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Lord Bruce of Donington: My Lords, I deeply sympathise with the Minister in the position in which she finds herself with regard to the allegations. Can any of the allegations to which she referred by regarded as criminal? If there are suggestions that criminal actions may have taken place it is difficult to understand why the police were not immediately called in. Can the Minister enlighten the House about that?
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, yes, the police are very much involved in these allegations. They are in the hospital at present, which is one of the reasons why we have some difficulty with the inquiry. Clearly, we must in no way obstruct what the Merseyside Police are doing at present.
I have been to Ashworth on two occasions and I have spoken to those responsible for the hospital. I know that in parts of the hospital extremely good work is being carried out. We are talking about one unit within the hospital, and that needs to be seen in context. The personality disorder unit contains people who, in the old jargon, were called psychopaths. They are very disturbed, violent people. I believe that they are the most challenging patients with whom we must deal anywhere in the health service and it is not surprising that on occasions we have difficulties.
Lord Merlyn-Rees: My Lords, perhaps I may return to the terms of reference. I finished today for publication next week an inquiry into allegations against the hospital trust in Leeds. Constantly, during the past three years I found that the people concerned had not read the terms of reference. The Minister referred to wider matters and my noble friend Lady Jay referred to more
general matters. Will the wider matters include resources and staffing of a wider nature than the narrower but important issues that we have discussed today?
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, the terms of the inquiry will be focused on the clinical care, the policies and the procedures carried out within the unit. They will also take into account the security and management arrangements. To my knowledge there have been no problems regarding financial resources to the hospital. That has not been an issue. As regards whether the inquiry should look wider, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State said that he wants it to focus on the personality disorder unit of the hospital. However, if the inquiry wishes to follow up wider questions which are necessary to the proper consideration of these issues it has the freedom to do so.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, as we have a little time, perhaps with the leave of the House I may return to a few questions which I asked in my original remarks. The Minister has not responded to them but I believe that they are important and are not covered by the terms of the inquiry which she says make them difficult to comment on. The first is the issue of staffing levels at Ashworth, which must have been known to the management and to people in the wider healthcare community before the allegations became public. If the suggestion of considerable under-staffing at Ashworth is true, what was being done about it before the allegations came to light?
My second question related specifically to the member of the medical staff who, the Minister said, was suspended today but whose suspension was not referred to in the Statement.
My third question related to the mechanisms for reporting upwards from the hospital through the health service. There appears to be a considerable lacuna between the reporting of individual members of staff and the Secretary of State, or the Minister who is responsible for the hospital. Although the Minister said that the hospital trust will report directly to the Secretary of State, my suspicion remains that we are seeing another example of the fragmentation of proper responsibility and accountability within the health service.
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot answer in detail the issues concerning the staffing levels at Ashworth. All I can say is that all such hospitals are both professionally and geographically isolated and find difficulty in attracting staff. As regards staff reporting, in this case it was not a member of staff who was reporting but a patient who was making allegations. I am sure that noble Lords who are aware of such institutions will know that frequently allegations are made by patients about their personal treatment.
Baroness Jay of Paddington: My Lords, I believe that there was also an ex-nurse who was very much
involved in those allegations, which were substantiated, it is true, by the patient. However, there was the involvement of that ex-nurse.
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, an ex-nurse was in charge of the patient Daggett, who absconded. He was subsequently dismissed by the board. I am in no position to judge the veracity of the allegations and, again, I am sure that that is something which the inquiry will wish to take up.
The accountability of this particular hospital is very clear. I explained it to my noble friend. It is as clear as it is with a trust or a health authority: it goes through the regional office of the NHS Executive to the Secretary of State. The noble Baroness is a member of a health authority and no doubt she knows the lines of management accountability as well as I do.
Lord Richard: My Lords, the Minister has told us for the first time that a member of the medical staff has been suspended. Can we have some more information about that? Who is the person and what position does he hold? What is his connection with the allegations?
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, I do not have the name of the member of staff. All I know is that allegations have been made about him. I do not know what those allegations are in the same way that I do not know any details about the two nurses who have been suspended and the allegations made about them. But they are all suspended pending the inquiry, as is the chief executive.
Lord Richard: My Lords, what position does he hold?
Baroness Cumberlege: My Lords, the medical member of staff is a clinical psychiatrist.
Education Bill
5.11 p.m.
Second Reading debate resumed.
Lord Monkswell: My Lords, in returning to the Second Reading of the latest and, it is hoped, last Education Bill which this Government will present to the House, we all owe a very great debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for exposing very clearly the contradictions in the Government's arguments. On the one hand, in his opening remarks he suggested that the Bill will enhance the choice of parents--but that will be done by extending the ability of schools to choose the parents. That is one of the fundamental contradictions of the Government's position. By talking about extending choice for parents, they imply that that is good, and that is what they are doing. But in fact, they are reducing parental choice by giving schools the choice as to which parents are allowed to send their children to a particular school. That demonstrates the Government's complete lack of understanding of the nature of comprehensive schools and comprehensive education.
I speak from my experience as a member of the Manchester education committee and also from visiting other schools in other localities. I am also a governor and the chair of governors of a high school. Therefore, I should explain to the Government that every comprehensive school is unique and has its own ethos and separate identity. It may come as a surprise to the Government, who look at these matters superficially, that two schools, which have an almost identical building, with almost identical numbers of staff and pupils, may have a completely different ethos and arrangements within them for the education of the children. Therefore, by and large, parents have a wide range of choice within the comprehensive system.
I could go through all the aspects of the Bill in detail, but that has been done most ably by my noble friend Lord Morris of Castle Morris. What I aim to do--I hope not to take too long over it--is to illuminate one or two aspects of the Bill which have been mentioned.
I was concerned about the way in which the Minister talked about the home-school contracts. At the moment, it is virtually an unwritten contract that all parents are required to present their children at school and that the school must educate the pupils. But home-school contracts take that a stage further. My reason for raising that matter is that I had experience of a school where the concept of home-school contracts had not been thought through and had not been well explained to it. Its view was that all that was required was that it should present the pupil and the parents with a piece of paper which said that the parents must get the child to school and must ensure that he did his homework and that the pupil must be attentive in class and do his course work. That seemed to be the implication of what the Minister said.
I suggest that a contract is between two or three parties and all the parties must have something to contribute to it. It is unfortunate if only one party or two parties to the contract are required to provide or produce something or adhere to any constraints and the third party--the school--does not. It would be well worth the Minister discussing and talking to people who have experience of devising those contracts and utilising them so that he understands what it is all about.
My next point is the effect of selection. Those of us--I include the noble Lord, Lord Henley--who are "baby boomers", born shortly after the war, experienced the divide in our education system between grammar schools and the secondary modern schools. There was that distinction at the age of 11 between a child being a success or a failure. There was a distinction as to whether he went on to a university or to some other form of usually lower class education.
One of the effects of that was that quite a large number of mistakes were made. People who should not necessarily have progressed through grammar schools to university did so, and quite a large proportion of the population who should have benefited from grammar school and university education did not do so. One result was that when those young people went into work in industry and commerce there was a distinction between what one might describe as the officer class and other
ranks. The result of that was an extremely deleterious effect on the performance of British industry and commerce, because we had the wrong people with the wrong qualifications in the wrong job. Having spent 20 years in industry, I can testify to that experience.One of the other problems is the importance of sensible consultation. Again I speak from experience. When my children were fairly small, just coming up to primary school age and going into primary school, the local education authority planned to merge a girls' school and a boys' school. On the face of it, that was a sensible proposition. But when it came to the legal requirements of the consultation exercise, the only people whose opinions were sought were the parents of children already at those schools. If one bears in mind that the timescale of the change was five or six years, it will be understood that all the children at both those schools would have left the school by the time the merger took place. Effectively, the wrong group of parents were consulted. Those parents who had children at the feeder primary schools for both those high schools were not consulted at all. I suspect that, if they had been and had the right questions been asked about the future of the education which they wanted for their children, the results would have been rather different.
In conclusion, comprehensive schools have worked for this country. We can judge that in a number of ways. One way is to see the massive expansion of the numbers of young people who are qualified to go into university compared with the numbers under the previous system. A grammar school in every town means three or four secondary moderns. Education should not be a lottery, with a four out of five chance of failure. Education should be beneficial for everyone; in other words, everyone should have a 100 per cent. chance of a good education.
5.20 p.m.
Baroness Warnock: My Lords, like other noble Lords who have spoken, I welcome some parts of the Bill. Fortunately, I do not have to go into questions of intellectual property with regard to those parts. However, there are many aspects of the legislation that I find very disturbing. I do not want to talk about the whole Bill--that is, either the good or the bad bits--but will concentrate on certain aspects of it on this occasion.
I find the Bill somewhat confusing. I believe that the confusion in the first part of the Bill arises from the use of the concept of choice, and it is very familiar in the present educational climate. Of course the existence of more and different kinds of schools involves in principle a choice, just as the existence of the independent sector involves more choice. But to suppose that a school that is selective offers each individual parent more choice is, as has already been pointed out, totally fallacious. We might as well say that an individual parent has a choice of sending her child to Winchester. That is correct, of course, provided that her child is clever, is a boy, and that she has enough money to pay the fees.
Similarly, with a selective school, or a school which has more selective places than it had before, individual parents cannot choose to send their children there to the
extent that they could before. Parents can choose to let the child apply but they cannot possibly choose that the child should actually attend the school. For that, the child has to be clever enough to pass the entrance examination.I am not at all hostile to selection as such. I do not believe that it is an intrinsic evil, with one proviso; namely, that the other schools are good and should be seen by parents to be good. I believe that they can provide a good education to those children who are not selected. I know, for example, of one London girls-only maintained school which is a Church of England school. I am told that this year there were 90 places to be filled--it is a three-form entry school--and that there were well over 490 candidates. That school selects partly on academic grounds and partly on Church membership grounds. But the point I wish to make is that it is incredibly important that any education Bill which advocates selection should say something about, say, those 400 girls who will not be going to that excellent school.
The main defect of the Bill, as I see it, is that it has very little hope to offer to schools which are not going to be selective schools. There is one exception to that and it is a most important one. The Bill does offer hope in the new qualifications. I believe that it is thoroughly admirable to have a new authority which covers all of the curriculum, including the new qualifications.
The worst feature of the legislation is that new powers have been given to the funding authority to start up new grant-maintained schools in any area. Moreover, the governors of existing grant-maintained schools can expand their school or change its character so far as concerns selectivity without proper consultation. We are told that they will be given advice or guidance from the Secretary of State, but we do not know what kind. That is a fragmentation of the policy making powers of the LEAs in relation to schools. As one speaker has already said, it is another nail--possibly not quite the last one--in the coffin of the local education authorities.
So far as I can see, the local education authorities will have only two functions in the future. One is to issue statements on children with special needs who will merit statements, if I may put it that way. But, even there, the local authority will not have to place those children with statements because, if your child has a statement, you really have a choice of schools. Indeed, schools and local authorities are almost bound to allow the child to go to the school of first choice, which will make things extremely difficult for schools such as the one in London that I mentioned. However, LEAs will have to issue statements and ensure that those children go to the schools which their parents prefer.
The other task of the LEAs is a new one and seems to me to be a terrible task; namely, to provide education, very expensively, to those children who will, if the Bill goes through in its present form, become "disqualified persons". Whatever else is claimed about the Bill, I believe that that title must go. I am sure that there is some other way to refer to those unfortunate children who will not be accepted at any school. However, I am afraid that they will be rather numerous. So a new and
sad task will fall to the LEAs and it is only to be hoped that they will have enough money to fulfil it. They will have to devise other forms of education for the children who will be excluded from every school, not just from the one at which they started. We should be ashamed to have legislation which contains such clauses about "disqualified persons".As I have said before, I believe--and even more strongly on reading the Bill in detail--that the slaughter of the powers of the LEAs will turn out to be one of the worst things that this Government have done. We must restore local policy making to the education scene. Governors of schools are interested in their own school and they cannot have, and should not be expected to have, an overriding interest in the common good of all the children in their area. It is not their task to make policy. It used to be the task of the LEAs. I hope that some of that power will be restored to them somehow or other.
5.27 p.m.
Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, I very much welcome the Bill. It appears to me neither as a curate's egg nor, to take the example of the right reverend Prelate, a half-burnt piece of toast, but as a very wholesome slice of daily bread for the children in our schools. I should particularly like to address the topic of selection which many speakers have referred to and which seems to result in a great deal of misunderstanding--not least a misunderstanding of what the Bill is actually saying and what it proposes to do.
However, perhaps it would be salutary, first, to ask why selection is on the agenda at all. It surprises me somewhat that there is a belief on the Opposition Benches--and, indeed, in some of the daily newspaper reports--that repeating like a mantra that comprehensive schools have been a success will somehow make that come true. Unfortunately you cannot have it both ways. You cannot produce the wonderful rhetoric which the noble Lord, Lord Morris, produced, and which I greatly enjoyed, about the failures of the education system where, for example, 85 per cent. are not performing as well as they should, and point out how desperately the children from deprived homes in poorer areas are being educated, while at the same time claiming that the comprehensive schools which all these children have been attending are a howling success.
However, surely as people who genuinely care--and I know that we all do--about what is happening to the young people in our society, we ought to be asking much more fundamental questions without ideological presuppositions as to what it is that is going wrong. It is patently obvious that we are not doing as well as we would like to be doing, especially as regards the less able or at least those who are perhaps less well endowed in terms of home background and so on. Indeed, we are not doing as well as we would like to do. We are not doing as well by them as they deserve. Therefore something must be wrong somewhere within the system that we have set up.
Comprehensive schools are not a howling success. When they were first introduced I was one of those who believed that they would be a great step forward. It is extremely disappointing to read the research of the past 10 or 15 years which consistently shows that children from more deprived backgrounds continue to perform poorly even though they are now in the comprehensive system. Many of us as educationalists thought that it was the failure of the secondary modern schools that made that happen. However, it is not; it seems to be something which continues despite the reorganisation of the system.
Sadly, the success rate of young people from less well-off homes in getting into higher education has not been radically changed. In many ways the social composition of those who enter higher education is not greatly changed from that of 20 or even 30 years ago. We need to look at this matter again and we should do so with open minds and without all this ideological baggage of repeating--as I said, rather like a mantra--comprehensive schools, good; every other kind of school, bad.
Having said that, as I listened to spokesmen from the Benches opposite this afternoon, I found myself re-reading the Bill rather nervously in case I had misread it. Were we being presented with proposals for 100 per cent. selection in some schools? Were we being invited to sign up to the idea that some schools should select all their pupils and others should select none--the old bipartite system of grammar schools and secondary modern schools? No, it is no such thing. The most that is being proposed is that local authority schools should be able to select up to 20 per cent. of their pupils and grant-maintained schools should be able to select up to 50 per cent. of their pupils on any range of criteria which they choose, not just academic ability but perhaps giftedness in the performing arts or music, or even in sport. The sort of picture we have been offered of how wicked it will be for a child to fail to get into a school and therefore be "in the sink" is absolutely not the picture which this Bill presents us with.
I have said before in your Lordships' House that to allow schools which are situated in deprived areas where achievement has been low to select a proportion of their pupils on grounds of ability might be a good thing. I remember that one of the aspects of the ILEA's policies that I liked--I am sure that noble Lords on the Benches opposite approved of the ILEA, which I, largely, did not--was that it attempted to achieve a mix of ability in its schools. It used to band pupils into the very bright, the medium-bright and the less bright and ensure that each of its comprehensive schools had a mix. That is the kind of possibility which is opened up by this Bill. In an area which has a long history of low achievement it is difficult for the head and the staff of a school to raise that level of achievement unless they can admit some pupils into the school who have the possibility of reaching higher achievement. Then one can begin to reverse the downward spiral. Therefore I strongly welcome that aspect of the Bill.
Nor does the Bill in any sense restrict choice; it widens choice. It always seems to me odd that we hear a repeated statement--as if repeating it made it true--by those on the Benches opposite that one cannot have parental choice and selection. I have said before in this House that people choose which university they wish to apply for. However, that does not mean they are guaranteed to obtain a place there. The universities select the students who best suit them. When young people enter the world of employment they choose which jobs to apply for. However, that does not mean they are guaranteed to obtain the job they want. There is a wide diversity of choice. However, the fact that they may sometimes suffer disappointment and not get the job they want or get into the university they want is surely not a recipe for going to the other extreme and becoming like the People's Republic of China and saying, "You have no choice at all. This is where you go and be blowed to your choice and your inclinations". I have seen young Chinese men and women in universities literally in tears when they describe to me how they were directed to study engineering although they wanted to become doctors or they were directed to become teachers when they wished to become actors or actresses. Surely we are not advocating that kind of thing.
Let us keep an open mind about what selection can achieve. What is more, we should keep an open mind about the effect of including in the criteria for selection the home-school agreements for parents. It is unfair to expect schools and teachers on their own to cope with all the difficulties that young people face nowadays in reaching their full potential. There must be a partnership, with parents being prepared to sign up to their part of the bargain. Schools alone cannot make good deficiencies that may exist in people's ordinary lives outside school. Schools must have help from parents. This surely is a way in which that can be achieved. I believe it is right to sign the agreements before the young person enters a school, because afterwards it is too late to find out that, however hard the teacher works, he or she is in opposition to the parents, who may be pulling the child away from what the teacher is trying to do. Having these agreements signed in advance gives the parents a choice too. If they do not like the criteria the school has set out in the home-school partnerships, they have the choice of choosing another school where the criteria are more to their liking.
I wish to refer to another aspect of the Bill; namely, the setting of targets by individual schools. I give this provision a particularly strong welcome. It has quite rightly been referred to rather tangentially by other speakers as being part of the package of raising standards. I wish to emphasise how important a part school targets play in raising standards. One of the courageous things which this Government have done is to set national targets, year on year, up to the year 2000, for the achievement of young people. Each year they have courageously published the performance tables to show how progress towards those targets is being achieved. The effect obtained by the annual publication of those tables has been beyond even my wildest
expectations. The raising of standards and pupil achievement has been quite remarkable. However, we are still not as far down the road as we would like to be, and we never shall be until we raise standards for all pupils in our schools. Simply to set national targets, or even regional targets through the training and enterprise councils, cannot reflect the whole picture. Targets must be set at the level of individual schools.I refer to a depressing experience when I attended the education forum of one training and enterprise council at which regional targets were being discussed. The three representatives of three Labour local education authorities began the discussion by saying, "Of course you cannot possibly expect our kind of children to achieve anything like the national targets. Our kind of children can only reach a half, a third or even a quarter of the standards that the others can attain". I want individual schools to consider that kind of statement and say "nonsense". I believe that individual schools will not be tempted to lower their standards and to set themselves low targets. They will have to answer to parents and to pupils as regards the targets they set. I should like to see every school set itself realistic targets for the achievements of its young people. That way, most certainly, the achievements of young people will be raised throughout the entire population and not only in the leafy suburbs.
5.40 p.m.
Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale: My Lords, I rise to speak about the Bill with mixed feelings because some parts are very acceptable and are, as my noble friend Lord Morris pointed out, Labour Party policy. But there are other parts which are far from being acceptable and will, I hope, be extensively amended before the Bill leaves your Lordships' House.
First, however, I should declare an interest (especially perhaps as in this instance my accent may be misleading). I am chair of governors of Fairlawn Primary School, a county school in the London Borough of Lewisham; and I also serve as one of the chairs of Lewisham Admissions and Exclusions Appeals Panels.
There are many aspects of this long and wide-ranging Bill which are of interest. However, at this stage I should like to make some points only about those parts of the Bill dealing, first, with selection, and, secondly, with exclusion. I turn to the proposals on selection in Part I, whereby all schools will be allowed to select up to an increased percentage limit without central approval or any public or community consultation. For county, voluntary and grant-maintained primary schools the limit is now to be 20 per cent.; for specialist schools it is 30 per cent; for grant-maintained secondary schools it is 50 per cent.; and, for reasons I cannot understand, grant-maintained schools requiring "special measures"--which means that they are considered to be failing on inspection--should be allowed a 20 per cent. increase.
One of the striking factors in the proposals is the way that parental choice--it was supposed to be a guiding light for this Government's education policy--is being eroded. Rather than expanding the choice for parents, an extension of selection will mean that those parents
whose children fail to meet whatever entrance criteria schools impose will not have their choice. Increasing selection gives the schools greater choice--not the parents of children who are not chosen. The effect on other schools of a local school becoming more selective has significance for the whole local community; and schools and planning authorities will face even more difficulty than they do already in planning provision for their local communities. Even the Government seem to see the risks in this since Clause 11 gives them reserve powers.The question of the parental choice of school is already very vexed indeed, as anyone who has had anything to do with admissions appeals will testify. Parents say, sometimes despairingly, sometimes aggressively, "But this is the school of my choice", and have been misled by the propaganda poured out about this by the party in power into thinking that that should be enough to decide the matter. But of course it is impossible to satisfy all the demands for entry into a popular school. Proposals to increase selection will create further havoc in local admissions and planning.
I have felt for some time that we are looking into an abyss already; and I find that view endorsed by the Audit Commission report, Trading Places, of December 1996. It uses the word "gridlock" for the crisis. I make no apology for quoting this part in full because it is exactly the position that recent policies have produced. It has to be recognised and dealt with rather than further compounded by the proposals in the Bill before us. The audit report warned:
- "Unwanted and unnecessary school places lock up scarce resources which could be used elsewhere. Class sizes continue to rise in popular schools. Appeals are on the increase. Schemes for school rationalisation are decreasing. Government and LEAs blame each other. The system risks gridlock".
That is an indictment with which I completely concur both from my own experience and from conversations with others who have to try to help deal with the flood of admissions appeals which pour in. Appeals clerks have a mammoth task to try to make the necessary arrangements and, not least, to find the people to sit on the panels day after day to hear the cases put by impassioned and sometimes distraught parents who more often than not have to be told that on the entrance criteria of the school their child does not qualify. Parental choice does not come into play when dealing with oversubscribed schools.
Before I leave selection, I wish to mention another worrying point in the Bill. I refer to the potential use of baseline assessments at the age of five for the purposes of selection. Those assessments are generally recognised as desirable to allow children's progress to be monitored properly, but it is not acceptable that they run the risk of being used for selecting children at such a young age.
Clauses 2 and 7 of the Bill require school governors annually to consider selection--a not very subtle attempt to encourage the growth of selection. It is an exact parallel to the requirement of annual decisions on whether to ballot parents on grant maintained status. The Government do not seem to have learnt from that experience that it does not achieve what they want. It is
yet another statutory demand on already overloaded governors who, not surprisingly, are becoming ever more difficult to find.Turning to exclusions, we all recognise that other pupils and teachers have to be safeguarded from disruption, or worse, by individual pupils; and that as a last resort this has sometimes to mean exclusion. However, in dealing with the mechanics, let us never lose sight of the many and complex reasons for the fact that exclusions are a growing problem.
Disruptive children are often from emotionally and/or economically deprived backgrounds. In many areas the resources are lacking to provide adequate help from specialist services such as educational psychologists. And when the child is excluded, the arrangements either for referral units or home tuition are often woefully inadequate so that an excluded child is too often found to be coming to the attention of the police. Let us not overlook the real pressures in a league tables climate on a school to divest itself of problems which affect its overall performance and statistics.
- "persons permanently excluded from two or more schools".
I am horrified to read the provision at Clause 28(2) which states:
- "Where a child has been permanently excluded from two or more schools, he is a 'disqualified person' for the purposes of this section during the period of two years beginning with the date on which the latest of those exclusions took effect".
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. The term "disqualified person" should not be used of any child. It is completely unacceptable to label a child pejoratively in this way. I do not know what brilliant bureaucrat thought up this term. Perhaps--I do not know whether I dare say so in this House--it was one with a legal background. But surely someone should have thought of the consequences of such a term coming into usage about a child and the effect on the child and the parents. One does not need to be a child psychologist to see what harm it could do. And what civilised society would brand a child a "disqualified person", however many times that child has been excluded from a school? This term surely has to go.
There are many other sections of interest to me in the Bill upon which I shall not comment now. I conclude by saying that, although there are good points in the Bill, I find the whole thrust of the extension of selection very depressing. It is turning back the clock and it would do nothing to address the real problems of our current education system.
5.49 p.m.
Lord Annan: My Lords, there is much to praise in the Bill, since it addresses some of the problems which have plagued education in this country for years. The early clauses deal with the question of selection that has occupied so much of our debate. In the 1960s I was one of those in favour of the comprehensive principle. I see no reason at all to go back on that belief today.
When I became Provost of King's, in Cambridge, in 1956, 69 per cent. of the intake came from independent schools; a further 12 per cent. from direct grant schools; and the remainder from maintained grammar schools. Today, 70 per cent. of the intake come from comprehensive schools and a few maintained grammar schools. Has the intellectual level of achievement fallen? It has not. For five years running that college came top of the academic achievement table. Who can doubt that the principle of selection at 11-plus failed to identify boys and girls who would have gained entry to university and distinguished themselves there?
Yet people like myself should admit that the move to comprehensive education did not serve the country as well as it should. The tragedy of the comprehensive system was, as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Walton of Detchant, that it coincided largely with a revolution in teaching methods--a revolution that was responsible for lowering the standard of achievement in schools; and in institutes and colleges of further education theories of education replaced old-fashioned instruction in chalk and talk.
The ideal of head teachers in comprehensive schools in the 1950s was that their schools should be uniform-wearing, satchel-carrying schools with homework; and that was diminished. In addition, the NUT turned to the tactics of disruption to enforce its claims.
On the question of selection, I want to make it clear that in comprehensive schools I favour the maximum of streaming and setting.
That is why, in my opinion, the Government were right to set up special schools to encourage the teaching of maths and science. I only wish that they would pay a differential to those who teach these subjects in all schools. The schools are competing with business, which demands higher and higher numeracy skills--and can pay for them. Who can blame potential teachers for settling for vastly higher pay in industry than they can possibly receive from teaching in schools?
Good schools in good LEAs have a grievance. They see comparable schools from indifferent LEAs adjoining theirs opting out and being awarded capital grants sometimes totalling £1 million--and not only capital grants; sometimes they receive more in recurrent grant. Whereas good schools which remained loyally with their LEA because that LEA had treated them fairly now see their recurrent grant go down because the Government have imposed cuts on local government. Is it any wonder that they feel sore? I have heard the noble Baroness, Lady David, make that point time and again at Question Time, and I have never heard a satisfactory reply from the Minister.
Clause 30 of the Bill requires parents to sign a home-school partnership document. That is a welcome innovation. But how long will it be before parents begin to think of suing schools which have had to cut back on teachers and other auxiliary staff and activities because in their opinion a school has broken its side of the contract?
I still doubt whether we realise how far we lag behind our competitors in Europe. Our children do not emerge from school with the attainments of Dutch, German or French children. That is one of the most severe criticisms which those who support a positive grammar school policy can bring against the policy of comprehensive education. Both the Germans and the French have maintained the equivalent of a selective principle. In only one of the Lander in Germany, Land Hesse, are the Gesamtschulen (that is to say, comprehensive schools) entirely compulsory.
I notice that the French are complaining that the standard of the baccalaureat has fallen. Has the standard of A-level achievement fallen in this country? There is grave scepticism about the marking of scripts now that such immense numbers sit GCSE examinations. Is it not time now to refer to the GCSE boards? Should not the Government set up an inquiry into their work and the effect that their policies have had on higher education? Options proliferate--
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