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Education and Inspections Bill

Chris Woodhead is a friend of mine, and we discuss these issues at great length. I am sure that he will retain his support for this party. On the hon. Gentleman’s question about the 10 per cent. selection, that arrangement is designed to achieve something different, namely to create an ethos in a specialist school. We are in favour of schools being able to establish an ethos, in relation to music, languages, maths, computing or whatever. We are therefore in favour of retaining the 10 per cent. selection on that basis. To return to my point about the amendment on grammar schools tabled by the hon. Member for Bury, North, I believe that any ballots to retain those schools would be won, but why should the schools have to go through such a time-consuming and distracting process just to satisfy the ideological yearnings of a few Labour MPs? Our amendments Nos. 103 and 104 seek to restore to the Bill its original White Paper vision by deleting the change proposed in clause 37(4):"““In subsection (3), for ‘to have regard to’ substitute ‘to act in accordance with’.””" The starting point of the whole saga of the admissions code is section 84 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which states:"““The Secretary of State shall issue, and may from time to time revise, a code of practice containing such practical guidance as he thinks appropriate””." It goes on, in a very non-prescriptive way, to say:"““The code may include guidelines setting out aims, objectives and other matters in relation to the discharge of their functions””." Subsection (3) of that section contains the famous phrase:"““It shall be the duty of””—" LEAs and governing bodies—"““to have regard to any relevant provisions of the code.””" Clause 37 of the Bill does two key things. First, it replaces the phrase"““a code of practice containing such practical guidance””" with the far more prescriptive words"““a code for school admissions containing such provision””" as the Secretary of State thinks fit. It also replaces the looser phrase ““to have regard to”” with the far more authoritarian wording"““to act in accordance with””." As everyone knows, clause 37 was introduced into the Bill as a result of pressure from the Labour rebels, and following the Secretary of State’s letter of 6 February to the Chairman of the Education and Skills Committee. In that letter, she said:"““As you know it has always been our intention that the Code of Practice on admissions should have real force.””" She then said,"““we are concerned that recent legal judgements may have weakened the perceived force of the Code, so we will close the legal loophole so that admission authorities must ‘act in accordance’ with it, rather than having to have ‘regard’ to it.””" On the first of those assertions, I looked in vain in the White Paper for a reference to the code having real force. The nearest I could find was at paragraph 3.22, which states;"““No one approach towards admissions will work in all circumstances. This is why we want to ensure that all self-governing schools…are free to use the approach to fair admissions that they think will best meet their local circumstances, as long as it is compatible with the Admissions Code.””" Of course, in all their radio, television and newspaper interviews in the period between the publication of the White Paper in October last year and the concession letter of 6 February this year, the Prime Minister and the then Secretary of State categorically ruled out giving the code of practice any more compulsion than it already had. As the Prime Minister said at his press conference on 23 January:"““I can’t agree, for the reasons we have given on many occasions, that this code becomes statutory””." The second slightly misleading statement in the letter of 6 February is that the change of heart was prompted by recent legal judgments that may have weakened the perceived force of the code. The implication is that those legal judgments occurred after the publication of the White Paper in 2005, hence the need for a last-minute change of mind. The case of the London Oratory school was decided on 17 December 2004, some 10 months before the publication of the White Paper. The truth is that it is simply an unnecessary concession made for internal Labour party management reasons and has nothing to do with what the Prime Minister or the then Secretary of State thought, in their best judgment, was in the best interests of the education system. We believe that clause 37 is far too prescriptive and that circumstances not envisaged by the drafters of the code might require more flexibility. For instance, it should be permissible for a school to refuse admission to a child whose parents refuse to sign a home-school agreement. We agree with the White Paper at paragraph 3.25, which states:"““We recognise that no form of admissions arrangements can increase the number of places at an oversubscribed school. That is why we are continuing to increase the number of good schools and the number of places in good schools.””" That should be the focus of our attention rather than the over-obsession with admission arrangements. I also agree with the Prime Minister, who was absolutely right when he said on 24 October:"““Local authority efforts to create equity often produced deadening uniformity, with child-centred learning and a rigid adherence to mixed ability teaching too often failing to raise expectations and meet basic standards.””" The focus of an incoming Conservative Government will be to raise standards in all our schools so that children of all backgrounds will have a greater opportunity to attend a good school.