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Lord Morris of Castle Morris moved Amendment No. 1:
The noble Lord said: In order to cover the susurrus created by the movement of noble Lords whose interest in education seems to have expired some considerable time ago, perhaps I may begin by apologising to the Committee and begging its indulgence because I have
In moving Amendment No. 1, I wish to speak also to Amendments Nos. 4, 48 and 55. These amendments bring together the issues of enlargement and increases in selection. The first two amendments provide that county and voluntary schools are to be excluded from the greater freedom to select where they have enlarged their capacity to a significant extent in the previous four years. The third amendment, which is an amendment to the Government's new clause before Clause 3, provides that where a grant-maintained school has used that clause to enlarge its premises in the same way, the greater freedom to select conferred under Part I shall not apply to that school.
This Bill is about serial change. One might describe it as a series of salami cuts towards selection or a creeping barrage against the comprehensive principle. The best analogue I can think of is ecclesiastical. For some 10 years before 1980 liturgical activists worked to modernise the services of the Church of England and confine Cranmer to the crypt. Then, in 1980, came the Alternative Service Book; not a replacement, we were told, not a takeover, but one beside the other--alternatives. But, as some of us said, be ye not deceived. The intention was quite clearly to displace the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and scrap 318 years of tranquil agreement; but slowly, slice by slice, introducing first of all series 1, series 2, series 3 and series goodness knows what, and then a little bit further down the line producing an Alternative Service Book, marginalising and reducing the old book, and pushing the new one, especially through the theological colleges. This same process of gradualism is at work in the Bill.
As we open our detailed discussion on it I would beg the Committee not to be taken in for a moment by the idea that these are only small changes, minor adjustments and little movements here and there to allow a bit more elbow room to those who really need it. This Bill offers alternatives and its aim is to restore the elitism of the 11-plus. We shall not see the 11-plus reinstituted in all its gory glory, but we shall see the same divisiveness in our education system. And unto him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not--the underprivileged--shall be taken away, even that which they hath.
In technical terms, the Bill completely rewrites the concept of "significant change of character" and "significant enlargement" by the provisions of Part I. This provides that in relation to the character of the school, increasing selection up to a threshold of 20 per cent. in a county school or 50 per cent. in a grant-maintained secondary school does not significantly change its character. It is the same beast really; nobody would know the difference; it is a minor matter; a mere adjustment. In our view, that is not so.
In the same way, the Government's new clause, which was twice not agreed to in the other place, tries to rewrite the concept of significant enlargement of premises so that an increase of 50 per cent. is not to be treated as significant. By altering these technical definitions, Ministers hope to liberate schools--and in particular grant-maintained schools--from a process of public consultation and seeking of consent and popular agreement which in most other areas of our legal system is considered the essential underpinning of a structured system, and especially of a structured system of school provision.
These amendments thus seek to draw out some of the implications of this gentle relaxation of control at the outset of our Committee stage. The contention behind the amendments is that either a substantial increase in the selective intake of a school or a large growth in its size are major alterations in both the practice and the ethos of a school and that they should not take place simultaneously. All those professionally concerned in education agree, as the Second Reading debate on this Bill reflected, that the education service needs, above all, a period of calm and recuperation rather than the perpetual fuss of ongoing and everlasting change. Teachers, head teachers, LEAs and educationists are sick of one Bill every year, churning up and overturning what they have been trying to assimilate and get through to their pupils in the previous 12 months. They go back in the autumn in fear and dread of what the Government will throw at them this time which will require more and endless returns and paperwork and keep teachers from their classes.
The principal problems in our education service are illiteracy, innumeracy, the position of our system in its rating against our international competitors, discipline, teaching methods, rotting buildings and demoralised teachers in a profession which does not even have a general council to look after its interests. Those are the major items that we ought to be addressing ourselves to, because, as the Prime Minister himself said--we shall repeat this shamelessly during the next days of Committee debate--15 per cent. of our children are equal to the best in the world but, in his phrase, the other 85 per cent. frankly are not. What we have is this great tail of under-achievers. We contend that those are the people to whom we should be addressing our work. Yet the Government's policy, at this fag end of a Parliament, is to loosen the foundations on which a formerly coherent system rests by creating, even more than they have to date, a market for pupils among schools.
I should also, I suppose, declare a sort of interest. I am the chairman of the Council of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, which is part of a group of charities of which the Prince of Wales is the president. I was talking about this issue with the Director of Education in another of them, Business in the Community, which deals with education and business. He said this:
I could not put it better myself. It is right that, as the Committee begins to assess what the Bill says about greater selection, this is a matter to which we should give our attention.
The Government make much of the importance and the creative possibilities of competition. There is a great deal of truth in that. We on this side of the Chamber support competition wherever it can be usefully and creatively deployed; it is a necessary part of any educational process. It can be creative, stretching, enlightening, developing and it can be great fun. I recall that 50 years ago my grammar school, as it then was--it is not now--used to play rugby against every public school in the area that we could find. It was highly competitive. We played Blundells, Christ College, Brecon, Crypt Gloucester and Llandovery. In our view those schools existed for the sole purpose of being beaten by Cardiff High School at rugby regularly every year and by a large margin. Similarly, we competed against them in achieving scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge and we did extremely well.
But what was the price? Eighty five per cent. of our contemporaries, many of our friends, brothers, sisters, people with young children whom we had been brought up with, were consigned to the factories, the collieries or the dead-end jobs where they were simply "hands" that clocked on for the appropriate shift. They were the under-achievers--the tail-enders.
Those days are dead and gone. Competition must now be creative in a new way. I gave the best picture of it that I know at Second Reading when I talked about one school which introduced a new race on Games Day, in which the school was divided into teams. They raced against one another, but each team had a proportion of the weak, disabled, the unco-ordinated and the general losers. The winning team was the one which got all its members over the line first. To win one had to collaborate as well as compete. That is the kind of competition that this country needs: that is what we are aiming for with these amendments. I beg to move.
Page 1, line 13 at beginning insert ("Except in the case of any county school which has within the previous four years undertaken a significant enlargement of its capacity").
"We estimate that 25-30% of young people at 19 are functionally illiterate and this is costing business £10 billions per annum to provide training in basic numeracy and literacy as well as billions to the UK economy in terms of the costs of unemployment, social
24 Feb 1997 : Column 908security, exclusion, crime and related tax costs combined with low purchasing power and lowered tax-base in the economy and skills shortages undermining future investment.
We believe that this 'tail' is the result of the cycle of low aspiration and deprivation in disadvantaged communities with low literate adults...some 5,000 schools (4,000 primary/1,000 secondary) need focused support to tackle this issue which affects over 200,000 young people leaving school at 16 with virtually no formal qualifications (100,000 fail to achieve any grade in English or mathematics at GCSE each year)".
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