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Bob Spink (Castle Point) (Con): I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way—she is being quite generous. Will she take this opportunity to clear up the Liberal Democrat policy on discipline, because I have been confused by her remarks so far? Does she agree that bad behaviour is a key ingredient in poor performance in schools and that we need more discipline? Does she support clauses 84 to 86, which extend parenting orders and all of that?
Sarah Teather: We all agree that the Bill is complicated, and one needs copies of about four Acts and five statutory instruments to understand it. However, I cannot answer on "all of that".
We support all the recommendations in the Steer report, although we are concerned whether the proposal to take the parents of excluded children to court if their children are found in a public space in the first five days of an exclusion is practical, so we want to probe that issue further.
Mary Creagh: Before the hon. Lady entered this House, she was briefly a councillor in a north London authority—later, she became the local candidate in another part of the London. She has discussed timidity in the Bill, but she was on the committee that scrutinised the outsourcing of the Liberal Democrat council's school meal service, which resulted in the outsourcing to Scolarest of school meals, the closing and selling off of school kitchens and children being fed a different type of mechanically separated turkey every day. Does she regret her timidity when she sat on the committee that failed to provide decent school meals for children in that area?
Sarah Teather: Perhaps we should get back to dealing with the detail of the Bill.
Mr. Bailey: The hon. Lady has rightly identified bad discipline as a reason why some schools perform badly, and she has advocated radical changes. Why does she not support the radical change of giving teachers the right to discipline in school?
Sarah Teather indicated assent.
Mr. Bailey: In that case, why does the hon. Lady not vote for the Bill on Second Reading and table amendments in Committee on the items with which she does not agree?
Sarah Teather: I see that I am going to have to repeat myself several times. That was pretty much the first thing that I said, when I explained that we all have to make a choice based on the whole Bill, just as the Conservatives have. They have made a choice on the whole Bill and said that although there are things that they disagree with they feel that it is worth giving it a Second Reading. We have looked at the whole Bill, and I am afraid that we feel that there are too many problems for us to be willing to give it a Second Reading.
Let me return to the word "choice", which has come up rather a lot. The choice in the Bill, if there is any, is all about decisions at 11. I believe that choice should be a theme that should run throughout the education
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system. Even when choice is mentioned, I cannot help wondering whose choice it really is. If one lives in a rural area, much of the hubbub about choice in schools is irrelevant because there are not that many to choose from. For parents in urban or semi-urban areas, whether or not free transport is offered, the crisis at 11 is about surviving the stampede to get into one popular school and hoping that one's child does not end up lumbered with any of the unpopular ones.
That is not meaningful choice. The problem is that if we give schools the freedom to control their own admissions, we will take away what little choice parents have and hand it to schools that will have the power to choose their pupils. All the evidence suggests that when schools do that, they choose the well-off and bright children, leaving the others to go to other schools. That is hardly surprising given the incentive to do so because of nationally publicised league tables. If we move further down this route we could completely undermine the comprehensive system.
Sarah Teather: I am not going to give way now as I want to make some progress.
Let us look at the evidence on admissions and social segregation. From the Sutton Trust, to Simon Burgess's work at the University of Bristol, to Rebecca Allen from the Institute of Education, the findings are similar. Schools that control their own admissions and perform highly are less likely to take poorer students than the catchment area would predict. The Government will say that they have outlawed more schools being able to select by ability, that they have forced schools to operate in accordance with the new code, and that they have legislated to prevent schools from interviewing in order to choose pupils. That is welcome, but it is not enough. Very few schools use interviews to select pupils anyway. Much more serious are the covert measures such as gerrymandering of catchment areas, name recognition and selection by aptitude, which is really just a semantic sleight of hand for selection by ability.
Is anybody really convinced that a code to be published after the Bill will be tough enough anyway? Will it be sufficiently tight? Can a beefed-up admissions forum police it adequately? Will it have the data? Will it be prepared to challenge the data provided? Will it really be prepared to grass on its high-performing local schools to the schools adjudicator? Frankly, a system that needs so many safeguards probably is not safe in the first place.
One wonders how on earth parents are supposed to navigate their way around a system with so many more schools operating their own criteria. One choice adviser per local authority is about as far as the proposed £12 million is going to go.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I think that the hon. Lady has indicated that she is not going to give way at the moment.
Sarah Teather:
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I will give way in a moment, but I said that I wanted to make some progress.
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Every MP and councillor will know that schools admissions are one of the most controversial aspects of education. Surely that is therefore the one issue that should have some accountability. The local authority is the right place to decide an area's admissions policies for community schools, foundation schools and city academies. Whatever other freedoms they may have, this one needs a strategic overview.
What about parent representation on the governing body of these trust schools? We know the direction of travel that the Government take on this. Look at academies, which need only one elected parent governor, with all the others appointed. That is no way in which to increase parents' influence on schools.
Mr. Andrew Turner: If 100 pupils are admitted to a school and 365 are turned down under one admissions policy, and the admissions policy is changed, will not that still lead to 100 pupils being admitted and 365, perhaps different, pupils being turned down?
Sarah Teather: It will not change how many are turned down. The key problem is the criteria that are used for turning them down and whether those criteria are accountable. Will the brightest children or those with the most well-off and articulate parents be taken? If so, we will have two-tier schooling.
Ms Angela C. Smith: The hon. Lady's comments about city academies are surprising given that when the Liberal Democrats were in charge of Sheffield city council they opened up negotiations with the Vardy Foundation for a city academy. I would appreciate her comments on that.
Sarah Teather: One of the problems with the way in which the Government run education is that they do not give councils an awful lot of freedom about the kinds of schools that they want to offer in a particular area, so that they are forced down a route, either through bribery or financial incentive, and often through the building schools for the future programme.
If the Government really want to turn round underachievement and social segregation in schools, they need to look again at the way in which schools are funded. If a means could be devised to target specific funding at young people who are underachieving or disadvantaged, schools would have an incentive to take those young people and they would get the extra resources that they need to thrive. By that I mean not just targeting a local authority or a school but following the pupil. We are looking at how such a system could be implemented in practice. A similar model has been used in the Netherlands and in Finland with considerable success, and I hope that the Government will look in more detail at such methods.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab):
Is the hon. Lady aware that Stockport council, which is Liberal-controlled, constantly argues that more money should go to the wealthy areas of the borough such as Cheadle and Bramhall rather than to the poorer parts of the borough such as Reddish?
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