| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Another point where our amendment differs from the approach of the Government is by applying the target on diversity to all local authorities, not only those with poor APA ratings. We are unconvinced that the good performance of local authorities truly justifies exception from the rule on diversity, particularly with the insignificant proportion—15 per cent of schools—which the Government believe should be schools other than community schools. Only a handful of local authorities will be affected by this provision.
If we exclude academies and city technology colleges and concentrate solely on maintained schools, out of 3,385 maintained secondary schools in England, around 65 per cent are community schools and 35 per cent are not. There are relatively few local authorities where fewer that 15 per cent of maintained schools are not community schools. January 2005 data indicate that only six local authorities would fail to meet this target with regard to primary schools and only 21 local authorities would fail to meet this target with regard to secondary schools. If we included academies and city technology colleges and took the APA rating into account, I am sure that the numbers prevented from seeking consent from the Secretary of State would be even lower. I would be interested to know what estimates the Government have made of the number of local authorities that would not be allowed to seek the Secretary of State’s consent under these regulations. I would also like to know on what basis the 15 per cent is chosen, as increasing the proportion even slightly leads to large increases in the number of local authorities that are prevented from seeking consent. A five point increase to a minimum of 20 per cent doubles the number of authorities that would not meet the diversity target, and if we increase the target to one-third of schools, 77 local authorities would have insufficiently diverse secondary schools.
12 July 2006 : Column 795
Amendment No. 70 means that local authorities would have to demonstrate that the establishment of a community school would raise standards more than the establishment of a foundation school. I feel this is very important. This is what the Bill should be about, not so much about structures, but about raising standards in our education system. It will demonstrate that the principal justification for the establishment of a new community school must be the provision of high quality education for pupils. If a local authority cannot demonstrate that a community school will raise standards more than a foundation school, I see no reason why the local authority should be allowed to go ahead. The 1997 Labour manifesto stated:
Both these amendments reflect the fact that foundation schools perform considerably better than community schools in terms of academic achievement. For example, if we consider the most recent GCSE results, at community schools 24.9 per cent of pupils received no GCSE passes at A* to C; that is, nearly a quarter of pupils. In foundation schools that figure dropped to 19.6 per cent. The proportion that received five or more good GCSEs, including English and maths, was 38 per cent in community schools; in foundations schools it was 44.2 per cent; in voluntary aided schools it was 49.1 per cent; and at city technology colleges, which are independently run and enjoy the greatest freedom among schools, only 3.6 per cent of pupils failed to pass any GCSEs at A* to C and 65.9 per cent of pupils passed five or more GCSEs. The results are here to see. Indeed, at the Thomas Telford City Technology College, which has an intake that is representative of the national ability range, 100 per cent of pupils achieved 12 or more GCSEs at grade A* to C, and that figure includes English and maths. The pattern displayed by the value-added results is identical.
Our next amendments attempt to ensure that local authorities make a real effort to bring about the new vision of the education system. They reflect the Government’s statement in response to the House of Commons Select Committee report that:
- “It is important
that local authorities seriously consider all alternatives to secure
the best education for their community ... and do not just promote
local authority community schools as the default
option”.
Amendment No. 71 states that where a local education authority wishes to propose a community school, it must simultaneously publish proposals for a foundation school. This would ensure that the adjudicator could always choose to reject a proposal for a community school in favour of a foundation school. It also reflects the commitment the Government gave in the White Paper at paragraph 9.11 that:
- “We will expect local authorities
to ... make their own proposal for a self-governing (Foundation)
school, if they cannot find a suitable promoter, in keeping with the
commissioner role”.
12 July 2006 : Column 796
9.15 pm
Amendment No. 72 also promotes the new role for the local authority by requiring local authorities to provide the adjudicator and the Secretary of State with a notice setting out their reasons for publishing proposals for the establishment of the community school and, where applicable, their reasons for not publishing proposals of their own for the establishment of a foundation school. That ensures that local authorities justify their decision to propose the establishment of a new community school if they cannot justify the choice of community school over a foundation school.
Finally, Amendment No. 89 to Schedule 2 would give the adjudicator an explicit right to alter a proposal for a new community school into a proposal for a new foundation school. That would ensure that where the adjudicator considers the proposal for a new school, he is aware of his right to accept the proposal with modifications, and therefore is able to accept a planned school as a foundation school instead of a community school.
This is partly a probing amendment. The adjudicator may already have these powers, and perhaps the Minister could expand on that. By explicitly including the power in the Bill, the Government could, with appropriate guidance to the adjudicator, ensure that all such proposals are examined to see whether a self-governing school might be a more appropriate solution to the needs of the area than the community school. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: I rise on behalf of these Benches to raise some objections to the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. The amendment would do two things. First—and I will come back to this point—it would substantially remove the element of valid parental choice. Either we mean parental choice or we do not. If we decide to abolish the alternative option of a new community school, what we are effectively doing is determining the range of choice before a choice has even been made.
Secondly, the amendment would remove the last barrier between the Bill and the possibility of an education Bill that would satisfy the Conservative wish to return to some form of selection. Therefore, this amendment is of the greatest significance and importance in determining the true purpose of the Bill. I, for one, look forward with very great interest to what the Minister has to say about it.
The Conservative Party played a large and
extremely constructive part in the creation of comprehensive schools.
Even today, in many shire counties comprehensive schools work extremely
well and have brought to a large number of children opportunities that
they would not have had under a selective system. They have been issues
of pride to the county councils and councils that administered and
12 July 2006 : Column 797
I believe that the comprehensive system in this country has been extremely badly served in its treatment by a very sophisticated public relations system which has given it nothing like the credit it deserves for the remarkable strides it has made and has concentrated on the failures of a very small number of schools. One of the things I remember, having been a Secretary of State, is that the proportion of failing schools in England and Wales is relatively small, probably about 200 to 300 schools, and that it is not a characteristic of one particular sort of school—the so-called community school. It is a characteristic of every single category of school. Regardless of whether we are discussing independent private schools, selective schools, secondary modern schools or comprehensive schools, there has always been an element of failure.
One of the jobs I had when I was Secretary of State was to insist that failing private independent schools be closed. There was a proportion of failing private independent schools; there always will be. One of the wisest remarks ever made by a thinker on education—Michael Rutter, in his famous book—was that in every category there are failing schools and good schools. The key question is what makes a good school, not to assume that one category will define one school good and another bad.
The community school is exactly what many parents would choose. We will come to later amendments concerning the centrality for my party of a fair choice being made by the parent—and, where it is appropriate in secondary schools, in consultation with the pupils. That should be the acid test of which schools should be allowed to go ahead. We do not seek to weight the choice; we would not remove a particular category of school from the list; in the last analysis, if we believe in parental choice, it must be valid and made genuine. With great respect, Amendments Nos. 77 and 55 would make that impossible.
I said to the Minister—he took some exception to this, and I now better understand why—that I believe that the playing field in the Bill is not exactly level. He conceded that that was true of capital provision, because academies undoubtedly have some preference for capital buildings. Indeed, they have some preference for new and fine buildings. The average cost now is very high, above £20 million, well above what would be the case for a new community school.
The Minister argued with great
force that that did not apply to revenue. I should have explained
earlier that when I referred to some—how can I put
it?—bias in the playing field, I had in mind specialist schools
rather than trust schools, where there is clearly a small but
nevertheless relevant revenue element between specialist schools and
community schools that are not specialised. But that was not all that I
meant. I was not speaking purely about financial considerations; there
are several others. The national curriculum will not apply to
independent state schools, as I understand it. School pay and
conditions will not be determined nationally and applied to the school,
the
12 July 2006 : Column 798
In addition, the community school is uniquely saddled by having to seek the permission of the Secretary of State, with a very small number of exceptions—the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, has spelled out just how small that number will be. None of us want a poorly performing local authority to set up a new school. I hope that none of us would want to see poorly performing sponsors of an independent state school to set up a new school. We believe that the same provision should apply across the board, not to one section only. Then there is the issue of how far Ofsted inspections will apply rigorously within the independent state trust schools.
I believe that there has been a very powerful public relations lobby against community schools and in favour of trust schools. One rather amusing example, which I find painful although amusing, appeared in the Times Educational Supplement on 6 June about “a lavish dinner” at which the heads of community schools were invited to apply for trust status by no less a figure than Sir Cyril Taylor. I cannot remember many lavish dinners being offered to heads of state schools not within the circle of those invited to move towards trust status.
It goes far beyond that. There has been a consistent barrage of criticism of our comprehensive schools. That brings me to the second part of what I want to say. I will not go on for long; I know that there is time pressure on the Committee, so I will not repeat the speech, but I want to make this point.
The Minister, who is a very fair-minded man, was kind enough to make available to us the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit study entitled, School Reform: a Survey of Recent International Experience. That is very fair of him and it is a very fair and objective report. The report throws very grave doubt on how far comprehensive schools have done less well than their selective alternatives. I went very carefully through that report. I also went through another report, called Education at a Glance, which covers a much wider range. It is published by the OECD and relates to the figures for 2005. It shows what I was trying to argue earlier; there are really good schools and really poor schools in each category—it does not depend on the category. Perhaps I may remark briefly on the matter.
The
OECD statistics go beyond the ones with which the Minister kindly
provided me by including additional countries that are not covered by
the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. They show three things very
clearly. First, among countries with selective systems, some of which
go back a long way, the Netherlands does very well. It is not in the
very top group, but it is very close to it, and it has had a selective
system for very many years. Incidentally, it has a very diverse
selective system, which includes faith schools, schools set up by
parents, and many others, but it puts the emphasis on
selection—it is a selective system. At the other end of the
spectrum of selective systems— rather surprisingly, given what a
12 July 2006 : Column 799
Let me be equally fair. In the group that is called “strongly parent-related”—that is, where parents are free to make choices—Denmark comes out as a basically comprehensive but very poor system, largely because it gives almost total freedom to parents to choose whatever sort of school they want, from independent to comprehensive, but it does not have the sort of rigorous inspection that we have in this country.
Finally, we come to the comprehensive group. At one end is Norway, a country with little discipline and a great belief that it was doing well. It is wrong; it is not doing very well according to the OECD indicators of mathematical and literacy achievement. At the other end is Finland, a country that does the best in Europe over the whole spectrum and that has nothing but comprehensive schools and only a tiny percentage of about 2 per cent who opt out of the system. It is simply rubbish to pretend that a system determines the standards that children achieve. That is not true. What happens and what matters is whether schools have good heads, a good vision and a good sense of commitment, and, on behalf of many thousands of teachers and many hundreds of head teachers in this country, I resent the attempt to run down the major achievements of our comprehensive schools.
I conclude by saying that, according to the OECD indicators in this thick book, which I shall put in the Library for anyone who is willing to see it, the United Kingdom actually comes out extraordinarily well. The Minister may want to take some credit for that, although the figures date back to 2000 when 85 per cent of our children were in comprehensive schools and before the system began to fragment into academies and all the rest. That 85 per cent of children in the comprehensive system achieved seventh position out of 41 countries tested by the OECD for literacy, and roughly the same for numeracy. Among the very highest placed industrialised large countries, we were exceeded by countries such as Korea, Finland, which I have already mentioned, and one or two others, sometimes but not always including the Netherlands. However, in our ability to include all our children and our capacity to rate highly according to these demanding OECD indicators, called PISA—the programme for international student assessment—the validity of which no one has questioned, the United Kingdom has come out surprising well. Instead of taking credit for that, we run down those very parents and teachers who have achieved that. Yes, we should achieve more, but we should not understate what we have done, and, above all, we should not fall into taking part in what is in essence a political football game on the field of education.
12 July 2006 : Column 800
9.30 pm
I hope that the Government will reject this amendment. I hope that they will go further and assure us that they are completely objective in the way in which they conduct their competitions between schools and that one school is not weighed against another. In our view that implies that—I will come to this on a later amendment—ballots will be conducted in which parents can legitimately take part, and that the Government will respect parental ability to choose and to have a preference. At least publicly, they state over and again that they believe that. If they accept this kind of weighting, that belief will not add up to anything very much in real terms. I oppose the amendment.
Lord Gould of Brookwood: Once again I have the enormous honour of following the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who I have looked up to for so many years. I still do. First, this is not about selection against non-selection. Selection should be finished, gone and buried. Secondly, comprehensive schools have done a remarkable job. But I ask: have they, for every kid in our country, done the best possible job? I went to state schools. My kids go to state schools and they have done well. I did not do very well at school. However, there is no question that there were pupils in my kids’ schools who could have done. The comprehensive system could have done a lot better, and we could move on and produce a better system.
Baroness Williams of Crosby: In the noble Lord’s view, is there any system which has done absolutely all that it can for every child within it?
Lord Gould of Brookwood: The question that we have to ask—I was involved as a young socialist in trying to get rid of the local grammar school—is whether the system that we went through is the best system. Could we have done better? That was my question, which I think it is reasonable to ask. However, in respect of the amendment, it is absolutely wrong to suggest that no more community schools should be built or developed. That cannot be right. I believe that the strength of this Bill is that it is not a political football. Its strength is that it has taken not this route nor that route, but a sensible, balanced and reasonable way through the middle, which tries to balance the extremely important claims and demands that have been made for community, cohesion and fairness with the requirement now to give our kids more diversity and choice.
I, too, have read a lot of the literature
on education in the world today. The greatest amount of diversity and
choice, surrounded by a context of local authority and governmental
intervention, which ensures fairness for disadvantaged children and the
protection of their rights, seems to work best. That appears to be the
way forward. It is in Sweden, which has not been mentioned. It is
clearly wrong just to say, “Let us move to choice and forget
about fairness”. It is also wrong to say, “Let us look to
fairness and forget about choice”. We need to find a way of
liberating the potential of those kids who do not get a
12 July 2006 : Column 801
Baroness Walmsley: This has been an interesting debate and it is not over yet. I want to refer to the start of the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, when introducing her amendment. She talked about how undesirable it was that local authorities should regard the schools in their area as “our schools”. I think that that is very desirable. It means that those schools belong to the community, which is represented by the elected members of the local authority. It is a good thing if a school represents the community.
Baroness Buscombe: Does the noble Baroness therefore relish the idea of exclusion, because that is what I am saying? Declaring that you are either in the family of schools or outside it is to exclude a large body of pupils.
Baroness Walmsley: Certainly not, and my subsequent remarks will make that clear.
The noble Baroness also spoke of the vision of the White Paper. I am afraid that the vision of the White Paper was unaccountable chaos—unaccountable to the local community. Moreover, the changes the Government were forced to concede, bit by bit, to get the Bill through another place will make their original vision much more accountable to the local community. Competition seems to be the panacea for all ills. The noble Baroness talked about maintained independent schools, and the Government refer to trust schools as maintained independent schools. So far as I am concerned, they are independent of the local authority, independent of the community, and independent of parents. Very few parents have any role at all in the governance of those schools. In that respect, they are also independent of children because they can turn them away willy-nilly if they wish. They are dependent on the state only for funding, because in pretty much everything else they can do what they like.
The noble Baroness also said that unless a community school could demonstrate that it would raise standards, it should not be allowed to go ahead. I do not disagree with that, but I would also like to see the same criterion applied to a trust school or an academy. We have tabled an amendment on those lines to which my noble friend will speak shortly. Unless a trust school or an academy can demonstrate that it really would improve standards in the community, it should not be allowed to go ahead.
My noble friend Lady
Williams of Crosby quoted a number of pieces of research in her
inspiring speech, but one piece she did not mention was the work of the
Sutton Trust. Its research considers voluntary-aided and Church
schools, and shows quite
12 July 2006 : Column 802
The noble Lord, Lord Young, asked whether we are doing the best possible job for our children. In some cases I agree with him that we are not.
Baroness Walmsley: I am sorry—the noble Lord, Lord Gould. The way in which to help all comprehensive schools to be as good as the best is not to take away their links with the local authority, but to support and resource every one of them, while encouraging every local authority to show the leadership required that will enable schools to support each individual child in fulfilling its own educational potential. That is what we need to do to make sure that our schools are as good as those in Finland, to which my noble friend referred. What is the difference between the Finnish system and that in this country when both are basically comprehensive systems? As she pointed out, in Finland there is very little opting out because the vast majority of schools are comprehensive schools. They get their share of the higher achieving children as well as of those who need more help.
In this country we do not have that system: we have independent schools, voluntary-aided schools, grammar schools and secondary modern schools in some areas; that is the choice of the local people and I would not take that choice away from them. But that is the crucial difference. If you are going to compare a comprehensive school in Finland with a comprehensive school in the UK, you have to look at its intake and at the support it is being given. The vast majority of comprehensive schools in Finland have an intake completely spread across the whole ability range.
It is not diversity and choice that matter; it is quality. If I go and buy a car I do not want a choice of a red, blue, green and purple clapped-out Mini; I want a choice of a Rolls-Royce—and that is what we should be making of all our comprehensive schools.
Lord Adonis: I have a slight difficulty in replying. I have this group of amendments, which seek to forbid the establishment of new community schools; I have the next group of amendments, to be moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, which seek to extend the right for community schools to be established; and I have also heard the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, which I think was more in support of her noble friend. I am trying to work out whether to reply to both groups of amendments now or to reserve my reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because I assume she is going to make another speech on her next group of amendments.
12 July 2006 : Column 803
Baroness Walmsley: If the Minister would find it easier, we on these Benches would be perfectly happy if he were to postpone his response. My noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford will move the next group of amendments but, if the Committee would find that more convenient, we would have no objections at all.
Lord Adonis: I am very happy to do that, in which case I can reply to the noble Baroness helpfully—she said that I try to be fair minded, and I shall be as fair minded as I can—on one or two points and I hope that it will reflect her remarks.
I agree with a good deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said about the way in which education policy is portrayed. I find myself often at the receiving end of this. Any Minister who has to read some of the claptrap reported in the newspapers about standards in state schools, and who constantly has to reply to it, is familiar with the difficulties that we face often with our media.
I have the highest regard for the noble Baroness, who is grappling with the issues that we are all grappling with to improve our schools, but I think there is a fundamental confusion in what she said in regard to what she called comprehensive schools and what she called community schools. With the exception of grammar schools, which these provisions do not affect at all, all the categories of schools that we are discussing today are, in her understanding of the term, comprehensive schools.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that there were free-for-all admissions. There are no free-for-all admissions: all these categories of schools will have to act under this Bill in accordance with the code of practice on admissions. They will all have to observe the pay and conditions document for teachers, observe the national curriculum, undergo Ofsted inspections and have the SIPs we talked about earlier, whether they are trust schools or non-trust schools. I think there was a fundamental misconception at the root of the noble Baroness’s remarks. We are not talking about selective systems against non-selective systems, so the comments about comparisons between the Netherlands and Germany do not apply in that sense. We are talking about a greater diversity of school management and tying it within a basically comprehensive system. Her party’s proposals would limit that.
I am giving a partial
reply, so perhaps I can delay commenting on one or two points. The
noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that she did not want to remove any
category of schools—that she wanted fairness between them. With
great respect, that is not the case. Her Amendment No. 92 would prevent
the establishment of trust schools because it would forbid trusts and
trust bodies from effectively appointing the majority of the governors,
which is one of the elements behind a trust school. A trust school,
where it wishes to do so, is enabled to operate in its governance terms
like a voluntary-aided school. In an addition to Clause 18, by
forbidding any reduction in the statutory proportion of elected parent
governors on a school governing body, Amendment No. 92 would in fact
make it impossible to establish a trust
12 July 2006 : Column 804
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |