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The Finnish model is particularly interesting because it is a comprehensive model. Its real emphasis and investment has been first on teachers, in terms of very long and developed teacher training. Another interesting and distinctive aspect is that children do not start their education until the age of seven, and therefore the opportunity for relating with their families is much more important there. Pre-school does not start until the age of six. In the first years of schooling they have shorter school days, so again they have more opportunity to be with their families.
I am putting this forward to challenge what seems to be the prevailing presumption that our model of provision of education is the one that we should be pursuing. It may be the right one; but from my experience of being involved in caring for vulnerable children, what is most striking is the appalling consequences of not having properly trained staff working with children. The most important thing, which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made clear on Second Reading, is the need to keep a single-minded focus on supporting and developing those professionals working directly with children and young people, and not to be distracted from that.
I feel moved to say that because to my mind we overlook that in this country. We are a culture that puts particular emphasis on generalism, on being flexible and on taking on different roles. That is an important model for us. The idea of specialism, of a deeply well educated and focused professionalism, is also very important. For children and particularly for vulnerable children, we need to think much more deeply. I say that in the light of a letter that I received recently from the Minister, saying that children in children’s homes are cared for by staff only 23 per cent of whom have any relevant qualification. Get the education and training of our teachers and support right—I know that it has been improving significantly—and you will be going an awfully long way to delivering improved education for our children.
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Baroness Williams of Crosby: I very much agree with the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. It is certainly the case that one of the distinguishing features of the Finnish system is that it requires all its teachers to have a postgraduate degree. That seems to be a crucial factor in the quality of the education in that country. I pay tribute to the Government for some of the steps that they have taken in that direction, not least in the training of head teachers and senior management staff, but, as a country, we must press much further with in-service training of teachers to ensure that they keep up with the many demands made on them.
I rise to say a few words about Amendment No. 57A regarding sixth forms. It is a probing amendment. My noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford pointed out that we are confronting a decade of dramatic decline in school rolls. We all know that one of the things that makes a sixth form viable is an adequate number of pupils to maintain a range of choices for young people who are going on to take A-levels, NVQs or whatever the higher qualification may be. If the size of a sixth form falls below a certain point, it simply becomes uneconomic to offer a range of alternative courses, and the sixth form then constricts rather than broadens a youngster’s education.
I make no bones about my worry that if a range of trust schools, in particular, academies, are created in a local authority area—most of them will expect and want to have a sixth form because it is part of the traditional prestige of a secondary school which many people involved very much prize, although the Minister may say that that is not true—that may bite into existing sixth-form provision, which will make it difficult for those secondary school sixth forms to be viable.
I have in mind the more disadvantaged local authorities that have set up sixth-form colleges or, in some cases, tertiary colleges to try to meet the needs of their brightest, most ambitious and aspiring youngsters who want to go on to try to get A-levels and other advanced qualifications. I am frightened that in certain circumstances those sixth-form colleges could be undermined. The Minister will know well that they have a good record in secondary education of achieving outstanding results in parts of the country such as Devon, where it is difficult to sustain a sixth-form among a lot of small towns and villages. There have been notable results in those sixth-form colleges.
I shall not press the Minister now—he may wish to answer the point on a later group of amendments—but the issue has been neglected in our discussions thus far. It is extremely important that every last boy and girl who wants it can get sixth-form or tertiary college provision and I am troubled by the difficulty already experienced by some authorities, where the sixth forms are only just viable, as to what might happen if new ones open.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: I wish to respond to a couple of points. It is almost as if some kind of Scandinavian Utopia exists. We should be comparing like with like. Would that the UK was identical to Finland. I do not know whether I really do want it to
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I agree that the international report mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, is interesting. I have not looked at the OECD report, but I will do so. The international report states that following the reforms of 1998,
and that many parents in urban areas now exercise choice. That is a really interesting scenario. The report also states:
“Choice is now exercised by many parents in heavily urbanised areas of Finland—for example in Helsinki in 2002, approximately 50 per cent of children entering secondary schools at ages 12 and 13 requested a school other than the one they were allocated to”.
Not all the people who value choice are in the highest socio-economic groups. That is interesting. Even in Sweden, another much vaunted and justifiable example, there is no firm evidence of the impact of reforms, but a decade after the reforms, Sweden has one of the least ability-segregated school systems in the OECD. In areas where children have been encouraged by their local authority to choose and have been given support and information to help them to choose, the least well off appear to take advantage of the choices. So often we hear it said that parents do not want choice, but I believe that is invalid.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: We on these Benches are not arguing against choice. We are arguing that in that choice there should be a level playing field to establish new community schools alongside voluntary-aided schools, trust schools and so on.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Perception is everything. When I listen to the noble Baroness, I cannot help feeling that she worries about choice. I agree we should not denigrate community schools or comprehensive schools. Many of them have achieved startling successes, but neither should we go in the opposite direction and suggest that somehow trust or foundation schools will be totally untrammelled and free of any accountability. I have heard it alleged tonight that they will not be subject to the national curriculum—that is not true. They will be subject to Ofsted inspections.
We are trying to find a balanced approach. Are choice and diversity wanted by parents? I believe that they are, not just in the UK system, but also elsewhere in the world. Has that choice the capacity to benefit children? Again, I believe it has. It is not the only answer, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, rightly says. We are in a dynamic situation, not a static one, as I believe the Government have recognised. We are being invited to go from one end of the spectrum to the other. On the one hand, we are being invited to suggest that no community schools are allowed to
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford: It seems to me that it is pejorative for the noble Lord to speak of the higher performing schools, as though by definition community schools are low performing schools and voluntary-aided schools are not. I know there is some evidence—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, cited some evidence—to indicate that there is higher performance in voluntary-aided schools, but when one looks at the Sutton Trust research one sees that that is very closely linked to income.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Perish the thought that I should be pejorative. I should have said “local authorities” rather than schools. I am not attempting to be pejorative at all. The Government had to make an assessment. We know that some local authorities are failing authorities. We have to be honest. We know there are significant numbers of children who are failed in our current system. That does not mean that I believe, or anyone else believes, that the vast majority fit that description. We are trying to find a way forward which we believe will raise standards in all schools. I think that the Government have got it right with their compromise. The Liberal Democrats believe that they have not, that this goes too far and that there is too much diversity and choice. There is a judgment to be made. I hope that the amendment will be withdrawn.
Baroness Buscombe: I hope that noble Lord, Lord Young, will come further in the Buscombe direction than the Walmsley direction, given that Buscombe has been quoting from the Labour manifestos for 1992 and 1997, the 2005 White Paper and ad infinitum. I feel that I am almost seeking to do the noble Lord’s job for him.
This may sound very controversial, but it has been nagging at me that there is a feeling that if one is going for anything other than a community school, one is somehow leaving the community and that the local authority body that sets schools up and manages them is somehow intrinsically linked with a local authority and therefore with the community. As a punter, I never felt any connection with my local authority until I became a representative of it. I hope I am making myself clear here. Most people who live in towns, villages or cities feel a real sense of connection not with their local authority but with the place that they live in and the community as a whole. To somehow feel that if one moves away from management by the local government structure one is leaving the community is fictitious and completely wrong.
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Lord Adonis: I have spent my political life in what Roy Jenkins called the radical centre, and never have I felt more in the radical part of it and the central part of it than in the debates we have been having on the education Bill. It is my great regret that I should be parting company with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who was in the radical centre, but on this issue has moved to the less radical zone. I think she would still see it as the centre, but is less prepared to contemplate change.
My noble friend Lord Young made an excellent speech and the case for change is compelling. If we take a hard-headed, realistic approach to our educational performance in the past 20 years, three things stand out. First, there has been remarkable progress in that time. When the GCSE was introduced in 1988, only one-quarter of 16 year-olds were getting five good GCSE passes. It is now 55 per cent. That is the scale of the progress we have made as a society over that period, and it is very welcome. But 55 per cent is 55 per cent and becomes 45 per cent if English and maths are included. They are the core skills that teenagers require if they are going to be likely to succeed in employment thereafter and to avoid the scenarios that we were discussing earlier in our debate. But while we have made great progress, we cannot be complacent.
In looking at the international evidence to which the noble Baroness referred, three things become clear: our average performance as a country has risen substantially in the past 15 years, and that is to be applauded; our top 25 per cent are as good as the top 25 per cent in terms of performance anywhere in the world and we have a fantastic top end in the state and private systems; and the gap between our highest and lowest performers as large groups—not just the extremes—is much higher than in the rest of the OECD and is still at proportions that cause concern. That is why these reforms and the preparedness to consider them are important. We have higher average achievement and very high top-end achievement, but we still have a very long tail of low achievement which is unacceptable, as are the disparities in performance. We have higher performance, but there is still much to do.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, put his finger on the third key priority, and I come back to it time and again, as we are spending so much time discussing structures and legal reforms in the Bill: we will achieve nothing without steady investment in our teachers, our head teachers and our support staff. As I said on Second Reading, the Government are making huge additional investments in those areas—in qualifications, salary levels and staff numbers. That investment is going into schools and resulting in more and better teachers irrespective of category of school.
In response to the noble Baroness, I re-emphasise that we are talking about trust schools, community schools, voluntary-aided schools and foundation schools where the investment in people and facilities is equal and the pay and conditions apply equally across the different categories of schools, as does the curriculum and inspection.
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Putting all that together, I say to noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches that we come back to their Amendment No. 92. They accuse us of not having a level playing field. However, I believe that the proposals we have set out provide a good range of opportunities and rule out local authorities from promoting community schools only where their own performance is of a level where I think any reasonable-minded person would think that they are not suitable to promote schools.
One category of new school that we are talking about is the trust school, which is basically the application of the tried, tested and largely successful voluntary-aided model outside the faith sector. The Liberal Democrats’ Amendment No. 92 would forbid that model being established in the state system. So there is not a level playing field as far as our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches are concerned.
Liberal Democrat Members also make the confusion—which I think the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, put her finger on—that a community school, in its engagement with the community, is to be judged only by the degree to which a local authority controls the school, the number of governors it appoints to the school and the degree to which governors on the governing body are elected by parents. Although we think it important that parent governors play a role in the school, use of the criterion alone is a fundamental misconception of what necessarily makes a good school or a school that is absolutely committed to community cohesion and engagement in the community.
I do not want to rehearse everything I said in response to the previous group of amendments. Perhaps I can briefly address the issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, of sixth-form provision. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, was absolutely right to say that the demographics mean that there will be a smaller secondary population over the next 10 years. However—and this is a key point in understanding trends in post-16 provision—on the basis of a rising performance in schools, particularly in schools where it is rising faster than the trend, it is an absolutely realistic expectation that the number of post-16 students will continue to increase and will probably do so substantially.
Because we have historically had such a poor record in participation beyond the age of 16, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that that will increase over the next 10 years. Indeed I think that we would be defeatist if we did not work on the assumption that we will have a declining secondary population overall, but with a rising population of pupils staying on at school and in college beyond the age of 16. It is the lowest-performing schools that have the lowest rates of post-16 participation, and they tend to be schools without sixth forms—or, to think of it in more modern terms, post-16 provision. Post-16 provision will increasingly be collaborative; it will not be the free-standing sixth form trying to offer the whole range of qualifications and courses but a post-16 provision which may well be shared with other schools or the local college.
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I believe that it is absolutely right that we should be seeking to promote more post-16 provision in schools, much of it on a collaborative basis, provided that it is linked to realistic assumptions about increases in the post-16s staying-on rate on the basis of school improvement and the rising proportions gaining qualifications. That is a realistic scenario to which we should be working.
The noble Baroness referred to the excellent sixth-form colleges—and I pay tribute to them. The sixth-form and tertiary college sector has been one of the most successful parts of our education system over the past 20 years. The sixth-form college sector is bursting at the seams it has been so successful. Colleges that were built for 1,000 to 1,500 students are in some cases now catering for well over 2,000 students. One outstanding sixth-form college I visited recently in Winchester has substantially more students even than that. The idea that colleges of that kind, which are now supremely successful, cannot co-exist and, indeed, add significant value to the work of schools in developing collaborative provision is wrong. We need to have a sensible scenario that puts a value on collaboration.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way for a moment. I fully agree with everything that he has said, but I am concerned that there are still some parts of the country where the staying-on rate is well below the national average. I agree that it may well improve but if there are 500,000 pupils coming out of the secondary system, while coincidentally in some parts of the country there has been a low staying-on rate that is only slowly beginning to improve, there is a danger that the first-rate sixth-form or tertiary college may find it difficult to continue expanding in the way that he was talking about.
Lord Adonis: Obviously I accept that we need to behave sensibly in this area. The Government seek to behave sensibly in all these areas. There will be a role both for thriving tertiary and sixth-form colleges but also for steadily more post-16 provision in schools.
On what the noble Baroness said about the history, let us be clear what happened. It was the grammar schools and the more successful schools in the system as it was in the 1960s and 1970s that had sixth forms. By and large, it was the secondary modern system that was 11 to 16. To my mind, it is not the model for the future to have schools that stop at 16. All our emphasis in the education system must be to promote staying on beyond the age of 16.
Few Members of this House would, without serious thought about what will happen beyond the
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On Amendment No. 57A, FE institutions are already consulted when it is proposed that schools add sixth forms. The effect of proposals on existing provision is taken into account. At the moment, proposals must be published and consulted on. That will not change under the Bill.
I think that I have covered most of the points raised through the amendments. In conclusion, as my noble friend Lord Young said, we have struck a sensible balance here between allowing local authorities that have a good track record and can show that they support the principle of diversity to be able, in appropriate circumstances, to promote community schools while ensuring that there are strong incentives for diversity, especially in areas where local authorities are lower performers. That is the basis of the amendments that we tabled in another place, Clause 7 and the guidance that backs it up. If the Liberal Democrats cared to withdraw Amendment No. 92, so that we can have trust schools, we might find ourselves almost approaching a point of consensus.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I take issue with the Minister about Amendment No. 92, which, as far as we are concerned, merely requires that there should be a larger proportion of elected parent-governors on trust school bodies. We find it very odd that the trust school model diminishes the role of elected parent-governors. I cannot see that that would prevent a foundation being set up. But we will come to that in due course; we are certainly not going to withdraw that amendment now. However, as for Amendment No. 56, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 57 and 57A not moved.]
Baroness Crawley: I beg to move that the House do now resume.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
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