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Education and Inspections Bill

After years of being referred to on my home turf as the hammer of the Trots, it is a pleasure to be referred to as a left winger by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke). If my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) were in the Chamber, she would be similarly amused. I wish to speak in support of new clause 16, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), and to touch on a couple of new clauses that stand in my name. Some of the arguments against allowing parents to conduct a ballot on a major change in their child’s school are extremely flawed. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr. Blackman-Woods) asked why parents should hold a ballot. The answer is set out in the White Paper, in which the Government say that they want a to move to a position where"““the system as a whole is increasingly driven by parents and by choice.””" If we want to give people a choice, we must accept the risk that they will make choices that we do not like. That is what democracy is about. Some of the suggestions that we have heard apply to any election. It was suggested, for example, that it is unfair to hold ballots, because a great deal of information is sent to people. Contentious views are expressed, and the process became politicised. So be it—we must trust parents to sift the information and make a decision. We trust them to do so in a general election, so why not trust them in a ballot on their school? It was suggested, too, that parents of children who would soon leave the school would not have long-term interests in its future. That was answered very well by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor), who said that that is true of all electorates. I invite my hon. Friends and Opposition Members who subscribe to that view to apply it to the electorate voting in a general election. ““You may not survive for the whole of this Parliament. You might pop your clogs very soon. You won’t have a vested interest, so we’ll not allow you to vote.”” One can say that about every electorate in every election. New clause 16 does not preclude further ballots taking place. It does not preclude involving parents at feeder schools. It does not preclude other consultations. It states that if we are serious about parents being at the heart of the system and if we are serious about choice, we must allow them to make that choice. Some in the Chamber have come close to saying this afternoon—the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe almost said it in these terms—that they did not like ballots because they did not produce the results that they wanted. That is not a tenable position in a democracy, and it is a very dangerous road for politicians of any stripe to go down. If the Government are convinced that trusts will be popular with parents and that that is the right way to go, let us have the argument and let parents have a say. There is nothing to fear from a real debate. If we do not accept the new clauses and amendments, let us consider the choice that we are offering to the parent of a child at a school whose nature and ethos is to change radically. I think of how I as a parent would react. There are a number of reasons why a parent may disagree with the school’s decision to become a trust. The parent may believe strongly in community schools, or may object to the people who will be coming in to run the trust, perhaps because the parent objects to their business values or does not like their religious ethos. There could be any number of reasons. That leaves the parent with the choice of leaving their child in a school with whose ethos they fundamentally disagree, or disrupting the child’s education by moving them. We give them that choice without letting them have any real say in a ballot on the school’s future. That is not a tenable position. We must tell parents that we trust them to read the information, consider the contending arguments and have their say in a ballot. If we do not, we are implicitly saying that we do not think parents are bright enough to determine the outcome or to decide among all the contending groups. That is nonsensical.