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Lord Peston: I thank my noble friend for that reply. I wish to make a few brief remarks. I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn that as regards social class and selection we have what we might call the "Mandy Rice-Davies" phenomenon here as regards asking any head about social class; namely, "He would, wouldn't he?" However, anyone
who knows anything about the research into school admissions knows that a social class element definitely plays a role in some schools.I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, said; namely, that I am fighting on all battlegrounds, but not as regards every subject. When we discuss the reform of the curriculum and 14-16 education, even I shall reveal some new thoughts. The Committee will have to wait for that.
I turn to selection, particularly by aptitude, which was discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Let us assume that we continue with selection by aptitude, which has been legitimised. That would mean that all of our good footballers were in very few schools, likewise all our good artists and good musicians. We should ask ourselves—we are using our imagination—"Is that the kind of education system that we should like to have?". My view is that we should simply answer "No". I should like all children to attend schools in which some pupils are really rather good at art. In my school, some were but, unfortunately, I was not one of them. The notion that they—or the good footballers or good musicians—would not even be in such a school is the reason I oppose selection by aptitude.
As the Minister is well aware, I am opposed to all that development on the part of the Government. In fact, it is worse than that; I regard that approach as a gimmick, and I believe that it will gradually die. Let us use our imagination and consider what would happen if we went down the path of selection by aptitude: we should end up with an educational system that, broadly, we should find very unattractive.
We shall debate religious schools in due course, but I have a similar view in that regard. If the children of really committed religious people were all concentrated in just a few of our schools, I should regard that as a disaster for our country, let alone for education. That is why I am very concerned about the fact that, overwhelmingly, most children should be in our straightforward, ordinary schools. When we debate religious schools, our debate will not be about religion but about "inclusivity" and where we should like our children to be educated.
That is where I am coming from. I thank the Minister for her answer and other noble Lords for taking part in this debate. This is certainly a theme to which we shall return. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord Lucas moved Amendment No. 20:
- Page 2, line 38, at end insert—
The noble Lord said: Many experiments will take place under the Bill, but what will become of their results? We shall spend much money, but what value shall we get from that five or 10 years down the road?
Education is littered with experiments that have been tried and funded by the Department for Education but which have been allowed to die because nothing came out of them that was usable by other schools. There was no education pack, no route to follow and no training of other teachers; there was nothing that would allow a successful experiment to propagate in the system and nothing that would allow it even to continue in the schools in which it started. Many approaches have been started, given three or four years' funding by the education department and then left to themselves. Even if a new school wants to pick up some of the approaches, there is nothing that it can turn to.
In addition, many educational theories and practices have been propagated without ever having been properly tested and without their educational value ever having been shown. Such practices were fashionable and the thing to do. They might be what the TES or some other authority said was the right thing to think about this year. Those nostrums propagate, just as has happened in the medical profession in former years. We need to ensure in education, as the Government have done in medicine, that the practice that is propagating around the system has been shown to be beneficial.
The Government have introduced NICE, which is an innovation of which I thoroughly approve in the Department of Health. It is time that in education we had at least something to that effect, if not a body of that format. Educational research has always been extremely thin on the ground. Even when we are confronted with problems such as how best to treat special needs children or whether there are ways of educating dyslexics that are better, cheaper, quicker, more effective and more lasting than others—the Government are spending hundreds of millions of pounds on that every year—precious little research is done on which method works best. Down the years, that has cost us a great deal of money. I know that it takes some money up front to do such experiments, but unless one does the research when one is doing the innovating, at the end of the day one either has to continue with a project that one does not know has any value or one is left with a project with which one cannot do any good afterwards.
That happens right at the core of the department. Ofsted has never done any decent research into whether its reports paint an accurate picture of schools. It has never submitted itself to external verification. It is extraordinary that an institution that was set up to assess how well schools were doing has never permitted itself to be analysed in that way by academics or anyone else. There should be a culture in education—as there is in medicine and other areas—of peer review, of innovations being tested against what other people think of them, of how well practices have actually performed, and of independent views being taken of the products of research and innovation. That is the basis on which we should seek to move forward in education.
As we come to what I hope will be the beginning of a fascinating period of experimentation and ideas in education, we should set out in the right way and with a determination that what comes out of this approach should have been evaluated independently. That independent evaluation should be available to the public, other schools, and those who wish to take a critical view of what is happening. That will allow us to learn from what we are going to do and to take forward the best, not just what appears to be the best presented, when we look at what has been done. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley: I rise to support Amendment No. 20 on the grounds that there is a need for proper evaluation and transparency. I also wish to speak to Amendment No. 25, which is grouped with it.
Proper evaluation and transparency are both good things, but so is accountability. The purpose of Amendment No. 25 is to ensure that the Secretary of State's decisions in relation to allowing certain schools to be exempt from education legislation are subject to parliamentary scrutiny. That will be done by introducing an obligation for the Secretary of State in England and the Assembly Cabinet Minister for Education in Wales to lay before Parliament or the Assembly, as appropriate, an annual report on the operation of the provisions of this chapter of the Bill. That would allow Members of Parliament or of the Assembly to question what has been done—that would, I hope, be done on the basis of independent evaluation—and to judge its efficacy.
In her earlier remarks, the Minister expressed support for having an opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny of innovations, so I hope that she will view these amendments with favour. What goes on in schools is of economic value. Undoubtedly, some schools will try to exploit that. It is far better that schools, rather than private companies, should be in a position to innovate. I hope that that will raise standards and disseminate best practice into other schools. But mistakes are often made when things are tried for the first time. It is therefore essential that there is an opportunity in the Bill for Parliament to assess what has been done and to give its opinion on whether that is in the best interests of our children.
When the Bill was debated in another place, it was suggested that one innovation for which schools might apply might be that of charging for their services and ending the right to free education. The Minister assured Members of another place that that was an example of an innovation that would not be allowed. However, the Minister was not forthcoming with other examples of the sort of things that would not be allowed. The noble Lord, Lord Peston, has already pressed the Minister on precisely what sort of innovations really require this legislation. Perhaps the Minister can elaborate on that when she replies. Would the Government accept a reduction in the burden of statistical returns on schools as the sort of innovation for which they are looking? It is all the
Lord Dormand of Easington: The proposal put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, sounds fine, especially with regard to education, if I may say so. But does he agree that there is a problem in relation to the time factor? He says that the provision has to be made. That is the first thing, and that would take some time. Then there must be an independent evaluation, which, I suppose, would take even longer if it were to be of any value at all. We then come to the publication of the assessment or evaluation. There is also one other stage which the noble Lord did not mention—the consideration.
In many cases, would it not take months and months to come to a decision? The noble Lord may say that it would be well worth it, and he may be right about that. However, does he agree that, if we were to go through all those stages for all or most of the projects in education, that would present a serious obstacle to what he is proposing?
Lord Lucas: I should like to see the noble Lord propose his system for medicine, whereby doctors would simply do whatever they wanted and would experiment on people in any way that they wanted. They would not be subject to a review of what they had done or be questioned as to the usefulness of what they had done. They would be allowed to publish a paper without peer review, and other people would then be encouraged to copy it if it happened to take their fancy. That is how it is in education. I hope that it will not be in most—
"( ) No order shall be made under this section unless proper provision has been made for the independent evaluation of the effects of the project, and for the publication of that evaluation."
7.30 p.m.
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