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Mr. Peter Kilfoyle (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab): When one reflects on the number of days that were rightly given to consideration of Welsh devolution and compares that with the six hours for this debate, it underlines the need for all right-thinking Members to vote against the programme motion. We are not here necessarily to help or hinder the Government but to hold them to account, and we are considering an important Bill.

I endorse the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) and some of those that my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley South (Mr. O'Hara) made about the many good things that have been done locally and nationally in our schools. My constituency, like everyone else's, has benefited.

I want to underline that aspects of the Bill will be advantageous to people in constituencies such as mine, and they are welcome. However, let us make no mistake:
 
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at the heart of the Bill lies a structural issue about trust schools. That outweighs everything else in it. I agree with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), who said that we were considering something that was roughly analogous to grant-maintained schools.

Looking around the Chamber, I see no more than a handful of hon. Members who were here in the winter of 1996–97. You will remember, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that one measure that came before us towards the fag-end of the Major years was the Nursery Education and Grant-Maintained Schools Bill. I had the honour of speaking about schools for the then Labour Opposition. We defeated the Bill by one vote, mainly thanks to a hapless Whip on the Government's side, I hasten to add. Nevertheless, we defeated it, and we were committed to removing what we saw as a travesty of educational policy that went under the banner of grant-maintained schools.

This is the first time since 1997 that I have spoken in the House on education. I have no doubt that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) and the hon. Members for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) and for Havant (Mr. Willetts) were absolutely sincere, even if they were making mischief with the Government, when they said that they applauded these policies. If these trust schools are introduced, they will atomise comprehensive, co-operative and cohesive local educational communities. I can put this no better than the head teacher of the Notre Dame specialist arts school, a girls' faith school in my constituency, who wrote to the Secretary of State to tell her that she had missed the point completely, and that trust schools and foundation schools were of no consequence whatever in meeting the demand for raised standards.

6.6 pm

Mr. Douglas Carswell (Harwich) (Con): I broadly welcome the Bill. It is perhaps one of the most heartening Bills on which I have spoken since becoming a Member of Parliament, and I hope that it will begin a radical transformation in our education system of the kind that I would like to see. At the centre of the Bill are the proposals to devolve to schools new powers and responsibilities, to empower schools to acquire self-governing trust status, and to devolve power and responsibility away from remote educational experts.

The Bill will begin the fragmentation of monolithic state provision, and that is a fragmentation in which we should welcome and rejoice. For more than a generation, we have seen the steady advance of an invidious leftist orthodoxy through our state educational institutions. State-enforced, one-size-fits-all education has held down a generation of young people, and it is time to overturn it. The Bill does not mark the end of one-size-fits-all, state-enforced education, but it marks the beginning of the end. That is why I have no difficulty in supporting it.

I served on the Education and Skills Committee, but I was unable to support its rearguard action to fight against the measures outlined in the White Paper. The Committee's critique of the White Paper conflicts with its decentralist rationale. If anything, the Government should be prepared to go much further than they have done in the Bill, but that can wait until another day.
 
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However, the Bill brings closer that other day, when we shall see a radical change to the status quo in our education system.

The significance of the Bill is that even those on the centre left of British politics have lost faith in the state-enforced, one-size-fits-all system of education. They have lost faith in the notion that education can, or should, be run entirely from the centre. Having listened to the ideologues and the dinosaurs who oppose these measures, I believe that the only compelling critique of the Bill comes from those who say that it does not go far enough.

Not all in the Bill is perfect—the poisoned pills placed in it by the Government on admissions, the unelected and unaccountable adjudicator, and the banning in clause 40 of interviews, for example—but I suspect that those measures will be less important than is supposed. One day, we will iron out those flaws and then we will go much further. In the meantime, the Bill warms the cockles of my localist heart. I will go through the Lobby tonight with many Labour Members, and with a spring in my step.

6.8 pm

Tom Levitt (High Peak) (Lab): I rise to speak as the proud product of comprehensive education, as both a pupil and a teacher. I want to follow on from where my fellow Derbyshire Member, my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Liz Blackman), left off, by asking, who suffers when the system fails? With only a 56 per cent. GCSE pass rate, we are not delivering for enough children. Who suffers? It is the children from the deprived wards where expectations are lowest, the children whose parents are not well motivated to support them through education, and the children who leave school at 16 to go into low-paid jobs with low skills and to continue the cycle of deprivation. Those are the people whose needs we have to address.

It would be a tragedy if the Bill failed tonight, and I welcome any support that it is being given, from wherever it comes. I particularly welcome the statement by the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) that the 18 years of Tory Government had failed to deliver for children in education. I agree with him entirely. I know that it failed. I was a teacher under a Tory Government, and I was a Labour member of an education authority under a Tory Government. I sat there while Derbyshire budgets were cut by 7 per cent. in real terms, and when we had larger primary class sizes, more outdoor toilets and more leaky roofs than anywhere else in the country. That was education under the Tories, and we must not return to it.

The Bill is not a panacea. It does not say, "We know best". It acknowledges that when schools have made major strides, they have done so by thinking out of the box and by finding new partners—partners with a vested interest in skills, education or children. They have worked in harmony with good LEAs, or despite the lackadaisical LEAs, and they have said "Every Child Matters."

The Bill tells us, "Here are some things that others have found to work. With the right local leadership in our schools, with supportive communities taking an active interest in their schools and with the right partners chosen by schools and encouraged by LEAs,
 
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we can create a framework to give better support to schools, children and learning. We can make a difference to the children who most need that difference to be made."

The Bill opens doors rather than closing them. It does not guarantee higher standards, but it is the toolbox from which schools can select to ensure that they deliver for the children in their catchment areas.

6.11 pm

Mrs. Nadine Dorries (Mid-Bedfordshire) (Con): My girls are being educated at a state comprehensive, but I cannot allow the comments of the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) to go unanswered. The hon. Gentleman, who has chaired the Education and Skills Committee, was educated at a selective grammar school, while I, a junior conservative Member, was educated at an inner-city secondary modern.

My girls have not always been at a comprehensive school. They have also been educated at private schools, and I have never seen anything in a private school that could not be replicated in a state school. I was particularly impressed by Ampleforth, a Roman Catholic boarding school that follows the rule of St Benedict and has an ethos based on realising the potential of every child, regardless of ability. It takes an holistic approach to children and is not obsessed with league tables. Father Gabriel, the head, does nothing that could not be replicated in any other school. It is not necessary to have grand buildings to achieve culture, ethos and identity. What is necessary is parental preference and involvement. A school must be responsive to its community or, dare I say, market, and it definitely needs freedom.

The Bill takes the first wimpish steps towards liberation of state schools from the asphyxiating control of local education authorities, and removes the remote governance of this place. By giving schools freedom, it will enable our children who are educated in the state system to benefit from the kind of education from which those in private schools benefit.

We are all different. If that were not the case, we would all be sitting on this side of the House. Why, then, do Labour Members want to homogenise education? They want to keep it all at the same level, and ensure that everyone is taught in the same schools. We do not want that. We want parent power, and believe me, if a parent talks to the head of an independent school, the independent school jumps. Parents need and want that kind of power in the state system.

Surely we should welcome the emphasis on personalised learning. After all, it is another thing from which children in fee-paying schools benefit while children in state schools do not.

I speak very much with a mother's hat on. I wholeheartedly welcome the emphasis on nutrition in school and the work done in that connection by the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh).

I have an interest in special needs. I hope that trust schools will have the ability and the power to "velcro" the funds provided by the statementing system to children's special needs, and that some trust schools will specialise in that and will really benefit.
 
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I wholeheartedly support the Bill.

6.14 pm

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