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Education and Inspections Bill

I am afraid that, as she did yesterday, the hon. Lady shows her ignorance of both the historical and current situation in Reading. I certainly have not denigrated any schools that have achieved a reasonable performance. I have tabled amendment No. 110 to clause 48. According to the regulatory impact assessment,clause 48 creates"““greater flexibility and encourages collaboration by permitting schools, or groups of schools working together, to adopt admission arrangements that band applicants””." There are three kinds of banding: it can apply to a single school, across the local area, or it can represent a national ability range. The previous attempt to encourage banding failed, because it was a lengthy process and there were applications from only 15 schools, two of which were turned down. I hope that the present attempt fails. I have two main objections to banding. First, it derives from an ideology that dictates that the quality of a school can only be determined by planning its intake. People who push that philosophy do not believe that the success of a school is determined by ethos, quality of teaching or leadership. Banding is a substitute for making genuine improvements to a school. It attempts to fiddle the figures, rather than address the problems inherent to a school or to a group of schools.