to stop them exercising such choice.
Several hon. Members
rose—
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Mr. Willetts: Let me make progress on this very important point, because it matters enormously to us on the Conservative Benches. We do not believe that that old model is any longer a way in which people can credibly claim to deliver social justice. That is why the system needs to be opened up, and why we need to consider a radically different alternative allowing greater diversity and choice.
However, the alternative model has powerful critics, and none more powerful than the Deputy Prime Minister, who put it so well when he said:
"If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there."
That is his objection to the model and his concern. I wish that that were only one of the absurdities that we are used to hearing from the mouth of the Deputy Prime Minister, but sadly, what he was describing is the thinking that lies behind far too much regulation of schools in our local areas.
As an example of such thinking, I quote from the adjudicator's report on a request to open a new voluntary aided Montessori primary school. He wrote:
that is, the new maintained school—
"might prove attractive to more local families who might indeed find places to be available. If this were the case, then the anxieties expressed by the LEA, the schools local to the proposed site and other objectors would prove to be well founded".
So the chief adjudicator did not allow the new Montessori school to go ahead. That is an outrage. That is not the way that education should be conducted in our country today. We want to see conditions made easier for new schools to be created and for successful schools to be expanded.
Somewhere in No. 10, and perhaps at least with the Secretary of State and her adviser, Lord Adonis, there is a recognition that school adjudicators should no longer turn down bids to run a Montessori primary school. That is not a vision for education reform in the 21st century. The Prime Minister gets it. He is clear about that whenever he makes the case for education reform. It is a pity that, because of her fear of her own Back Benchers, the Secretary of State has been reluctant to make a case for education reform on those lines today. We know that the abolition of the school organisation committee and the new power of schools to compete to create new places are exactly what is necessary to move us in the direction that I have set out.
Tom Levitt (High Peak) (Lab): I owe it to the hon. Gentleman to give him a chance to take a breath. Is there not a world of difference between schools selecting parents and parents selecting schools? Does he agree that selection is the antithesis of choice?
Mr. Willetts:
Does the hon. Gentleman support specialist schools? Does he agree that they should have distinctive specialisms? Should they be able to select 10 per cent. of their pupils by aptitude in those specialisms? Can he explain to me the difference between the aptitude and the ability of pupils? That is a dangerous question to ask.
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Tom Levitt: I am happy to respond. All the comprehensive schools in my constituency are specialist schools, and they may or may not take up to their 10 per cent. of additional pupils. What they do not and cannot do is select against children in their catchment area, who still expect and get comprehensive education from those schools.
Mr. Willetts: The world is moving on.
I have talked about the concern of Labour Members over the possible threat to equity. I understand the concern and appreciate their sincerity. I have explained why I do not believe that the old model of the local comprehensive school can work any longer. There is a second concern—that having laboured long and hard, the Secretary of State has produced a mouse. There is concern that despite the radical talk that we have heard from the Prime Minister and in the introduction to the White Paper, the Bill does not go far enough.
We would like to see far more education reform than is in the Bill. There are too many examples in the Bill of measures that take a step towards more freedom and more choice, only to erect a Heath Robinson sort of contraption around them to stop freedom being enjoyed and choice being exercised. In Committee we will try to bring back the greatest possible freedom for schools.
We have some concerns about restrictions in the Bill. I shall give two examples—first, the power of the schools adjudicator. The Bill increases enormously the adjudicator's power to interfere in the decisions that individual schools take, including about their admissions, but about many other matters as well. The powers of the adjudicator appointed by the Secretary of State are so enormous that it would be tempting to allow the powers to go into legislation, knowing that a future Conservative Secretary of State could use the powers of the adjudicator provided for in the Bill to change the education system in the way that we wish. If we simply wanted to come to power with maximum Executive freedom by fiat to change schools, we would use the powers of the adjudicator. I am sure that Labour Members will wish to consider that point.
I do not believe in free-standing executive discretion on the scale that will now be enjoyed by the adjudicator. It is important for those of us on both sides of the House, who believe that ultimately these decisions should be taken by people who are democratically accountable, to consider whether we are content with the amount of discretion that the adjudicator will enjoy under the Bill and, in particular, whether we believe that it is right that there is no provision for any appeal by a school against a decision by the adjudicator. This is one way in which it may be possible for Members on both sides of the House to improve the Bill.
Secondly, on the important issue of interviews for admission, the Bill goes even further by explicitly banning, in primary legislation, interviews for all purposes other than the allocation of children to a state boarding school. That ban is already in force through the admissions code, but it is tightened up in the Bill. I recognise that, and I regret it. It goes to the heart of an important confusion in the Bill. The Bill contains tough, indeed draconian, powers on discipline, and, in this day and age, we need to make it clear that teachers have disciplinary powers. But the Government are only
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thinking of how to improve order and discipline in a school by giving teachers almost unfettered power to discipline children. There is a better way of ensuring that schools are orderly and can maintain discipline, which is by encouraging schools to have a distinctive ethos and to have parents who are committed to the school and understand its ethos. Being able to invite parents to an interview to establish whether they and their children are committed to a home-school contract is a good way of establishing a commitment to discipline without having to fall back on the severe disciplinary powers proposed in the Bill. We know that a small number of Church schools have historically used interviews in order to establish the religious conviction of parents. I rather suspect that the Prime Minister is aware of such procedures used by schools. It is a great pity that he appears to be committed to a provision that would stop schools doing what the school to which he sends his children has been doing, which seems to us to be a reasonable way for Church schools to establish a denominational commitment.
The Prime Minister said to a Labour party conference:
When he contemplates the Bill, I am sure that he will wish that he had gone further. It will be our task in Committee to make sure that the Bill goes a lot further than it does now.
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