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Education and Inspections Bill

I shall speak to the group of amendments tabled by myself, but may I say first that I agreed completely with many aspects of what the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) said? He provided a powerful critique of selective admissions systems, which will also underpin my own argument in support of new clause 39. I am therefore extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making those points. Today’s debate, furthermore, could not have taken place without the Conservative party’s dramatic switch of policy over selection earlier this year. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) asked why that happened, and it may well have been due to the authoritative YouGov poll published in The Daily Telegraph last December, which showed that only 20 per cent. of parents supported selective admissions policies to secondary schools. That amounts to focus-group policy making with vengeance, but I am delighted that the Conservatives have listened to the focus group that The Daily Telegraph offered them. I shall speak mainly to new clause 39 and briefly to new clauses 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46 and 47 in reverse order. New clause 47 argues the case for bringing academies into the overall admissions arrangements of other schools. New clause 46 is similar to new clause 42, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather), but the latter has the advantage of dealing specifically with anonymised admissions. New clause 45 raises the question of the local educational authority’s role as the co-ordinator of local admissions arrangements and the monitor of compliance with them. I feel slightly ambiguous about it because I was one of the first to argue that the admissions forums should have a new enhanced power to monitor compliance. I am very pleased to say that that is now in the Bill and I am grateful to the Government for including it. I would still like to test the argument and I hope that the Minister will think further about it in due course. Perhaps we should ensure that the admissions forum has the full support of the LEA, particularly in respect of secretarial and administrative functions. New clauses 43 and 42 simply place within the Bill the admissions criteria that are deemed to be either acceptable or unacceptable in the current code of practice. There has been a long-standing debate about whether the code of practice or elements of it should be incorporated into the Bill, perhaps as a schedule, and these new clauses make the argument for having a full list of approved over-subscription criteria—not non-permitted criteria—placed directly in the Bill. We have already established a precedent for doing so with some over-subscription criteria: for example, we have agreed that the ban on interviewing, the priority given to children in public care and the promotion of banding should all be in the Bill, so it is illogical if other approved criteria are not in it. New clause 41 is consequential on new clause 40, which argues, given that the Bill brings about significant changes to admissions arrangements, that we should establish, six months after the passing of the Act, an independent review body to monitor and assess the operation of all aspects of admissions arrangements across the country. I wish to speak at slightly greater length to new clause 39 and I intend to press it to a vote. The new clause deals almost entirely with process rather than with the arguments between supporters and opponents of selection. An argument about process can take place now only because, for the first time in more than 30 years, we have a consensus between the three main political parties about not returning to selective admissions policies as an organising principle of secondary education in this country. For that, I am hugely grateful to the leader of the Conservative party, who changed the policy earlier this year. I believe that they have listened—