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Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I did not say that the idea would set school against school; I said that there were some who feared that.
Lord Sheppard of Liverpool: My Lords, I want to take that fear very seriously and I understand it.
My noble friend the Minister spoke about a culture of collaboration. A cluster of schools sponsored by different faiths and the local authority can be highly creative. Moving out from the secure base of belonging to a school in which their own faith is taught, children can meet others and work out what tolerance and respect mean. Pretending that religious faith is not there will not do that. Clusters can be a significant way of beginning to build some bridges. The Church leaders in Liverpool used to meet—and still do—with our opposite numbers in Belfast and Glasgow twice a year for 24 hours. Perhaps 10 years ago, our Belfast colleagues gave us a presentation on the EMU programme—education for mutual understanding—which is required of all schools in Northern Ireland. The Protestant child who was mentioned earlier who did not meet a Roman Catholic from when he was six until the age of 15 would not be able to do that today.
As I dare to mention Northern Ireland, no doubt if we could start all over again we would not start precisely where we are now. The same is true of Bradford. However, programmes such as EMU begin from where we are. Last week I rang Bishop Walsh, the Roman Catholic diocesan bishop in Belfast, to ask whether the programme continues. He said that it does, with enthusiastic support from schools. As we might expect, the links are easier and more successful in the areas where sectarian passions are not the strongest, but even in those areas where it is most difficult, the programme makes a beginning. There are a number of areas in other cities where we need to make a beginning. EMU is part of the required curriculum. It is cross-curricular, appearing especially in history, English, drama and RE. The EMU co-ordinator in each school has to make a report to the governing body every year. The programme insists on links between schools.
I could see such a programme being appropriate in other parts of the UK. I hope that Muslim leaders, for example, might echo the comments of the Roman Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland last November, that EMU sets out,
- "to address issues of conflict and overcome the all-pervasive culture of silence on the causes and consequences of division".
Opening up the possibility of Muslim schools in the maintained sector sends a strong message of inclusion to that community. Many of their young people feel disenfranchised and excluded from places of influence and power. Our message to those young people is, "We want you as full citizens".
Let me say a little about Church of England schools. When I first became a bishop, as Bishop of Woolwich, I was made aware of criticism of Church schools in London of the kind that Frank Dobson has been making in another place. It was claimed that they created sink schools by creaming off the nice children. During those years, I learnt that any successful schools were in danger of doing that—faith-based or secular. I saw two Church schools that took more than their share of children with special needs. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn mentioned Archbishop Michael Ramsay school in Camberwell, which did just that, and no doubt still does.
Our ideal is that Church of England schools should not be simply for the children of Church families. Pressure on admissions has sometimes made them more like that, but the traditional C of E school has always wanted to serve the neighbourhood more widely. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has encouraged the Church of England to increase its number of secondary schools. If that happens, I have no doubt that it will make that traditional dream more possible.
When I moved to the North, I saw Church schools—in Wigan, for instance—that were clearly for the whole community. Lancashire taught me to be much more enthusiastic about Church schools than I had been in London. Archbishop Warlock and I in particular worked for a joint school with the Roman Catholics. It was very difficult for years because the population of Liverpool was declining and falling rolls meant that no new schools were being opened. However, I have been invited this May to celebrate five years of the joint Anglican and Roman Catholic Emmaus School—a large, two-form entry primary school, which is the first new school that Liverpool City Council had built for 25 years. I am also delighted to learn that a new city academy high school is proposed in the inner city in Liverpool, to be sponsored jointly by the Anglican diocese and the Roman Catholic archdiocese.
When these discussions take place, we seem to speak only about the Bradfords and Oldhams—places with large Muslim communities. There are also cities and towns with smaller Muslim communities that would find it very hard to run their own school. That is also true of Sikh and Hindu communities, in which parents are often glad to send their children to a school based on another faith. We have been glad to offer places to those who are not part of our Church. I well remember the leaders of the Muslim community coming to ask
for our help when Liverpool education committee went co-educational. I am glad to say that our Archbishop Blanch Girls High School has for some years been happy to include a number of Muslim girls. Another school in Liverpool with a most honourable tradition in that respect is a Jewish high school—King David school—which has included perhaps 30 or 40 per cent of gentile children, with its particular appeal of specialising in music.When my noble friend replies to the debate, I hope that she may be able to tell us that there will be a realistic programme along the lines of the Secretary of State's hopes for a family of schools and her own phrase of a culture of collaboration—perhaps through a programme building on the experiences of EMU from Northern Ireland. That would help pupils to feel secure in their own identity and worth and to experience steps in building mutually enriching relationships with others.
5.58 p.m.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, one of the problems with this debate is that there are so many good speakers that it is almost impossible to nip out for a cup of tea. However, I see that this is one of the exceptions. The Benches are emptying rapidly. Be back quickly, my Lords, because I shall not be long.
I have an interest to declare, as many know, as the editor of the Good Schools Guide. I am also one of the sponsors of a local school in its bid for technology college status. I am participating actively in the campaign that the Government are taking forward.
I shall save most of my comments for Committee. I am fond of detail. Many subjects have been raised today and I look forward greatly to debating them. I welcome many aspects of the Bill, although, along with many others, I note the tendency to do much more by secondary legislation and to give many more powers to the Secretary of State—a tendency that is twinned with a proposal to diminish the powers of this House to consider secondary legislation. If we are to go that way with Bills, we must go the other way with the powers of this House and give it much greater power to deal with secondary legislation.
Along with my noble friends, I am concerned by the trend towards centralisation. We have in the Department for Education and Skills a great fondness for pet projects and budgets of a few hundred million pounds given to this and that, and involving centralised control from the centre. The sort of thing we are telling local education authorities not to do and preventing them doing is springing up in the Department for Education and Skills. That is a trend which ought to be sat on. It is not the best way to run schools. We are producing a plethora of plans and forums—and even more in this Bill, all of which take the time of the most senior people in a school and the best people in a local education authority to formulate and then to make work. There are so many around at the moment that they cannot possibly work well. That cannot be the right way to go. We have a lot of good people out there in schools; we ought to give them
more responsibility. We ought to think of the Department for Education and Skills much more as a centre of expertise, of initiation and encouragement—not of control in the sense of having to dot every "i" and cross every "t" but more in the sense of an enlightened Ofsted watching what is going on and lending a helping hand, or insisting on lending a helping hand, when something is clearly going wrong. We should not think of it in the sense of day-to-day control, ever looking upwards, even for little things. If I want to change a school day, I have to apply to the Secretary of State. That is utterly ridiculous and is the wrong way to go.I am glad to see that we are slightly opening the door on new schools, but I am sorry to see that LEAs are to remain the gatekeepers for that. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, hymned Denmark as an example of a Scandinavian school system. If parents in Denmark get together in sufficient numbers, they have a right to start their own new state school. There are no controls on school numbers. If parents want to create a school with a particular character to suit their wishes and the needs of their children, they may do so. That has not led to a vast expansion in the number of schools, any more than the freedom to make jam sandwiches means that we are flooded with jam sandwiches as there are natural economic constraints on these matters. However, that process leads to a much more dynamic and much more parent-centred school system and one where the state has no control over what kinds of schools are created, where they are created and what their underlying religious, or any other, philosophy is. That works extremely well. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, having raised the subject of Denmark, will feel able to support me in Committee when I shall try to move a little further down that road.
One of the advantages of a Bill as diverse as this one is that you get a chance to ride a few of your own hobby-horses in Committee. I give the Minister advance notice that I shall be out there on one called "statistics". One of the great failings of a department for education which is supposed to know about these things is the statistics it produces. Take the performance tables. Every year or so it changes the bases. Does it provide historical data? No. The Scots do. When the Scots change the bases, they redo the historical data. You can get a time series. You can see how schools are doing. When the bases were changed again this year, no historical data were provided. I can get nothing out of the Department for Education and Skills to enable me to look back. That is destructive of a proper understanding of the way schools are going. If performance tables are meant to be out there so that we can, as the noble Baroness said, "judge" a trend, a trend is what we should be given and not a lot of discontinuous measurements on different bases.
We ought also to pay more attention to research. There are some wonderful projects going on. Beacon schools constitute one such project that I am enormously glad this Government have carried out. It has been sitting there waiting to be done for years and I am glad that the Government have done it. But what
data are becoming available on how that system is being used, what its successes are and on what it takes to be a good beacon school? There is nothing on the DfES website. That is absolutely the kind of research that ought to be carried out to make the best of that kind of initiative. There is little good educational research; there needs to be a lot more. I shall come back to that particular hobby-horse in Committee.The General Teaching Council's first disciplinary action is interesting. The Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 sets out the crime of unacceptable professional conduct which means conduct which falls short of the standards expected of a registered teacher. The first person to be accused under that rubric has two particular crimes against him. He handed to a registered inspector a folder of correspondence between himself and the head teacher; in other words, he told an inspector what was going on in the school so that the inspector knew what was really happening. He also handed to Edexcel correspondence between himself and the head teacher which constituted a formal complaint about the running of the GCSE mathematics examination; in other words, he told the authority responsible for running the mathematics examination what was being done wrongly in his school. I find it totally astonishing that the first case to which the GTC turned its attention involves closing the gates on openness as if it is saying that it should be illegal for a teacher to blow the whistle and, indeed, if you blow the whistle, you risk your entire career and you could be prevented teaching ever again. I hope that we shall be able to add a small amendment to that bit of the 1998 Act to make it clear that that kind of action is to be praised, and not condemned as a crime.
I turn to religious schools. I find myself aligned with my noble friend Lord Baker on that matter. I have severe doubts about the effect that religious schools have. One can see too may examples—Oldham is one of them—where religion has been used to exclude children of another faith and deny them a part in the community. The schools ask, "How can we turn away Christians"? However, if a school is to represent the community and to be the kind of school which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sheppard of Liverpool, wished, it has to turn away children of its own faith community. I have no difficulty with schools which hold to a faith and all the things of the spirit that faith can bring. However, I refer to the issue of having only children of that particular faith in that school. If a private school wishes to do that, it should be permitted to do so. Most private religious schools, except perhaps some that represent minority religions, admit children of all faiths because they need the money. By and large it is only in the state system that religious schools are exclusive. If you want a decent school in some parts of London, you have to convert to Catholicism about three years before you conceive, go to mass every day and produce a certificate from a priest to get access to state money to pay for the education of your child. That seems to me entirely wrong and not the way in which the state should disburse its money. It is fine to permit a religious-based
school to control its intake, but it is not fine to make little exclusive sects at the expense of the taxpayer and all of us.I have seen some fascinating research. People have carried out controlled experiments in which pupils in one class have been taught nothing about racial and religious division while pupils in another class have followed a course designed to improve tolerance. In every case the class that is properly taught is less racially tolerant: as they know what the enemy is like. They find it easier to pick out points of difference and to see others as different because they understand more about them. However, if I were brought up with a Jewish boy or a Muslim in a mixed community, it would be ridiculous for me to regard them as different as I would recognise immediately so many points in common. To bring up people separately builds in differences. You can afford a little of that in a society, but once you start to treat large groups in a society in that way it becomes dangerous over the long term.
We shall have a great deal of fun talking through the curriculum. What Lord Denning said about prison education should inform a good deal of what we say. There is a great deal of understanding and innovation taking place as regards how to bring kids back into education who were lost to it when at school. If we can understand a little of the successful experiments in that area, we may understand a little about what we should have done in schools to stop that situation arising in the first place.
6.9 p.m.
Lord Alton of Liverpool: My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that only a week ago I spoke at a Catholic sixth form college in London, at which 50 per cent of its 850 students were from other faiths—25 per cent were Hindu and 10 per cent were Muslim. I hope that he realises on reflection that the caricature that he painted of Catholic schools is extraordinarily unfair.
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