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Education and Inspections Bill

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman has seen the text of my speech. I am about to deal with that precise point, if he will hold his horses for a moment. I am not a million miles from his view. Such issues are more important than whether a group of children has access to an especially good school or whether a different group of children should have access to it. All that debates about admission, codes and prescriptive methodologies for determining intakes do is substitute one set of injustices for another. The genuine problem is that there are simply not enough good schools. If there were more good schools, the heartache and anger of parents who are unable to get their child into their preferred option would be less. The National Audit Office report has been much cited in the two days of debate on Report. It reported that 23 per cent. of secondary schools underperform and that it is likely that a similar proportion is coasting. Ofsted reports that 34 per cent. of secondary schools are no more than satisfactory according to its grading system and that a further 10 per cent. are inadequate. Forty-four per cent. of schools are therefore either satisfactory, which we no longer regard as good enough, or inadequate. That is a sad and alarming indictment of our education system. No one claims that the causes started in 1997, and they did not start under the previous Conservative Government. They date back more than 40 years. We all need to tackle the underlying causes in a practical and non-ideological way. We must examine the evidence of what works and not what fits our ideological stance. It is clear from the research evidence and the success of schools that set that, when comprehensive schools set all their academic subjects by ability in all year groups—with flexibility, so that children who develop later in a subject can move up to a higher ability group—and have smaller classes with more experienced teachers focusing on the lower attainment groups, far-reaching improvements occur in the quality of education in those schools. If we can recreate in the top sets the academic education that grammar schools and many independent schools offer their pupils—an education that stretches children academically and enables them to fulfil their educational potential with an enhanced or accelerated curriculum—there is no need to undergo the upheaval of reintroducing the 11-plus and selection, and re-establishing grammar and secondary modern schools in areas where they were abolished more than 30 years ago.