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However, if by saying that local authorities should exercise their powers with a view to securing diversity in the provision of schools where appropriate the amendment simply means that they must act reasonably and within the limit of their powers, which makes perfect common sense, then of course I accept that, and that requirement is already set out in the Education Act 1996. The new duty to secure diversity in the provision of schools is framed in the context of local education authorities’ existing duties under Section 14 of the Education Act 1996 to secure schools which are sufficient in number, character and equipment to provide for all pupils the opportunity of appropriate education, and the section then goes on to define “appropriate education”.
Amendment No. 14 would require local authorities to exercise their powers in relation to the provision of primary and secondary education under Section 14 of the 1996 Act with a view to securing diversity in the provision of both schools and colleges. We are very sympathetic to the aims of the amendment. The Government are committed to increasing diversity of provision, with more specialist provision and increased opportunities for individual choice. We want that to extend to the further education sector as well as the school sector, and that theme ran through our further education White Paper this March.
However, for technical reasons, the Bill would not be the place to promote that duty. The duty in Clause 2 to secure diversity bears on local authorities’ duties in Section 14 of the Education Act 1996, which relate only to securing the provision of primary and secondary education. Responsibility for securing the provision of education for learners above compulsory school age, including from further education colleges, rests with the Learning and Skills Council under the Learning and Skills Act 2000 and not with local authorities. The amendment would therefore place local authorities under a duty to secure diversity in the provision of colleges which it would be impossible
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Lord Lucas: Perhaps I can persuade the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the Minister that the good work that they have done in new Section 13A(1)(c),
which applies to Section 13 of the Education Act 1996, might usefully be extended to Section 14. The wording there is quite weak. It refers to,
If that were strengthened by the concept in subsection (1)(c) of new Section 13A, under Clause 1 of the Bill, that would be a considerable improvement in the direction in which the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, is trying to take us in Amendment No. 15.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I thank the noble Lord for his suggestion. I do not have a copy of the 1996 Act to hand and so cannot look at it, but we will consider it and perhaps come back on Reportwith something of that ilk. I thank him for his interventions. I suspect that we shall go on throughout this Bill disagreeing with each other, but that is fine.
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I thank the Minister for his response and take on board his comments on further education colleges. I recognise that the Act applies to local education authorities, which I mentioned when I introduced the amendment. I said that I realised they were not directly under the responsibility of local education authorities, and implicitly, therefore, I recognised that technically the amendment was defective. However, I thought it was worth—indeed, it has been worth—throwing it in for discussion.
I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, sees us as trying to impose a grey world. We are not against choice, but we believe that under the current system much parental choice is a total chimera and we do not think that that will change. The Government are offering the country a system similar to that existing in London. Parents have the whole of the Greater London area to choose from, which has created chaos. Around 55 per cent of parents and children get their first choice of school in Greater London, whereas outside Greater London it is closer to 90 to 95 per cent.
I take on board the Minister’s statistics, and was surprised that as many as 65 per cent of households have five or more secondary schools within a three-mile radius. I recognise that in a town such as Guildford, where I live, there are five secondary schools, and there is that choice. In some senses, my vision of the community working together is based on somewhere like Guildford, where, by and large, there is a lot of collaboration and co-operation, but where issues arise over parental choice. My party is concerned about curriculum choice and the range of such choice available to pupils. That is a key issue.
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I shall read carefully what various people have contributed to this debate, but for the moment I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 14 and 15 not moved.]
Baroness Williams of Crosby moved Amendment No. 16:
( ) ensuring that the education provided in schools in its area shall contribute to social inclusion and community cohesion in that area.”The noble Baroness said: The amendment concerns social inclusion and community cohesion, which should be borne in mind in the decisions that affect the education provided in schools.
I take the point that these are regarded by some Members of the Committee as of secondary concern. Let me, therefore, step back to the original concept behind the community school, which I still believe to be of great value in a society such as ours. We live in a society which is multiracial, multicultural and in many ways divided. The community school came out of a socially profoundly split society, and one in which four-fifths of children went to a secondary modern school and one-fifth went to a grammar school. The community school was invented and designed to overcome that profound social division, which in my view deprived a large proportion of our children of any opportunity to take their education further, or, indeed, to achieve their full educational potential. I believe it is still the case that in many quarters children do not have the opportunity even today to meet their full educational potential.
My noble friend Lady Sharp spoke about her own strong belief in community schools. The Bill, as I understand it, goes beyond secondary schools and embraces primary schools as well. I find that a troubling development. The primary school was about educating a child to develop a sense of belonging to a community and the world of other children in that community. It was, and is, the concept of teaching children tolerance, inclusiveness and understanding. It is a very important part of what it is to be a young child.
I shall start at that point. I am frightened—perhaps the Minister can reassure me—that the introduction of trust schools and other schools at the primary level will go a long way indeed to fragment our society, which is not so strongly cohesive that it can risk that kind of fragmentation.
In secondary schools, the argument for some specialisation is strong, especially over the age of 14. However, many of us would want to see schools offering both vocational and academic courses, so that we begin to heal the ludicrous division between them, which has so distorted and deformed English education—though not Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish education in the same way. It is a rather specific feature of the English school.
Taking the view that what matter more than anything else are parental opinion and parental choice, I find it so extraordinary that in the Bill, which
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I shall not go on about this now because there are many later amendments, but, throughout, the Bill favours those schools that are alternative to the community school. It does so by providing them with much more money, by not obliging them to follow the national curriculum and by allowing them to go ahead without any form of ballot or parental preference being expressed. I find that objectionable. If someone wants to say that that comes back to social inclusion and community cohesion, I say that is an element in it, and that is why I waited to speak on this group of amendments rather than earlier. If there were a level playing field, parental choice would operate. It would operate between well-off parents and not well-off parents, southern parents and northern parents. But the Bill is not like that. It does not create that kind of basis of choice. One has to ask why.
I do not accept, because it simply is not true, what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, about grey uniformity. From the beginning secondary schools in this country have been amazingly diverse—not just individual schools with an ethos often created by their heads and teams of school teachers. That has always been true. All of us know that there are brilliantly good schools in every single category, and some very bad schools. That is as true—dare I say?—of private schools as it is of academies, community schools or any other group of schools you care to name. If people do not believe me they can read the conflicting reports on academies, for example, where some are said to be near failing and others are doing brilliantly. Go and read the reports from Ofsted inspectors about individual community schools. Some are excellent; some are poor.
There is a general problem, as was rightly said by my noble friend Lady Sharp, with inner-city schools. Incidentally, that is a problem anywhere you go in the world. None of us has been able to solve it satisfactorily so far. If the academies can solve it, that is wonderful. The jury is still out and there is no final verdict on the issue.
We speak of the Bill as being about parental choice. As I have said, it could be, but it is not an open and fair choice at present. We speak of it being about improving standards. All of us want to see that, but we also want to try to ensure that standards are improved in the light of the need to maintain social inclusion. It is a very difficult set of requirements to combine. We would be less than honest with ourselves if we did not admit that there are real problems.
I like Amendment No. 18, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, because it puts the school right at the centre of the community and asks what it can do for that community. Parents are particularly hard pressed, overworked, overstressed and often have little opportunity to give careful thought to exactly which school their child will go to—because they do not have the time to learn enough about those
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For a while, I represented one of the poorer ends of Crosby, a very poor part of Liverpool, Seaforth and Waterloo. Parents constantly spoke of how difficult they found getting to parents’ meetings to discover exactly what was going on, and how scared they were of going to see the headmaster or headmistress to ask questions about their children. A great problem is that parents do not have equal power, articulacy or influence. Anyone serious about the education system must therefore see how that can be dealt with and compensated for.
I approve of the Government setting up a system whereby people can advise on choice. But when all is said and done, if we are to raise the educational level of the children about whom many of us were speaking, there must be a general improvement in the educational system, not one specific to trust schools or particular academies. I refer to those children with special needs and to the 60 per cent in the middle, neither of whom have the financial advantage of being able to choose between every possible kind of school, and to those living in such cramped conditions that talking about parental choice is frankly a bad joke.
That is why I am concerned about this Bill, and why we feel that there are contradictions at its very centre. I repeat: one of the great problems we will come to later in the Bill is that the parental choice playing field is in no sense level. I beg to move.
Lord Dearing: I speak to Amendment No. 18. It is a great pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Williams.
A major strand of the Government’s thinking is diversity, choice and enabling parents to make choices in the best interests of their children’s education on the basis of good information, which will lead to more children going to good schools. A second theme is the objective of making all schools into good schools: where a school is unsatisfactory or failing, to provide for decisive and swift action to remedy the faults which stand in the way of it being a good school. To some extent, a principal advantage of letting market forces work is to exert pressure on underperforming schools to lift their game.
I shall argue a point brought out by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. We must have some regard to a school within a community framework, particularly where the community is socially and economically disadvantaged. As schools increasingly become places for the extended school day—where there are recreational facilities for the community, increased participation and a focus for lifelong learning—I see them becoming valued and important centres of community life. That is especially true in poorer communities, where people do not go outside their community much. They can be housing deserts, with little to bring people together to develop a sense of community; estates where young rascals—if I may so describe them—get up to damaging mischief
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Another of the Government’s themes is, rightly, parental involvement. The more you can involve a parent in a child’s education, the better it is for the child. There is lots of evidence on that. However, if a child is moving into a comparatively middle-class area, can we see parents who are not well educated and who live in social disadvantage feeling articulate or confident enough to go to a parents’ meeting and stand up and fight for their child and class interests in such an arena? I have my doubts.
Some of these young people, particularly the boys, are not doing well at school. Because the school in their community has failed, they must move to a school in a better-class area further away. It may be within two miles, but those are two miles in which they are more likely to truant and become a nuisance to themselves. They are possibly well into truancy already, but the more difficult it is to get access and keep a finger on them, the greater the risk. These are supporting arguments for caring for communities which have nothing much going for them.
I argue that local authorities—and, in another amendment, admissions forums—should take the value of a school in a community like that into account. If it fails, they should replace it with a new school on the same site or in the community, to keep the community alive rather than educationally abandoning it. They should exert a moderating effect on death by attrition through loss of numbers while the process of regeneration and re-establishing a school takes place. It is the kind of consideration we can all understand. It is a question of how we can give effect to what I have in mind.
Lord Gould of Brookwood: It is a great privilege to follow those words from such an expert in this field.
I say first how much I agree with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, on the early days of selection. When she was Secretary of Sate for Education, while I was trying to make my way in politics, I was pleased with what she did and supported her. Now, however, times have moved on. I shall respond to the two arguments that have been put.
The first is that people really just want a good local school; the second that people who are disadvantaged or less well off are unable to choose. Both those assumptions are, in large part, false. People do not want a good local school. More and more, they want the best possible school for their children. The idea that parents will now in some way just accept a good local school has just gone. Parents and children do not want that anymore. They want the best education, opportunity and the best chance to fulfil their lives’ potential that they can get. You can only get that through diversity and choice in the system.
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Baroness Williams of Crosby: I absolutely agree that parents want the best school for their child. My point is that the Bill presents them with a choice heavily weighted by the fact that trust schools or academies are likely to have a great deal more money spent on them. They will therefore be able to employ more teachers, and have more equipment and often brand new buildings. They are not choosing between like and like. They are making a heavily biased choice. Many parents would like to choose a good community school, but are not being offered the choice on the same basis.
Lord Gould of Brookwood: This is a balanced Bill. The key is that the Government in their strategic role for local authorities do everything they can to ensure a level playing field. Evidence from across the world shows that choice works when there is intervention to protect and support the disadvantaged. That is why this is a changed and balanced Bill. If it produces inequality, that would not work, but we have moved on from the idea of the good local school as the noble Baroness was describing it.
The second element is choice. The polling evidence is that people who are less advantaged want choice more. I believe the future for education and public services is empowerment. People from all strata of life—the kind of kids I went to school with at a secondary modern, not a posh school—are able to choose the school they want. If people are empowered, they will make the right choice. The idea of “We know best for people” has gone.
For that reason, I strongly support the Bill, and I commend to the Committee the point made by my noble friend that it is a balanced Bill. Reassurances are built into it and the drive towards fairness is essential to it. It should be supported.
Lord Lucas: I am in serious trouble here because I cannot think of anything that the noble Lord, Lord Gould, said that I disagree with. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, but that is not such a surprise to me. However, I am not sure that these sentiments belong in Section 14 of the 1996 Act. If I understood the noble Lord, he is concerned about the importance of schools to the community. He feels that LEAs should be careful before they rip schools out and should take care to support them and give them added emphasis because they are important to the community, whether in a Hampshire village or the suburbs of Liverpool. I agree with that and perhapsit is somewhere in education legislation. If a Government ever get round to providing us with an updated, consolidated set of education legislation so that we can find the right place without an army of advisers, we may find somewhere to put it in the Bill. If the Minister is feeling kind towards the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, I hope he will direct us in the right direction.
I find it difficult to understand what Amendment No. 16 is about and what it would require local authorities to do. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and I was not calling schools grey—I was calling the Liberal Democrats’ vision of what
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What are we asking LEAs to do in terms of Section 14 of the 1996 Act, which relates to the provision of new schools, to ensure that schools contribute to social inclusion? When we come to admission arrangements, I shall be arguing a radical line because it is important that schools are open to every section of the population. I have lived most of my life in middle-class parts of London and “community” is a diverse word there. There are schools that draw a particular community. I can think of a good primary school that draws children from the Kosovo Albanian community that is widely spread over north London. In my patch of south London, communities are not a matter of this or that street, but are broader and interwoven. It is hard to devise admission arrangements that provide for social inclusion and community cohesion without getting very odd arrangements for admission and the provision of schools. I am not clear how they would work, and that worries me because they might work in ways that we do not want.
Lord Judd: I warm to the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. In my experience, they relate to the realities in too many of our deprived communities. I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I reflect for a moment that the first amendment I spoke to in this Committee was about putting the right of the child to education at the centre of the Bill. If the potential of our young is to be fulfilled, the ideal is to have teachers and the community pulling together. It is important for the school to be the focal point for the community. It should be a place in which parents feel at home and, ideally, a place in which they see things happening that are relevant to their own fulfilment. I do not believe a school’s activities should be limited to what goes on with the children in the classroom. There is potential for activities for parents as well, particularly if a lot of capital resources are put into a school.
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