| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, this is an interesting amendment, but we do not believe that the law in this area needs further clarification. The effect of the amendment is largely already reflected in common law. Its aim is to ensure that all bodies responsible for maintaining or establishing schools should be subject to judicial review. LEAs, governing bodies and the Secretary of State, in respect of CTCs and academies, are rightly subject to judicial review. Case law has held that independent schools, apart from city technology colleges, are not subject to judicial review.
That seems about right. Parents who choose to enter into a private contract with a school to educate their children for payment have the usual private law remedies against the school. For that reason alone, I would not be happy to accept the amendment, which would bring independent schools under the courts' judicial review jurisdiction. We are content for the courts in this area to decide whether various education bodies should be subject to their jurisdiction. That includes the bodies to which the noble Baroness referred.
We have set up independent appeal mechanisms for most of the usual disputes that arise in education—on exclusions, admissions or special educational needs—to give less formal redress in suitable cases. Judicial review then acts as a fallback if these bodies are said to have got it wrong. I hope that the noble Baroness will recognise that, on balance, the Government's position and the Bill meet the requirements of proper opportunity for justice in case law and that she will therefore consider withdrawing the amendment.
5.15 p.m.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. I do not think that the situation of an independent school is analogous. Clearly, if parents send their son or daughter to an independent school they will not seek judicial review, but in this case an independent school may be operating in the public sector as a company. That is a different issue. If they operate on a public contract, they will have to meet certain obligations.
We shall look more carefully at what the Minister has said and think about it. We may bring the issue back again. This was a probing amendment, but we may wish to probe a little further. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 72 [Interpretation of Part 6]:
Lord Peston moved Amendment No. 114:
- Page 48, line 40, at end insert "which shall have the greatest flexibility possible for the purposes of interpretation by the teacher within general criteria"
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 115 and 116, which stand in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady David. Noble Lords with long memories will recall that I last spoke to Amendment No. 115 on 21st June 1988—almost 14 years ago to the day. However, I am talking on a different Bill this time.
My starting position, which I think I share with most noble Lords, is that I strongly favour having a national curriculum. It has evolved over the years, but whatever its deficiencies, it has led to higher standards and a more thought-out approach in our teaching. I am not questioning whether we should have a national curriculum.
I am concerned about how we can use the curriculum flexibly. We have discussed flexibility in a broad sense on other occasions on the Bill. I have one or two questions about the treatment of the individual child and providing enough flexibility to take account of their needs.
I start from the negative or pessimistic side. There are two reasons why it is extremely hard to take account of the needs of the individual child or for the teacher to produce the flexibility that I have in mind. One, to which I referred not long ago, is the dead hand of the examinations system. No matter what one says about education principles and the curriculum, anyone with any direct experience of education knows that the system is driven by the examination system. I am afraid that the position is even worse than it used to be, because coupled with the examination system is all the nonsense of league tables and the rest. Part of the motivation of a school is the need to look right in its league table position. The school is judged to an extraordinary and excessive extent by the exam system.
I am not going to the other extreme of saying that we do not need examinations or assessment, but it is worth asking whether we have too much of them. Being able to do examinations is a skill. As someone who was marvellous at it, I think that it is a useless skill. I have believed all my life that many very bright people have been misjudged because they were not good at exams. Their careers were often—I might go so far as to say—blighted as a result of their inability to cope with exams.
We sometimes hear proud parents say, "My son or daughter has umpteen grade this or that at O-level and A-level". The notion that a large number of such grades is a better performance than a few has always struck me as absurd. However, I agree that the
examination system is not nearly as absurd as the intelligence measurement system. Whatever else it measures, I have never believed that it measures intelligence.The examination system is one cause of the difficulty in gearing the curriculum to the individual child's needs. The other—and I am always careful about this—is the expense of gearing the system to the needs of the individual child. As my noble friend Lord Davies said, anyone who has been to a school will know that schools can always use more resources. That does not mean that, willy-nilly, we can simply wave our hands and say, "Therefore let there be more resources". Indeed, I always make the point that, no matter how many resources we give schools, they will still be constrained and have to decide how best to use those resources. One of my worries is that an attempt to deal specifically with the needs of the individual child might be thought to be too expensive.
If I may go into anecdotal mode, I do not usually watch serious programmes on television; I watch mostly westerns and football matches. However, a couple of weeks ago, I watched the first of a three-part set of programmes on ITV to do with children who have mental illness. It was an astonishing programme about a young boy who had a form of schizophrenia. The boy himself must have been enormously courageous to appear on the programme, and the programme deeply moved me. He was amazingly fluent and remarkably mature in his understanding of his own position. He was also clearly very intelligent. Yet, in the end, the feeling that one had looking at this young boy was that the school, possibly doing the best that it could, was simply failing him. It could not offer him what he specifically needed as an individual.
The programme ended leaving me in a state of deep depression, as the school took the view that the best place for the boy was not there but in a type of college that dealt with large numbers of people with that kind of problem. My immediate reaction was that that was about the worst possible decision that could be taken for such a young person. What shocked me was that he seemed overwhelmingly educable and not lacking in any ability to do the right things despite having a form of schizophrenia. Yet the curriculum could not be tailored to his individual needs.
That is an extreme example, but, as we know, schools have many other pupils who need rather more individual treatment than they get. I am not criticising schools or blaming teachers; in a sense, I am blaming the system broadly without knowing quite what we should do. What I am looking for today is some response from my noble friend on the Government's view on flexibility and the interpretation of the curriculum in relation to helping the individual child. Within that, as the Government have rightly placed great emphasis on innovation, will the Government encourage schools not to innovate narrowly but to innovate for young people who have individual needs? I have not used the words special needs because I am
not really talking about special needs. I am talking about individual needs and a child's need for quite individual support. I beg to move.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, much of what the noble Lord, Lord Peston, has said has certainly struck a chord with me. As strict application of the national curriculum does not work for all children in school, flexibility is important. My understanding is that earlier legislation allowed all schools—but perhaps the measure has been overtaken by later legislation—to disapply the national curriculum for particular children.
I visited a special school in the North East which was truly inspirational in everything it was doing. It was applying the national curriculum to many children for whom one would have thought it inappropriate. Such was the erratic nature of other young people's receptiveness to education—they had the types of problems to which the noble Lord, Lord Peston, has referred—that the school had to disapply the national curriculum in order to ensure the necessary flexibility to meet their educational needs properly. I am wondering whether that flexibility still exists. If it does, I believe that the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Peston, can be met.
Lord Lucas: My Lords, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, is opening the door on what should be a very exciting 20 years. A great deal will come out of the review of the 14 to 19 curriculum. If it works, it will start to offer real flexibility to the kids who are going to be part of it. We can see it beginning already. In my son's school, those who are good at mathematics will take GCSEs a year early and then go on to do an AS-level. They will therefore have pocketed that before reaching sixth-form college and have that ability to move ahead.
The 14 to 19 curriculum will also enable broader undertakings. It may take time, but I hope that we eventually have examination systems and timings that suit pupils and their achievement level, rather than operating as a metronomic schedule by which pupils face examinations at the end of each of the last four years of school. All exams should be rather like music exams, which pupils take when they are ready. It is extremely difficult to get one's head round how schools can be organised and timetabled to do that. However, if we move in that direction, schools will be offered much greater flexibility.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston, that we have to look very carefully at how we measure and restrict schools. Any form of measurement over time tends to affect schools' behaviour, so that they teach to succeed in that measurement rather than simply to teach pupils. I have developed an increasing loathing for the requirement that GCSEs be administered to pupils at 16 and not to pupils in a given year group. That is making it very difficult for kids who are dropping a year behind to find a school that will let them drop a year behind. Such pupils count as part of
the school's statistics but have no results, causing real problems in competitive environments such as London.It is a particular problem when the system provides a totally arbitrary cut-off date to determine pupils' year placement. One day's difference can put a kid in a different year group. If a kid just makes it into the higher year group but is one half year behind in development, he would be much better in the lower year group. However, that cannot be done, and schools will not do it because of the effect on league table results. That inflexibility has long persisted in league tables, and the matter should really be examined. It is starting to cause regular and idiotic problems. We need to be flexible on such matters and ensure that our way of measuring has an effect.
I shall be fascinated to see the effect of value-added league tables when they are introduced. They offer great potential for broadening people's appreciation of what happens in schools. They will affect the way in which schools teach in relation to measurement, particularly at the end of primary school when every extra point in a pupil's grade is the measure of the primary school's achievement and is essentially subtracted from the secondary school's achievement. There will be much tension in that respect.
We should be flexible in these matters. We should not become attached to rigid measurements. We should always consider what is good for the pupil rather than what is good for the system. I hope that that is the direction in which we move.
Next Section
Back to Table of Contents
Lords Hansard Home Page