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Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech

My Lords, I am very happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleague, propping up the end of a long list of speakers, but I hope that he will indulge me for two or three minutes longer. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord De Mauley and Lord Adonis, on their maiden speeches. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, on his ministerial appointment. I assure him that in my limited experience, he has taken part in a debate that is not simply wide-ranging and interesting but unique. I have never heard two mobile phones go off in one debate in this House before. I must presume that the noble Lord was excused the usual advice to those delivering maiden speeches, ““Do not be controversial””. For how, if we do our job, can he, a Minister, not provoke controversy? Just to show that he did and that the seeds of controversy were there in his speech, I shall begin by asking two questions, one in relation to his remarks on school discipline. I was pleased to hear the noble Lord affirm very clearly, echoing the remarks of his Secretary of State in another place, the commitment of the Government to helping in all possible ways head teachers and schools in dealing with the problems of discipline. In that context, there might well be a reply by the end of the debate to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady   Buscombe, about the Government’s views on the regularity with which decisions by head teachers to exclude are turned down on appeal. I am not denying that sometimes the appeal will be correct. However, if there is a regular pattern here it would be at least appropriate for the Government to reassure us that they will look at this and see that the right thing is being done. I was very pleased to hear the emphasis placed on parents in the noble Lord’s speech. I also support and endorse the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady   Walmsley, on this. But one specific question puzzles me. We want to support parents through the educational system—rightly so. That is marvellous. Equally, we want them to have respect from their children. But we are seeing an increasing practice in schools of there being available to very young children, sometimes 12 and 13   years old, advice of a contraceptive nature, either before or the morning after the event. The advice is not given with parents present, but in their absence. It is given quite deliberately in their absence. Sometimes, that may be essential, but it should not be a regular practice. A major breakdown is taking place if that has to be the rule. How does such a practice endorse the respect that we expect children to have for their parents? I know that there are two sides to this question. I am not suggesting that there is a single view which we can follow through, but there is a real issue here. If children of the age of 12 and 13 are being advised deliberately in their parents’ absence, that does not inculcate respect and proper family relationships. However, on a more positive note, during the past few years—I would say up to 15 years, over successive administrations—there has been a significant advance in education in our schools. I am pleased that this has happened. It has taken place across more than one administration. There are many areas of improvement that one could talk about; I shall mention just two. One has taken place in primary schools; the other has taken place in the development of post-school leaving opportunities. On the latter, I shall restrict myself to saying that I was pleased to hear the Minister suggest—the implications are important—that further education has to be a point of focus and interest in this area. I come from higher education; that is where I made living. But further education ought now to be a proper focus of pretty detailed scrutiny, attention and support. I turn to primary schools, which have seen real improvements. Those have been shown in all sorts of contexts—in terms of ability and standards reached. There are many things yet to be done and many areas in which we could improve further, but these improvements have been a result of government policies. The policies include a national curriculum, a national testing system, a national inspection system and the provision of enhanced opportunities for pre-school education. I have spoken to a number of head teachers of primary schools. They say that one of the most important factors in the development of attainment in their schools, and in dealing with behaviour issues and problems, has been the opportunity to welcome children into the school context before formal education begins at the age of five. This has had a huge impact, and it is much to the credit of the Government that they have invested in it. These are some of the mechanisms. Additional investment has gone alongside them, which is a good and proper thing. The drivers of these changes have been a focus on achieving national standards and a national declaration of attainment. All of that is good, but it has had certain consequences that perhaps are unintended. Those include more control from the centre. Reference was made in the previous speech to the impact of local authorities. If too much control is taken to the centre, perhaps remoteness develops. One sign of that is a possible over-emphasis on targets. Targets have had their role. They have had a very important part to play. Unless parents know what children should reasonably be expected to do at the ages   of seven, 11 and 14, they cannot assess whether children are being well served in a school. Targets are important. However, they risk having some unintended consequences. One of them is increased bureaucracy. I was pleased to hear in the gracious Speech that an attempt will be made to lighten that. But a more insidious consequence, because it is less obvious, is an approach where one size is increasingly deemed to fit all. If you think that you can solve educational problems by setting targets, it can lead to the assumption that there is a single way of proceeding; that there is one size for improving schools and that it will fit every school. But one size does not fit all. Schools are different—often very different. One attempt at a one-size-fits-all solution that is often favoured by the education profession is a focus only on class size. That is a mistake. Class size is important, but it is not the be all and end all. I shall return to that point in a moment. Among the differences that one finds in schools is a difference in size. There is a distance in geography. Some schools are in Wigan; some are in central London; some are in Cumbria; some are in Dorset; some are in far Cornwall. Each school will have its own character, partly as a result of that geography. Talking about co-operation between schools is fine if they happen to be in adjacent parts of a city, but if they are two counties apart, or at least 15 miles, it is a different matter. Therefore, there are differences in size between schools, differences in geography, differences in environment—again, we have heard some graphic examples of that—and differences in population. How many languages other than English are spoken in pupils’ homes, in which those pupils spend the large part of their lives? There are differences in attainments. Some children entering school do not have any—this is where the pre-school effort is so important—background of looking at books. A book is a foreign object to them, unseen before entering school. In some very sad cases children are not used to holding conversations with people; their parents do not talk to them. This emerges when talking with teachers and head teachers and when visiting schools. It is part of the reality. There are huge differences in the make-up of school populations. There are differences in attainment, differences in what pupils bring to the school and, inevitably, differences in outcome. A policy for improving standards, which we would all endorse, has to take account of differences as well as similarities and be focused more broadly than simply on a single set of targets. My proposal is to move at a pace we can manage from the one-size-fits-all approach towards a system whereby each school should have the luxury of support to devise a school plan which is a bid for funds. That is the luxury which the city academies will have. Their head teachers and heads of section will be supported to devise a plan that will work well for that school because the single target and the single one-size-fits-all approach does not meet the needs of individual schools. If such a plan were devised with the encouragement and support of the local authority, the local authority would to some extent be held responsible for funding it, and for the quality of the plan, and may even be assessed by Ofsted on the quality of its input into the school planning system. The plan would be something against which schools were inspected rather than simply on sets of national targets. However, I know that Ofsted’s inspections comprise more than that and I pay tribute to it. If a school were assessed on its plan to deal with its particular environment and its particular catchment, it is much more likely that the involvement of the school in developing new ways of dealing with problems which, frankly, we cannot deal with from the centre would be real and significant. If there is a role for city academies—and the jury is out on that—that is what they can achieve. We need to roll that out—as the expression goes—to a much wider range of schools. When noble Lords on other Benches were perhaps supporting candidates in the general election, as a decent Cross-Bencher I was at home preparing for future work in the House of Lords. One of the things that I did was to read in some detail the Scottish Index of MultipleDeprivation by area. In reading that, one of the things you discover is that educational deprivation is found in the same groups and in the same areas as deprivation in housing, in employment, in income, in health and in life expectancy. The folks that you meet at each two stops of the Jubilee Line going east have a lower life expectancy. Things are as different as that by area. Schools are in areas. I plead for the Government to take account—I hope that the Minister will take this up—of that area focus in the interests of schools and to begin to evaluate schools and to fund them on the basis of the plans they have to deal with the problems in their locality.